Invitation Part 6: Bible Corruption?

The Telephone Game  

One of the objections I hear on college campuses about the Bible is that it's been corrupted over the centuries due to copy and translation errors.

An analogy often used is the telephone game: A group of people whisper a certain phrase around a circle, corrupting the phrase further with each succeeding "transmission," the end result sounding markedly different than the original.

Thus, "I ate toast this morning" might turn into, "I hate the coast and I'm in mourning," by the tenth person or so.

Critics point out that the Bible isn't a circle of just ten transmissions, but hundreds, and not composed of only a single phrase, but thousands -- often copied in low-light conditions by unskilled labor.

Hardly a recipe for accuracy and reliability.

In fact, it's been estimated that there are some 400,000 "variants" (mistakes) in the ancient texts.

Three Replies: Lay people are generally unaware of the following facts, however:

1. Minor errors: 99% of the variants are minuscule, such as spelings of cities, and obvious omissions and and additions.

2. Multiple games: Scholars are not limited to studying one telephone game. Rather, there are multiple "games" to be pored over: manuscript "families" or "traditions" from diverse locations in the Mediterranean world that can be compared with each other. This process of cross-comparison leads many scholars to believe we've recovered more than 97% of the original wording of the New Testament.*

3.  Unaffected doctrine: No central doctrines of faith are affected by unresolved manuscript variants.

There is much more to be said on this topic.

Minimally, my hope in this short post is to give you some confidence that the charge of "Bible corruption," often heard in the media, pop culture (and on college campuses), isn't true.

New Testament historian Bart Ehrman, who makes no claim to Christian faith, seems to agree:

[Textual] variants . . . do not detract from the integrity of the New Testament; they simply provide the data that scholars need to work on to establish the text, a text that is more amply documented than any other from the ancient world.**


* For an excellent overview of how scholars study early manuscripts, see Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth, esp. ch 2.
** See Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, ch 3 (Kindle location 1412).
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Invitation Part 5: Embarrassing Material

I want to pause and say thanks if you if you've been following along in these blogs but don't think of yourself as a Christian. I truly hope they are helpful to your spiritual journey.

This is part 5 of my series of short arguments for the historical Jesus.

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This week: Embarrassing Material

In higher education they say that history is written by the winners.

If that's the case, we can expect the winners' version of history to be pretty one-sided:

• Their causes always true and just.
• Their leaders noble, heroic, idolized. 
• Their own roles sanitized of all wrong-doing.

Yet, the Gospel stories contain plenty of material that seems counter-productive. A small sample:

• Jesus' hometown people reject him and limit his ministry of miracles (Mark 3:3-6).
• His family thinks him "out of his mind" (Mark 3:21).
• His brothers don't believe in him (John 7:5).
• His dies at the hands of Israel's sworn enemy, Rome (John 19:16).

None of this material makes sense as a fabrication, but much better as facts of the matter.

The same could be said of those who wrote down the stories of Jesus: the disciples are often portrayed as foolish and obstinate. They vie for power, fall asleep on the job, deny and betray.

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All this "embarrassing material," which is only sampled above and is found in all four Gospels, gives the accounts a sense of authenticity.

But of course this conclusion is a judgment call for the reader.  Of this Jesus says, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Test the Gospel by reading and obeying it. I think you'll find, as I have, it's as true in experience as it is in history. 

photo credit: http://wallpoper.com/wallpaper/jesus-christ-293701

Invitation Part 4: Differences in the Gospels

Years ago when I first heard the argument from "differences," I was quite surprised.

The argument says that certain levels of difference between the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life actually lend credibility to the overall story.

Certain levels.

Not too much; not too little.

Big differences would be bad. What's big? If one account said Jesus rose from the dead and another disagreed, that would be a problem.

Zero differences would also be suspect. Imagine four reports on the life of a major figure -- say, JFK -- that were identical in every detail. We'd suspect collusion. Conspiracy. Hidden agenda.

But with the four reports of Jesus' life -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- we find ourselves with broad agreement on the "big rocks," such as Jesus' family, geography, teaching, acts of healing, death and resurrection.

Let's call it 70% agreement. Don't quote me on that. I'm not saying it's exactly 70%. But it's a representative figure that indicates broad overlap with differences in detail.

What differences comprise the remaining 30%?

Authorial choices to include or exclude certain parts of the story. Scrolls had limitations. Each author chose what to include in his scroll. These choices account for many differences.

Another category of difference is vitally important -- factual discrepancies: *

• The Gospel accounts don't agree on the names of the 12 apostles. 
• Jesus' genealogies in Matthew and Luke don't harmonize. 
• The final week of Jesus' life as recorded in John seems off by a day. 

There are others.

But from a historical perspective, these types of discrepancies are exactly what you'd expect to find from four different authors writing about the same event from four different points of view. **

70% agreement (again, a representative figure): In my view and that of many scholars, it has the ring of truth.



* Apparent discrepancies in the gospels have been worked on for centuries and have been given plausible explanations. Still, scholars don't always agree on these solutions. 
** For further reading on the question of differences and discrepancies in the Gospels, see Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, ch 4.

On vacation, see you next week