Yeah, But is That What God Really Said?

 “The law of the Lord is perfect and preserves one’s life. The rules set down by the Lord are reliable and impart wisdom to the inexperienced.”  Psalm 19:7

“Every word of God is purified; he is like a shield for those who take refuge in him.”  Proverbs 30:5

 Last Time, we talked about all the proofs that make us comfortable trusting God’s Word and seeing it as the Authority in our lives. One of those things, the many copies and versions of texts that have been found, helps us also to believe in the inerrancy of God’s Word, or the fact that there are no errors in it. When we talk about this, we are referring to the original texts, or as close to it as we can get these days.

 The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Until the invention of the printing press in the 1400s in Europe, the Bible was copied by hand and passed down from generation to generation. These original language texts continued to be copied and passed down even after they began to be translated into other languages, like Latin. The Bible was not translated from Greek to Latin to German and then to English. No, the current English translations were done from the original language the Bible was written in. (1)

 There would be multiple people, or copyists, making copies of the passages at the same time. Therefore, if one of them made a mistake, it would be caught by a future copyist or even when comparing the texts that were done at the same time. The most common variant between biblical manuscripts are misspellings. I love how it is put in this article (1):

“Steel, even iff a lot of words git mispeled, you ken easaly sea wat the hole thing sayed!”

 In 1611, the King James Version of the Bible was published, the primary initial English translation. At that time, the oldest versions of the Bible they could translate from dated from a thousand years or more after Jesus (1). One might think that texts which had been copied from copies of copies of copies exponentially could be significantly different from the originals, especially considering human flaws and the tendency for history to be interpreted by the conquerors. Instead, since the time of the King James Bible translation, we have seen proof after proof after proof that the Bible is incredibly accurate to it’s original wording.

 Based on comparisons between the Old Testament scrolls found in the caves near Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls (copied by Jews in the first and second century BC), and the Leningrad codex from which modern editions of the Old Testament were based, the text of the Old Testament is at least 99% accurate to the Bible used by Jesus and His contemporaries (1). Remarkably, “There are now about 5,800 existing manuscripts, each containing various parts or the whole of the New Testament in the original Greek. In all of these manuscripts, not one sentence has been found that is missing from the King James Version or other translations!” They have identified two passages that were added to the King James by scribes (Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11), however these are noted as such in modern translations of the Bible.

 All this is intellectually interesting, but what does it really mean for you and me today? It means that we can trust what the Bible says is what God really intended and wrote through its original authors. When I use a tool like the Blue Letter Bible, I like to look up the original text of different verses using an “Interlinear” tool. It breaks things down into the original words and you can click on those words to learn about their definitions and see where else they are used in the Bible for comparison. Oftentimes, this opens up a whole new understanding for me. I am so blessed to have these tools available today since I do NOT know Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic myself!

Here's the Thing: It is so important to know that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and that we can trust the words in it! We need to know that when it says, “For God so loved the world, “ (John 3:16) that He really did, and that, “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

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