Can we trust our Bibles?
In recent years, a former Evangelical named Bart Ehrman has been attacking the veracity of the Bible. One of his main lines of attacks is that we cannot trust that what we read in our Bibles today is what was actually written by the original authors of the Scriptural texts. The issue he is addressing is known as “textual criticism.”
The crux of the issue is this: we do not possess any of the original manuscripts of the Old or New Testaments (just like we don’t possess the original manuscripts of almost any ancient document). What we possess are copies of those texts. In the case of the New Testament, some of the copies we possess date all the way back to the 2nd century, but many others are from centuries later. In some cases, these manuscripts disagree – one will have a verse another does not, and some will even have entire passages that others do not (such as the story of the woman caught in adultery). Sometimes, if you are observant, you will notice that a Bible might “skip” a verse; this means that the editors of that Bible decided that the verse in question was not in the most reliable manuscripts and therefore was most likely not in the original.
So how big of deal is this? Evangelical Greek scholar Bill Mounce has a recent blog post where he addresses this issue (read his whole post for more details about textual criticism), and in it, he notes the following:
- About 5% of the Greek text is in question
- No major doctrine is brought into question by 5%.
Ehrman, in other words, is barking up the wrong tree.
Furthermore, as Catholics, we can trust the Bible because the Church which Christ founded has declared which books are in the canon, and our tradition (which is guided by the Holy Spirit) has included passages such as the woman caught in adultery in those books. Even if this story was added later, we can trust that it was under the guidance of the Holy Spirit that this beautiful story (John 8:1-11) was included in the Gospel of John.
…oh, and the Douey-Rheims Bible is great too!
I can’t tell if my first comment went up or not, but I enjoy reading the RSV Catholic Edition and the Jerusalem Bible.
The NAB, not so much. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone at all.
Tito,
Have you seen the CTS New Catholic Bible? It is the Bible I use and it includes:
- Jerusalem Bible translation (my favorite for reading)
- Grail Psalter for the Psalms (my favorite Psalm translation and the one used in the Liturgy of the Hours)
It also replaces “Yahweh” with “the LORD” in the OT translation, which was my main complaint about the Jerusalem Bible translation (and which is MUCH more readable)
I got it a few years ago and I really like using it for personal devotional reading. Unfortunately, the notes in it are little better than the NAB notes. But I’ve never found a Bible other than the Navarre Bible (which isn’t a complete Bible, of course) that had good notes.
I do use the RSV-Catholic edition for more serious studies, since it is a more literal translation.
I’ve never been able to get into the Douey-Rheims, as I find “thees” and “thous” very distracting while reading.
NAB? That seems to me to be a translation done by graduates of an English as a Second Language online course.
Two clarifications should be made concerning Dr. Mounce’s post. The division of books and chapters of the Bible into verses is, first of all, an invention of the medieval university, probably of the University of Paris (see Beryl Smalley’s classic on the subject, viz., The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages). The close analysis of biblical texts that theology students in the West engaged in during the Middle Ages required the development of this kind of precise referential apparatus. The Bible these students used was, of course, the Bible translated into Latin, usually a version of the Vulgate. The Bible they divided into verses, therefore, was the Latin Bible; and this division of the Latin text then became the standard division of the Bible regardless of language. The question of missing or added verses in the Bible is, therefore, most immediately a question pertaining to manuscripts of the Latin Bible, and not “a basic question of the Greek text,” as the professor of Greek argues. It does, of course, ultimately refer to the Greek, since the Greek text is the basis of the Latin text of the New Testament, but, as we shall see below, it does so only to a limited extent in respect to extant versions of the Greek New Testament.
The modern science of textual criticism may, in the second place, have developed within the last 150 years, but the practice of comparing manuscript variants to determine the best reading of a text is quite old. Origen engaged in this practice in the middle of the third century A.D. using his Hexapla; and St. Jerome did so again in the late fourth and early fifth centuries A.D. when translating for the Vulgate.
Catholics have a great advantage over other Christians in respect to the accuracy of their Bible because the official Catholic version of the Bible, the Nova Vulgata, is ultimately based upon St. Jerome’s translation, as revised several times over the centuries. Jerome was able to compare a number of manuscript versions of books of the Bible, including Greek manuscripts, in the late fourth century to compose the Vulgate that are no longer extant, even in later copies. That is, he had versions much closer to the originals than the ones modern scholars possess, given the general rule that older manuscripts contain less errors and extrapolations than newer ones. Indeed, some of his manuscripts were already unavailable in the Renaissance and early modern periods. English churchmen, as Dr. Mounce notes, could find no manuscript to use when translating the New Testament from the Greek dating earlier than the twelfth century (i.e., seven centuries after Jerome’s time). Modern archeologists have, it is true, found a number of old manuscripts containing portions of the Bible; but the collection of manuscripts at modern scholars’ disposal is still quite inferior to the one St. Jerome used.