THE BIBLE - A STORY FOR SURVIVAL

THE BIBLE SURVIVED ATTEMPTS TO ALTER ITS MESSAGE

HOW THE BIBLE SURVIVED: First, although some Bible copyists were careless or even deceitful, many others were highly skilled and meticulous. Between the sixth and tenth centuries C.E., the Masoretes copied the Hebrew Scriptures and produced what is known as the Masoretic text.  They reportedly  counted the words and the letters to verify that no mistakes crept in. Where they suspected errors in the master text they were using, they noted these in margin.  The Masoretes refused to tamper with the Bible text.  "Interfering with it purposely," wrote Professor Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, "would have been for them the worst crime possible."

Second the sheer volume of manuscripts today actually helps Bible scholars to spot errors.  For example, religious leaders taught for centuries that their Latin versions contained the authentic Bible text.  Yet, at 1 John 5:7, they had inserted spurious words referred to earlier in this articles.  The error even crept into the influential English King James Version!  But when other  manuscripts  were discovered what did they reveal?  Bruce Metzger wrote:  "The passage [at 1 John 5:7] is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic), except the Latin." As a result, revised editions of the King James Version and Other Bibles have removed the erroneous phrase.   

Do older manuscripts prove that the Bible's message has been preserved?  When the Dead Sea Scrolls  were found in 1947, scholars could at last compare the Hebrew Masoretic text to what appeared in the Bible scrolls that had been written more than a thousand years earlier.   A member of the editorial team of the Dead Sea Scrolls concluded that  one scroll "provides irrefutable proof that the transmission of the Biblical text through a period of more than one thousand years by the hands of the Jewish copyists has been extremely faithful and careful."

The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, features a collection of papyri that represents nearly every book of the Christian Greek Scriptures, including  manuscripts dating from the second century C.E.-only about 100 years  after the Bible was completed.   "Although the Papryi supply a wealth of new information on textual detail,"  The Anchor Bible Dictionary observes "they also demonstrate remarkable stability in the transmission history of the Biblical Text." 

THE RESULT: Rather than corrupting the Bible text, the age and multitude of Bible manuscripts have actually improve it.  "No other ancient book has anything like such early and plentiful testimony to its text," wrote Sir Frederic Kenyon about the Christian Greek Scriptures, "and no unbiased scholar would deny that the text has come down to us is substantially sound." And regarding the Hebrew Scriptures, scholar Henry Green stated: "It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted." 

Next time: THE BIBLE - A STORY OF SURVIVAL/WHY THE BIBLE HAS SURVIVED 

From The Watchtower magazine