Survey of the New Testament - Lesson 4

I. Introduction

Well welcome to our third and final talk on what’s called bibliology, as opposed to bibliolatry. Bibliology is the study of the book; bibliolatry is the worship of the book. The first is a good thing; the second isn’t. Anyway let’s pray, Father, once again we thank you for the chance to learn more about your Word. We pray Father that not only as we learn information but that as we learn that information, I should say that it will move into our hearts, it will give us confidence, it will transform perhaps the way we use the Bible and we trust it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Well, as I said, this is the third talk on bibliology and it will be the last. So we will get going on Mark next time. I want to address three basic issues today. One is canonicity: why do we have the books that we have in the Bible? I want to discuss the issue of transmission: how did the documents get copied throughout the centuries? Then I want to talk a bit about translations, and specifically, why they are so different, and what’s the best way to go about reading them. So those are the three major areas that we are going to look at.

Let’s start first on the whole issue of the transmission of the writings. How did we get them? The word “autograph” is the technical word that is used for the original document that was written. When Paul wrote his letter to the Roman church, the actual physical document that he wrote was called the autograph. All the writing materials they had back then were perishable. They were made out of plant, papyrus, or they were made out of animal skin. All of these things perish over time, and we don’t have any of the original autographs. Of course, that’s being redundant because autographs are original. We don’t have any of the autographs, but what we have are copies. 

And if you can kind of think back to what it must have been like to live in the 1st century, you can see why so many copies were made. Other churches certainly would have wanted copies; they would have heard about this great letter Paul wrote to the Romans. You are living in Colossae and you want to get a copy of it. The letter to the Colossians refers to, “get the one I wrote to Laodicea and swap them.” And so there are all kinds of needs for people to make copies of the letters of the Bible to get them dispersed. And there were basically two different methods of copying at the time. There were scribes who did it one to one. You would have a copy of Matthew, and then you would on a fresh piece of parchment or something would be making a copy. 

They also had schools where like I would be speaking and you all would be writing. And you can imagine that one of the things that happened out of that is that mistakes entered into the copies. For example, in Romans 5:1 Paul says, “Therefore—want to get this right—having been justified by faith, ‘echomen’ peace with God.” Now did I say ‘echomen’ or ‘echōmen’? Those are two different forms in Greek. One means “we have peace with God” and the other is “we should have peace with God.” The difference between a long and short “o.” ‘Echomen’ or ‘echōmen.’

So as copies were made, some of these kinds of mistakes crept into the copies. We will talk a little more about that in detail later but I just wanted to set the stage.

II. Canonization

So the copies are being made; they are being sent all over the world. And we enter into a stage of what’s called canonization. Here’s the problem that developed in the early church. Actually there were three of them. They gave rise to the whole issue of canonization, or why do we have the books in the Bible that we do. One of the problems is the eyewitnesses and the apostles were starting to die. At the early stages of the church they were the ones who exerted the authority. And so if there was a question of what did Jesus say or what did Jesus do, what should we do in this situation? There were eyewitnesses, there were apostles, there were people like James, Jesus’ brother, that lent authority and could make these kinds of decisions. Well, they started to die. And that raised questions of authority.

Second of all, there was the rise of persecution. Christians started to be persecuted for their faith. And you could imagine that if you were being persecuted for your faith, you would really want to make sure you were being persecuted for something you really believed. I mean it would be hard to be persecuted for something that you didn’t believe right? So again the issue of authority would rise.

But thirdly there was also the rise of heresy, and specifically, false writings. Remember when Paul writes to the Galatian church he says “If you even think you get a letter from me that says something different from what I preached, I didn’t write it, and whoever did is accursed.” So what was happening was that people were starting to teach false doctrine. They were starting to write letters presumably claiming to be written by Paul, I don’t know, by other people perhaps.

And so you have all three of these issues that were basically raising the whole question of authority. How do we know what books are really from God? Which ones we can trust? Well, we are in an area; all these books together are called the New Testament Apocrypha. ‘Apocrypha’ is just a fancy word that means hidden. And if you look at the collections of the New Testament Apocrypha that we have, you get the titles like of the Martyrdom of Matthew, the Gospel of Nicodemus, or the most famous, the Gospel of Thomas. And these are stories that were being written around biblical characters claiming to address specific issues that perhaps you know about from the Bible. But you have all this rise of false literature, and some of this false literature is not that bad. There are books like the Shepherd of Hermas, I don’t know if you have heard any of these names, like the Shepherd of Hermas, Clement of Rome, or Ignatius, or the Didache. These are all different names of some of these books that we generally call the New Testament Apocrypha. Some of them are pretty good; some of them are really bad. Okay? So this is the situation that was being created. The authorities were dying; there was the rise of persecution; and there was the rise of false writings. So it was into that culture or into that situation that this whole issue of canonization comes in.

A. Terms

Canonicity (define a couple of terms here), canonicity is simply the study of why we have books that we do in our Bible. So if you were to get a New Testament introduction book and saw, Table of Contents: Canonicity, that’s where the author is talking about why we have the books that we have. The other word that is important to know is canon. And the canon is simply the collection of books that we believe are from God. The collection of books that should be in the Bible, alright? And there are several groupings of these books that we can’t talk about now; there is a thing called the Old Testament Apocrypha, which is included in the Catholic Bible but not the Protestant Bible, but it’s more Old Testament and we can’t address that issue. We’re looking specifically at those documents that are classified as the New Testament Apocrypha, the books in this case that were not included in the Bible. Is that all clear? Okay. So you have all these problems; you have what we call the biblical writings; and then all these other writings.

B. Three criteria for canonicity

How did the church go about deciding on these books and not on other books? Well, there seems to be at least three basic criteria upon which people made their decisions. One, apostolic authorship, who wrote it? My guess, that was the first thing they looked at. Who wrote the book? And sometimes you may meet someone that says, “How can you trust the canon, it wasn’t really set up until the end of the 300s, so there’s a lot of questions?” Well the fact of the matter is most of the books in the New Testament were accepted instantly. Paul’s books were accepted instantly. Matthew’s Gospel, because he is an apostle, was accepted instantly. There were some problems with a few of the books, but the majority of them were accepted very quickly because they were written by apostles. Now Luke wrote Luke and Acts, about a third or a forth of the Bible. He’s not an apostle, and yet I don’t believe either Luke or Acts had any problems getting into the canon. 

But like Hebrews, we don’t know who wrote Hebrews; we aren’t really sure on that. Like 2 and 3 John weren’t distributed much around the ancient world because they were written to specific churches, so they had a little trouble getting into the canon. But for the most part when they knew the authorship, when they saw the authorship was authoritative, especially the apostles, those books were accepted instantly. So don’t let anyone tell you it took the church 400 years to decide what books belong to the New Testament. That’s simply not the case.

The second criteria is harmony of doctrine and tone. In other words, the church would read these books and they would say, “Do they agree with the books that we have already accepted as canonical? Do they agree with the books that we have already accepted as authoritative?” They looked at issues of doctrine. For example, Ben Sirach, that’s an OT apocryphal book. But Ben Sirach says that sin had its beginning with woman. Paul says authoritatively that sin had its beginning with Adam not with Eve. So you’ve got a problem, both those books can’t be in the canon, because that is just a flat out…you can’t harmonize it. So they looked at issues of harmony of doctrine and also just of tone. How does it feel? It’s interesting when—if you talk to people who say that there should be other books in the Bible., the first question you ask is, “Which one? Tell me from your reading of that book, what makes you think it should be in the Bible.” And again 99% of the time they haven’t read them. 

But the most famous of these books is the Gospel of Thomas; it gets dredged up all the time. Let me just read you a couple of quick excerpts from the Gospel of Thomas, and you tell me if it even remotely sounds like the Bible:

“Now after some days Jesus was playing (this was when he was a child) in the upper story of a house, and one of the children who were playing with him fell down from the house and died. And when the other children saw it they fled and Jesus remained alone. And the parents of him that was dead came and accused him (meaning Jesus) of having thrown him down. Jesus replied, ‘I didn’t throw him down.’ But they continued to revile him. Then Jesus leapt down from the roof and stood by the body of the child (I guess he jumped a story or so down), and cried out with a loud voice, ‘Zenon,’ for that was his name, ‘Arise and tell me, did I throw you down?’ And he arose (meaning Zenon) at once and said ‘No Lord you did not throw me down, but raised me up,’ and when they saw it they were amazed and the parents of the child glorified God for the miracle that had happened and worshiped Jesus.”

Now does that sound even remotely scriptural? That’s just weird. There is another one here where he went to get water and he broke the pitcher, and so he just used his cloak and his cloak became waterproof, and he carried the water back to Mary. But here is the best one.

“Jesus’ father was a carpenter and made at that time plows and yokes. And he received an order from a rich man to make a bed for him. But when one beam (one part of the bed) was shorter than its corresponding one and they did not know what to do, the child Jesus said to his father Joseph, ‘Put down the two pieces of wood and make them even from the middle to one end.’ And Joseph did as the child told him, and Jesus stood at the other end and took hold of the shorter piece of wood and stretching it made it equal to the other. And his father Joseph saw it and was amazed and he embraced the child and kissed him saying, ‘Happy am I that God has given me this child.’”

Now I’ve got a hard time believing that Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, came to earth to make logs longer. But anyway, it’s just full of this kind of stuff, silly stuff. Harmony of doctrine and tone, that was one of the criteria; you can see why… I mean “Thomas” was left out for other reasons. We can date it to 180 AD within a couple years. We know for sure that’s when it was written, so there is no way that Thomas wrote it, unless well—there’s just no way.

The third criteria, and this is an important one, continual usage in the church as a whole. Now sometimes the claim will be made that a bunch of stodgy theologians holed up in some school somewhere made arbitrary decisions about what books belonged in the Bible. And that’s just simply not true. The church leaders did get together; they got together in large groups called councils. And when the church leaders got together, their primary question was, “Has the church in your town accepted Matthew as truly being inspired by the Holy Spirit?” And the answer was, “Yes. The church as a whole has seen it.” “Do you use it?” “Yes, we use it.” Now this is a bit of a simplification but you get the idea. 

The decisions were not made by individuals, the decision was made by the collective whole of the church, and it was the church as the whole that recognized this book was authoritative; this book wasn’t. And when the council of the early church leaders met, they simply formalized what the church as a whole had decided. And again it’s the church as a whole; it wasn’t, “Well the church in Antioch likes it but the church in Rome doesn’t; we have a problem.” “Why doesn’t the church in Rome think it’s authoritative when the church at Antioch does?” That kind of stuff. And you can see why books like 2 and 3 John had trouble getting into the canon. They eventually got in because they knew John wrote it; but it wasn’t being used by the church as a whole because it was written to two specific churches, and they are very short letters. But anyway, in a very general sense, those are the three criteria the church appeared to use in saying these books belonged in the Bible and not.

C. Description of the “New Testament Apocrypha”

So let me give you a final definition of what we call the New Testament Apocrypha. Books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Nicodemus. One, they claim to be Christian. These are not Jewish books; they claim to be Christian books and rarely are. Number two; they all came from the 2nd century or later. That’s important, so somebody says, “Oh the Gospel of Nicodemus was written by Nicodemus.” No it wasn’t. It came from at least the 2nd century. And thirdly, these books were never accepted by the church as a whole. Never. There may have been one church somewhere that wanted the Didache to be in the canon, but the bulk of the churches didn’t so it was left out. 

That’s a helpful three things to remember as you get into discussions, because people will say, “Oh, but these are Christian books; they’re true.” Most of them, that’s not the case. “They are written by the apostles.” No they weren’t; they’re 2nd century. And, “It was just an arbitrary decision by some individual to leave it out.” No, the church never accepted Shepherd of Hermas or the Gospel of Thomas and these. Okay, any comments or questions on that?

D. Is the Canon closed?

Okay, let me address just a couple of questions that are generally raised on the issue of canonicity. One, is the canon closed? If, for example, what we call 1 and 2 Corinthians is really 2 and 4 Corinthians. We know there was a letter before 1 Corinthians; we know there was a letter written between first and second. So let’s say 1 or 3 Corinthians somehow appeared. We dug up an ancient Christian library and they had all four letters. Would we accept that as canonical? Well, there a several answers to the question. First of all, the biblical text I don’t think makes an explicit claim that the canon is closed. It would be really nice if the last verse of Revelation said, “Oh, by the way, this is the last book that was written in the New Testament and nothing can be written after it, so says God.” It would be nice if it said that, it doesn’t. 

Now there is a verse in Revelation 22 that says if you add to or take away from the description, then these plagues are gonna be visited upon you. So there’s a pretty strong statement, a curse basically, that if you change it, but it doesn’t apply to the canon as a whole, and there’s a chance that the Gospel of John was even written later than Revelation. It’s hard to date, but it’s possible. There is, however, Jude 3 (Jude only has one chapter, so you don’t say Jude 1:3; you say just Jude 3). Jude says “I’m writing so that you will contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” And Jude is Jesus’ brother, and I don’t know where the dates are for Jude, 50s-60s somewhere, I would guess. But certainly by the end of the 1st century what Jude is saying is that the faith, the collection of doctrines that define who we are as Christians, they have been delivered in their finality. The faith has been delivered. It’s an identifiable set of doctrines, once for all, and what Jude 3 tells us is that no other book can be brought into the Bible that disagrees with the existing books of the Bible. So Jude 3 is a pretty strong verse that the basic set of Bible doctrine is set. So that’s one of the criteria that you could use. I mean, if we found 1 or 3 Corinthians it would be interesting, but certainly if they disagreed with the two books of Corinthians that we have, they would be tossed because they would disagree with the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Some people would answer the question, “No, the canon is not closed.” And I think theologically this is probably where—not probably, it’s where I end up. I would be highly suspicious if after 2000 years another book or letter appeared. It seems highly unlikely to me, but theologically I can t find a way to close the canon as much as I would like to. But I think that if you said, “No, the canon is not closed,” if you look at new books you’re gonna have to say, “Well, do they fit the criteria? Who wrote them; do they agree in harmony; do they agree in doctrine and tone; were they used by the church?” These kinds of question would still come up. But again let me emphasize about every 15, 20 years there’s another set of books that come out, and they all say the same thing. It happened when I was in seminary. It happened again recently. “Oh, the church has been hiding books from us; now thanks to me and my great research ability we’re now gonna make them available to you for $39.95.” It’s just the New Testament Apocrypha. They keep dredging up the same stuff over and over again, and it’s been 15 years so everybody forgets. If you’re gonna say the canon theologically is still open, I think you still have to be extremely suspicious when supposedly any come up. And I don’t believe any other letters will ever appear.

The other argument is pretty strong, though, and that argument is, yes, the canon is closed. And I think there are several arguments that they could argue. One, all the books that we currently have stem from first or second-hand contact with Jesus. I guess if a book appeared that claimed to have first-hand contact with Jesus then this argument wouldn’t apply. But you know, if you get a book written in 150 by someone who is two or three generations beyond the disciples, I think people could fairly argue, “No, it’s simply not acceptable; it’s too far, it’s too long from the fact.” Second of all, this connects with other things you may or may not believe, some people will argue that Jesus and the apostles possessed a certain authority and that authority was not passed on. Some of this may have to do with your view of spiritual gifts, specifically the gift of apostleship. But the argument can be made that Jesus and the original apostles possessed an authority, and that authority is not replicated through the centuries. And so if the book doesn’t come from them, it can’t be viewed as authoritative, and therefore, the canon is closed. And you have verses like Ephesians 2:20 that says the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. So if you’re gonna start injecting books from some other place, you are gonna have problems. 

So there are arguments there. I guess there is a third argument, come to think of it, and that is you could argue that the church really did close the canon. End of the 300s, end of the 4th century, the church said, “No, the canon is closed, period.” And I think you could argue that that church was led by the Spirit. And so if you think the canon is still open, you’re not just disagreeing with me or another individual, you’re disagreeing with the whole movement of the ancient church in closing the canon. It’s a possible argument.

So is the canon closed? For all purposes, probably, but I just think theologically I’m not ready to say absolutely not. But I really wouldn’t believe it if someone gave me a book written by Paul I hadn’t seen before. That’s a really important question. And in some ways you get it with the issues, for example, of the spiritual gift of prophecy. If somebody claims to be a prophet and stands up claims to say, “Thus saith the Lord,” what they are claiming is that what they say is on equal authority with the written Word and there’s all kinds of problems with that. But certainly that, regardless to your view on spiritual gifts, I think everyone would agree that if a prophet claimed to prophesy and his prophecy contradicted Scripture, that they can’t be a prophet and they should be stoned, by the way. That’s normally one of my smart-aleck comments when someone says, “I have a prophecy,” I say, “Are you ready to be killed if you’re wrong? Because that’s the penalty for false prophets. What a prophet says always comes true. And so if you are wrong I have to kill you, I have to stone you, are you ready?” And people generally don’t continue prophesying around me.

E. Why do I think the church got it right?

The second question related to canonization is, I guess it’s really a related question, did the church get it right? Did the church really get it right in closing the canon? Because, understand the doctrine of inspiration is almost irrelevant if we don’t have the right books. So we can talk all we want about inspiration, but if we have non-inspired books in the canon, whether it’s inspired books outside the canon, then we have some problems. Yeah, I think the church got it right, and let me just give you two reasons. One, I have never seen any reason to question their decision. I have never seen any book in the New Testament Apocrypha that even remotely comes close to the criteria. They’re all written away after the time of Christ and the apostles. I should say almost all of them. And even the ones like Shepherd of Hermas and Clement and the Didache, which are pretty good books, you can tell they’re second generation books because they don’t claim the authority; they’re quoting the New Testament as an authority; you can just tell there is something different in them. I have never seen a book that even remotely suggested itself to me that it should be in the canon. So I have no reason to think the church got it wrong.

Secondly, it’s simply an issue of faith. I don’t understand why God would go to the work of inspiring all these books if he wouldn’t at the same time protect them, and make sure the inspired ones got into the Bible and non-inspired ones were kept out. That doesn’t make any sense to me, and so I believe it. 

I had a very, very difficult conversation once when I was in college with a kid who was my age. His name was Tony. Tony was the head of everything. You know these in college; he was head of the Baptist Student Union; he was the head of Young Life; and he was one of the leaders in Campus Crusade for Christ. Everywhere you looked there was Tony, except in class. We had quite a bit of contact together and then he dropped out of sight. And after about three or four weeks, in the middle of the semester, I got a little concerned. And I figured out where he lived, and I went and found him. And he was home and basically I said, “What on earth is going on? You just dropped out. You dropped out of ministry, you dropped out of school.” He goes, “Well I’m just having some real doubts about Christianity.” And I went, “Why?” And he said, “I’ve been taking a World Religion class.” 

And it turns out this teacher’s sole purpose was to convince students at Western Kentucky University that Christianity was the most inferior of the world religions. And one of the major points of attack that he used was canonicity. “Oh, you can’t believe the Bible; they brought in books that they weren’t supposed to be there. They didn’t get other books that we’re supposed to have. You just can’t trust it.” And in class, this was one of the teacher’s attacks on Christianity, and so Tony started asking me questions. And I had never studied canonization. I was a sophomore and I didn’t have anything to say. And I never saw him after that. I went home and I found dad, and I started asking him the questions. Dad did what dad usually did when I had questions; he gave me a book to read. 

And I read it, and it made me so mad; I’m never going to get tricked again like that, because the answers to Tony were so simple. Now I understand that most likely there were deeper issues in Tony’s life, and canonization was just kind of a trigger point. But the teacher used canonization to attack Tony’s faith, and I have heard of that happening many, many times. So this is a good topic that’s worth making sure you understand. Okay?

III. Transmission of the Writings

Okay, well let’s move on from canonization on to the issue of transmission. These manuscripts are being copied from century to century, and they were copied for the sake of churches. Individuals probably wanted them. These copies are called manuscripts. You may see along in the footnotes in your Bible, like “other ms” or “other mss say” – “ms” means manuscript, “mss” means manuscripts. So there are—were many, many manuscripts that were being copied. And as I said, when you look at these manuscripts there’s differences, and this is not some liberal concoction to destroy our faith. I mean you can physically look at these things, if you can get into a library that has them, and you can read Greek. You can see that they are different. Some manuscripts at Romans 5 say, “We have peace with God” – ‘echomen.’ Other manuscripts say, “Let us have peace with God” – ‘echōmen.’ So these are real differences among the Greek manuscripts. 

And I don’t want to go into too much detail, this is a highly technical field, but just to kind of give you a feel for it; one of the things that you will find when you compare the manuscripts is the whole issue of omissions or deletions. Some manuscripts have whole verses that other manuscripts don’t have. For example, in the best Greek manuscripts that we have in Mark 16:8, “and the women have seen the empty tomb and they leave and they were afraid,” period. And then you’ll normally see some sort of designation in your Bible, “Other manuscripts add.” And you get verses 9 to 20. So you have this rather large, this is the biggest chunk in Scripture; it appears to either have been added at a later date or left out at another date. But some manuscripts stop at Mark 16:8; others stop at Mark 16:20.

I like to tell the story of the sociology classes that you probably were all in. Did you see the stories of the Appalachian snake people? I like to tell people those are my cousins. Mounces are from Gravelswitch, Kentucky. I think it was our last year that we lived there, we went to Gravelswitch. It was a nice little town, it was strange there; everyone was named Mounce. I can still remember that. Mounce’s bakery, Mounce’s garage; I went into the bank and it was Mounce, Mounce, Mounce, Johnson; she was the outsider. Anyway, these are my cousins that you see in the sociology movies because in their expression of their Christianity, they do two really strange things: they drink poison and they handle snakes, and they don’t get bit by the rattlers. Now why are they doing that? Because in Mark 16:18, these are the signs of the Christians who go out, “They will pick up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it won’t hurt them.” See, my cousins are real Christians and we all are namby-pambies, because we won’t drink poison and pick up snakes. Well, it’s right there; it’s in the Bible. Don’t you believe the Bible? I don’t think there is any question among hardly anyone that Mark 16:8 ended at verse 8 or we’ve lost the full ending and this was added several hundred years later. It’s not part of the Bible. 

The other large section is John 8; the woman caught in adultery. You’ll see markers in your Bible around it, “the better manuscripts omit these verses.” You won’t see that in the King James or the New King James. You’ll see it in all the other translations, though as well. But the woman caught in adultery most certainly is a later addition. People tend to argue that it was true, but John never wrote it and it got stuck into the Gospel of John 100 years or later, or so. But there are also smaller sections. You know how we say the Lord’s Prayer? If you read it in the ESV or the NIV: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” Period. Then you go, “Guahhh, finish it!” Well, again this is another one of these things where when you look at the manuscripts, we can see that, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” only appears in later manuscripts; it doesn’t appear in the earlier and best manuscripts. We know that it was the habit of the church to add to the Bible especially flowery language. And so it fits that pattern. So anyway, the differences have to do with omissions and/or deletions.

But also there’re just differences sometimes. Some manuscripts will have a really difficult word, and then in this manuscript they’ve used a synonym that a younger kid could understand. And you can see what the scribe did, he was copying along and he goes, “What does that word mean? No one understands that word anymore. I better use a word they can understand.” It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea…but it was. And lots of times you’ll see changes where they want to make one Gospel read exactly like the other. So Matthew talks about “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and Luke talks about “Blessed are the poor.” There are a few manuscripts in Luke that say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” so they are trying to get the Gospels to agree to get away from problems. When along the bottom of your Bible it says “other manuscripts read,” that’s what it’s talking about. There’s differences among the Greek manuscripts and we have to deal with it. Okay?

A. Textual criticism

Into this arena then comes what is called textual criticism. Textual criticism is the name of the science that comes along and looks at ‘echōmen,’ ‘echomen,’ or any other difference, and says “Okay, which one’s most likely to be original? Which one did Paul most likely write?” It is a highly, highly technical field. But let me give just you a snippet, kind of peek into the way textual critics work. One of their premises is that it’s more likely that information was added rather than omitted. That’s one of those fundamental assertions. Here is what I mean by that. John 5:5, Jesus goes to the pool of Bethesda and there was a man who was lying there for 38 years, and Jesus says, “What are you here for?” Did you notice what I skipped? I skipped John 5:4. “For an angel of the Lord would come down periodically and stir up the water, and the first one into the pool would be healed,” John 5:4. 

The better Greek manuscripts don’t have verse 4. The later ones have verse 4. Now is it more likely that that verse about the angel was added or subtracted? You can’t think of any reason why it would be subtracted. I mean why have you been lying by this water for 38 years? I mean if John in the Gospel told us why, you would certainly expect it to be included. But you could see a situation where a scribe is copying it, and Jesus meets this man; he’s been lying by the pool for 38 years. “You know what? I think I know why he was there and it’s kind of a hole in the story. I better add it in.” So one of the starting points that text critics use is that it is more likely that material was added rather than taken away. It’s really hard to take away from the Word of God. 

A second thing they look at is how old is the manuscript. Siniaticus, which is the primary Greek manuscript that our Bibles are all based on, is 4th century. The King James is based on 3 manuscripts that came from the 11th century. Now if there were nothing else to decide, which one would you trust? A copy that was 400 years after the fact, or something that was over 1000 years after the fact? So they tend to look at the older manuscripts because they are closer to the event and they can be trusted more. Anyway it’s a very, very complicated field and I just wanted to give you a snippet of it.

IV. Current Situation

Okay, what is our current situation when it comes to all this? Let me give you three things. One, we have a little over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, none of the autographs, but over 5,000. That’s an amazing number of manuscripts. We also have thousands in other languages; you know translations and what not. A lot of the ancient works of history like Caesar’s Gallic Wars, there’s only three copies of it extant. And so you have three Latin manuscripts to try to figure out what Caesar wrote; but with the Bible you have over 5,000. That’s really quite remarkable; so we have a lot of data to draw from. Second of all, 99% of the text is sure. I don’t want you to think that with these differences that there’s huge chunks of the Bible that we are not sure about; 99% of the text is set. 

And, thirdly, that final one percent where we’re just not absolutely sure, contains no important biblical teaching. A lot of the things that we don’t know for sure are how you spell things. There are seven spellings for the pool of Bethasda; there’s five spellings for the Gaderene demoniac. You just can’t tell. It’s a lot of that kind of stuff. But the atonement, the cross, salvation, none of these things are brought into question at all by differences among the Greek manuscripts. 

And finally one note on inspiration and we will stop for a beak. If you notice in our Statement of Faith, it says that the doctrine of inspiration only applies to the autographs; you can’t apply the doctrine of inspiration to the copies because there are so many differences. I have been told that there’s 150,000 places they’re different. I suspect that number is too high, but that’s the number that’s passed around a lot and I have better things to do with my life than count. But we know that there’s differences, so the doctrine of inspiration is applied to these autographs. Now you may meet some that people say, “Hey, if we don’t have these autographs, it’s not even worthwhile to talk about the doctrine of inspiration. If all that we have are copies, then inspiration is passé. There’s no reason to talk about it.” I think the response is the text critics have done their work really, really well. And while there is that one percent we’re just not sure of, the 99% is absolutely set and there’s no, at least in the academic community, there is simply no question that 99% of the text that it’s accurate and it’s trustworthy.

Student: [inaudible]

Dr. Mounce: The Dead Sea Scrolls were all Jewish. So it was copies of Old Testament books. No New Testament. The neat thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Hebrew manuscripts that we have go back to about 800 or so AD. And there always was a lingering doubt as to how well the Jewish scribes copied the Old Testament. So here we dig up a scroll of Isaiah that was 800 years earlier, and compare it to the Hebrew text of Isaiah that we use, and they’re almost identical. And so we got a lot of assurance that the copying process for the Old Testament was done reliably. But it doesn’t affect the New Testament. 

Student: [inaudible]

Dr. Mounce: The question is: what about in French and German, and other languages? I am sure all of those go back to Greek and Hebrew. There is a standard Greek text; it’s called Nestle-Aland, United Bible Societies. They have come to agreement; it was done by a group of about five unbelievable scholars, the kind of people it’s kind of scary to be around. These guys are really smart. 

V. Translations

We’ve gone through canonization; we’ve gone through textual criticism. So chronologically we come up to the whole topic of translations. And again, it’s another huge topic. But I want to introduce some basic issues, primarily so you’ll know to trust your Bible, even though it’s different from other Bibles, and to kind of give you just a little bit of feel for why they are different. Let’s start with a problem, several problems. First of all, the Bible is not written in English, despite what some people unfortunately think. The New Testament is written in Greek. Most of the OT is written in Hebrew; small portions of it are written in Aramaic, a later version of Hebrew. And if you can’t read Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic you need a translation; that’s one of the problems. 

The second problem connected with translations has to do with the nature of languages. Languages are not codes. Now this is gonna sound really simplistic, but I remember when I first started learning Latin in high school. I went into class thinking that it was kind of like Morse code. “B” in morse code is “dot, dit dit dit”. An “I” is “dit dit.” An “L” is “dit dot dit dit dit dot dit dit.” So, “Bill” is “dit dot dit dit dit dot dit dit dit dot dit dit dit dot dit dit” in Morse code. Well I figured in Greek you would just switch the dots and the dashes. So Bill in Greek would be “dit dit dot dot dot dit dit dot” or something like that. It was this unbelievably simplistic view of language. I guess I thought there was a one-for-one correspondence. Okay, in English, “I want the water,” four words. In German you would say, you have four words, the word for “I” the word for “want,” you know, that kind of stuff. But, of course, languages are not codes and there is not an exact equivalence. It is virtually impossible to say exactly in one language what is said in another. And I don’t care whether you’re going from Greek and Hebrew to English or German to French. And that’s why when you listen to simultaneous translators, they always speak more than the person speaking. Because there’s going to be nuances and what not in the one language; it just takes a while to say in the other language. 

Let me give you some of the kinds of problems we have. What does the word “can” mean…C-A-N? “The ability to do;” “ a container;” “to fire, can someone;” “derriere.” My supervisor used to say, “Americans eat what they can and can what they can’t.” See, a word doesn’t have a meaning. A word has a bundle of meanings. And you can’t find another word in another language that has the same bundle of meanings. You can’t, it’s impossible. Even the word “the.” Well, you say that’s pretty simply. Certainly there’s a word for “the” in Greek. Not really. There’s a word that we translate “the,” that can also be translated “my” or “your” or “his” or “our.” See, there’re not exactly the same bundle of meanings. So how are you gonna translate the word “can” from English into another language if you’re translating in that direction. 

Here’s another example and this has to do more with grammar than it does with word meanings. Romans 6:15, Paul is talking about the role of ongoing sin in the life of a believer. And he says, and this is the NASB, “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be!” Pretty good translation. ESV translates, “By no means.” You go, “Well, that’s odd.” “May it never be, by no means.” I wonder how that happened? The New Living (NLT) goes, “Of course not,” which is colloquial, and not anywhere near as strong as the Greek. The King James says, “God forbid!” Now forget the fact that the word “God” doesn’t occur and the word “forbid” doesn’t occur. Actually I think “God forbid” is the best translation, because the Greek “mē genoito” is the strongest way you can in Greek and say that under no circumstances can sin be okay as an ongoing part of a Christian’s life. How can you say that in English? “Of course not?” No, you can see they are struggling with it, because we don’t have the words “mē genoito.” We don’t have the optative, the form of the verb that’s in the Greek. So how do you say it? These are the kinds of problems that you get when you translate. Languages are not exactly equivalent, and you simply cannot say exactly in one language what’s said in another, with all the nuances and all the force of a language.

Now connected to that, let me say something about the word “literal,” because we all want a literal Bible, right? And normally, when we use the word “literal,” what do you mean by that? If I were to say “Larry, do you want a literal Bible?” You say, “Yeah.” I say, “What does it mean to be literal?” It’s accurate. It says, well I can’t even use the right verb here, you’ll know why in a second. You want it to accurately represent what the original is saying. But how do you do that? See, here’s the problem: a lot of people think literal means word-for-word, and they say “I want a literal translation. If the Greek has eight words, I want a translation with eight words. If they use a participle, I want a participle. I want to be as close to the Greek as I can.” 

The word “literal,” if you look it up in the dictionary, actually has to do with meaning. If you wanted a literal Bible and if you’re using English the way the dictionary says we should, what we’re saying is that I want a Bible that says the same thing that has the same meaning. And yet we use the word “literal” more for form than we do meaning. Here’s an example; here is a literal translation, a word-for-word, we’ll call it, translation of John 3:16, “So for loved the God the world that the Son the only he gave so that every the believing into him not perish but have life eternal.” Now does anybody want to read a word-for-word Bible? It’s not English, is it? And this is just the nature of languages. Languages have different vocabulary; they have different word order; they have different grammar. You simply can’t go directly from one language to the next; it’s impossible.

The example that I use, and I’m never sure whether I should use these or not, but its works so well. I was in graduate school. I was struggling with reading German. I called mom and dad and said, “Can I go to Germany and learn German.” They said, “Fine.” So, I went to Schwäbisch Hall; it’s a great little tourist town in southern Germany. I went to German school for three months, absolutely loved it. 

There was a bunch of Americans there from some American university, who knew a lot more German than I did. They were in the upper division class; I was in the beginners. It was late fall and I was talking to my friends. And we weren’t ever supposed to speak in English. We were only supposed to speak in German. That was part of the deal. And I wanted to say, “I am cold.” So I said okay, “I” is “ik,” “am” is “bin,” and “cold” is “kalt.” So I said, “Brrr…ik bin cult.” And all 20 of my friends hit the ground rolling in hysterical laughter and I’m… “What did I say?” I said, “Ik bin kalt – I am cold,” and it literally took about two or three minutes to regain their composure, and these are my friends. They said, “Do you have any idea what you said, Bill?” And I go, “No,” and they said, “You said you are sexually frigid.” [laughter] And I went, “What?” They said, “If you want to say ‘I am cold,’ you have to say ‘It is to me cold,’ ‘Es ist mir kalt.’ That’s how you say, ‘I am cold,’ in German.” You know, what can I say? And you think I would have learned my lesson. It got warm a few days later. [laughter] And I said “Ik bin varm.” And they sat there and rolled their heads and said, “Will you ever learn?” I thought “Ik bin varm,” “I am horny” is what I said. Pretty that much crassly as well. 

I mean you can have the same problem going to Scotland, alright?. They kind of speak the same language or they would say we kind of speak the same language. I was at a restaurant once and I asked for a napkin, and they just sat there and shook their heads; a napkin is a tampon in Scotland. So you can get in all kinds of problems thinking you are being safe and being literal; it doesn’t work in languages. 

A. Translation philosophy

So here’s what happens because of the nature of language and a lot of other things. Every translation has a philosophy; every translation has to make a choice: what kind of Bible do we want to be? How do we want to translate it? And it’s that decision that determines how the Bible reads, alright? And this is why Bibles are different. The ESV was written for people who wanted to study. So, we use words like “propitiation.” “Well, I don’t know what ‘propitiation’ means.” Look it up. This is a Study Bible. The NIV is somewhere in the middle. They translate “hilastērion” as “atoning sacrifice.” You can kinda figure out what that means. The New Living completely just explains it. It takes about a phrase to explain it. See, that’s not because some people can translate and some can’t. There’s different translation philosophies, different audiences, and that kind of thing; and that’s why Bibles tend to be different. Let me give you the most basic division, the most basic question that translators have to answer.

B. Formal equivalence

Some translations are what’s called formal equivalent translations. Now, the New American Standard is the best example of this. A formal equivalent means that they want to go as much as is possible word-for-word. “If the Greek takes eight words, we want to use eight words in English. If the Greek uses a participle, we want to try to use a participle. If the word, ‘the’ is there in Greek, we want to say a ‘the’ there in English.” It’s done with a recognition that it's not always possible, but they want to be as close word-for-word to the Greek and Hebrew as they possibly can. Formal equivalent translations tend to use, for example, the same English word for the same Greek word. In other words, these guys know that words have bundles of meaning. But you know, the word “polis” occurs 60 some odd times, so we are gonna translate it “city” every time; the NASB does it. And so there’s this kind of word-for-word kind of mentality. There’s obviously certain values in NASB; if I sit down and I read the NASB, I can see the Greek behind it. They have done a really good job. The Greek and Hebrew are very transparent. And I think it’s much less interpretive than most, because they are just translating words; they’re not really concerned about meaning. And so there’s less of the translator involved in the process. Now the translator is involved in the process, but not as much so as other philosophies.

But there are several, at least three major problems I think with formal equivalent translations. One is that they are just terrible English, just terrible English, and they make Paul sound like an idiot in places. “Was Paul this uneducated that he couldn’t put a coherent sentence together?” No, but sometimes Paul gets mad and it’s hard to translate his Greek, but he is not incompetent, and it makes the Bible feel like really, really bad literature. And that makes it hard to read; it makes it hard to memorize. There’s other problems connected with that. But you know, having bad English may not be an issue for some people.

Number two: formal equivalent translations sometimes obscure meaning. I mean the heart and soul of formal equivalent translations is “To not interject myself into the translation, but if the Greek says it I want to say it; I want to get it clear.” And in many ways they do a great job, but they can obscure meaning as well. For example, every time “polis” occurs, (that’s the Greek word) they translate it as “city.” And so they talk about the “city” of Nazareth. That’s a bad translation. There were about 600 people in Nazareth in Jesus’ day. Is 600 people a city? No, 600 people is a wide spot on a road that’s lucky to have their own zip code. It miscommunicates; it’s not a city, it’s a hamlet, it’s a village, something like that. 

Another example is in John 2, I’m gonna pick on all translations by the way, except the ESV of course but…no, I can pick on that too. John 2, the NASB, this is the wedding at Cana, Mary is telling Jesus to take care of the wine problem. And the NASB says, “And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what does this have to do with us, my hour has not yet come.’” Ever struggle with that? “Woman.” Jesus, wash your mouth out with soap. Oh, that’s right, you’re sinless. Why are you being so mean to your mother? Well, the Greek “gynē” is not mean. It’s just a normal form of address. We don’t have anything remotely like that form of address in English, so the NASB comes along and says “woman” and we hear it’s derogatory; it’s under his thumb. That’s not in the Greek at all—doesn’t exist. 

That’s why the NIV says, “Dear woman, why do you involve me?” The NIV translators are saying, we’ve got to make people understand that it’s not a bad term for Jesus to call his mother, “woman.” “Dear woman.” The New Living simply skips it all together. “‘How does that concern you and me,’ Jesus asked?” And in a sense that’s not that bad of an option, because there is simply no way to say “woman.” I mean “dear woman” is close but still it raises questions the Greek doesn’t raise. So these kinds of translations are going to obscure meaning.

The third problem, and again, the second and third problems are very related, it is impossible to not be interpretive in translation. If you hear someone say “My Bible is not interpretive,” they really don’t know what they’re talking about, and be nice to them, but they simply don’t know. It is impossible to translate without being interpretive. For example, 1 Timothy 3, in the discussions of elders and deacons, verse 11 talks about females. The RSV says “The women likewise must be serious, no slanderers, but temperate, faithful in all things.” The word “gynē” can be translated “women” and what the RSV is saying is that they are talking about deaconesses. Now the word “deaconess” wasn’t created until the 2nd century, so Paul just used the word “woman,” context shows he’s talking about deaconesses. 

The ESV says “their wives” (which is the other translation of “gyne”), “their wives likewise must be dignified.” The ESV position was that this verse is not talking about deaconesses; it’s talking about the wives of male deacons. Now when you come to “gynē,” you cannot get around that problem; you have to be interpretive. You look at the context; you look at the exegesis; you look at your theology; you make a decision and you go with it in your translation. So the NASB suffers from what all translations suffer with, they have to be interpretive. You can’t get away from it. 

There is an Italian proverb, and if I could speak Italian it sounds really cool, but it means translators are traitors. All translators are traitors to the original meaning. You either put too much into it or not enough into it. Now that’s kind of a gross overstatement but you get the idea. So anyway, problems of formal equivalence, the problems of translations.

C. Dynamic equivalence

The other kind of translation, or should I say the second of four, is called dynamic equivalence, and the NIV is the best example of dynamic equivalent translations. Basically these translations are not concerned to translate words, they’re concerned to translate meaning. And in a sense that’s the fundamental question that all translators have to make. “Am I simply gonna translate the words and let you figure it out, or am I going to translate what the original means?” And it’s called dynamic because they don’t care how many Greek words it takes to say something. They don’t care about the grammar; they don’t care that it’s a participle. “If I can say the same thing in English with a finite verb or with an adjective, I’m gonna do it.” So dynamic equivalence says, “Translation process is dynamic; we don’t have to stick to the same grammatical forms, but what we are trying to do is get an equivalence of meaning.” 

The problem with dynamic equivalence is that they’re more interpretive. The more you go down this path—and it’s a continuum, it’s not a stair step; it’s a very smooth continuum; and as you go further down away from word-to-word, away from translating words to translating meaning, more and more of the translator’s theology gets put into the translation. And so they get more interpretive and therefore less trustworthy in a sense. For example, can someone who is divorced be an elder in a church? Well, the only passage is 1 Timothy 3:2. Now if you translate 1 Timothy 3:2 word-for-word it’s “of one of woman man.” But the problem is the word for woman and man could also be wife and husband, so it could also be translated, “of one of wife husband.” So, first of all, you have to make a choice whether you’re talking about married people or not. Okay, how are you gonna translate this? Well, the ESV translates “Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife.” Almost everyone was married, and we figured the point wasn’t they had to be married or not; it’s just that was the culture, almost everyone was married. “The husband of one wife.” 

See what we did? And I say “we,” I don’t know if you all know it, dad and I were two of the translators on the ESV; that’s why we’re a little biased towards it. That’s why we also have some good stories about it too, but that’s another talk. That was as close as we could get to the Greek where it had some meaning and we weren’t interjecting ourselves too far into it, because this is a difficult passage. Now the NRSV translates it, “married only once.” The NIV—and tell me if you can hear it, “the husband of but one wife.” There is no word “but” in there. Well, I don’t know why the NIV chose “but.” One of the possible interpretations is that elders can’t be polygamous and the “but” may be there to help you understand that. I don’t know. The New Living says, “he must be faithful to his wife.” I actually think that’s the right interpretation. It’s in the commentary if you want to read the reasons for it. 

I think it’s an odd Greek idiom. It has no parallel in the Greek literature. The “of one, of woman man” doesn’t exist; that kind of construction doesn’t exist anywhere in Greek literature. So it’s an idiom; Paul’s making up something, and it seems to me that he means that he must be faithful. So does the word “faithful” occur in the Greek? No, but that’s what it means. But you can see the problem as you get more interpretive, you get more meaning; it gets clearer; it flows better; it reads better; and more of the translators are in between the lines of your Bible. That’s dynamic equivalence. Translate words, formal, translate meaning, dynamic, and you can understand the problems. There are two other categories.

D. Paraphrase

One is paraphrase, and again, a paraphrase is very much a thought for thought. It’s just further down the spectrum. Go NASB, NIV, then you get to the paraphrases. And you get some very good paraphrases like the New Living Translation. I don’t call the New Living a translation. I think it’s very paraphrastic. I really like the New Living Translation. I know a bunch of the guys that helped do it. They’re good scholars; they are good people; they’re conservative. And I read the New Living almost as a commentary. I wonder what Craig [Blomberg] thinks on Galatians? Oh, okay. But there’s so much of the translator in these things that it gets dangerous. Another magnificent paraphrase is JB Phillips’ translation in the fox holes of London during the bombing of London. He writes only as an Englishman can write. Romans 12, “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold,” as opposed to “don’t be conformed to this world.” Magnificent paraphrase, but they’re paraphrases.

E. Running commentary

There’s a fourth category, and I just call it running commentary; there’s not a technical word for it. The Living Bible is so far out past it. Kenneth Taylor may have sold 40 million of these and they may be great assurance to people; it’s not a Bible; it’s not. It is made up stuff all the way, a lot of good stuff, a lot of made up stuff all the way through it. The Message—it’s a great running commentary, if you like it, it’s a great running commentary on the Bible; it’s not a Bible. It’s simply so far down the line that you can’t say “Thus saith the Lord,” and quote that book; you just can’t. So you have this long range. 

Let me give you an example using Romans 16:16. The NIV translates it, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” What’s a holy kiss? Well, the NIV said figure it out. I have down here Phillips’ translation is, “Greet one another with a brotherly kiss.” Now maybe that’s not Phillips, maybe that’s another translation, but you can see what they are trying to do. They are saying, “Don’t lay it on them.” What would a brotherly kiss look like in our culture? What would a brotherly kiss look like? A kiss on the cheek, right? I guess. The Living Bible says “Shake hands warmly with each other.” Now, having said something negative about the Living let me say something positive; that’s exactly what it means. That’s exactly what Paul means. What is the current acceptable way of warmly greeting someone? You shake hands with them; maybe now we say, “Give them a quick hug.” I don’t know. But the Living just nailed it. That’s exactly what Paul means. What he said was, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” 

And so this is the basic issue, and this is basically where translations are different…is that where on that spectrum do they want to go; word-for-word, translate meaning, thought-for-thought, my good ideas mixed in with the Bibles? Okay, that’s the phrase. And you know, each one has its use, doesn’t it?

VI. Final Comments

Let me give you some final comments. First of all: trust your Bibles. The translators have done a really, really, really good job. I’ve done, for one of the books I wrote, a tremendous amount of comparison of the translations, and I expected to find them contradicting themself all over the place. And that’s not what happens. Some are gonna be ambiguous. Some are gonna be a little more specific. Some are gonna be a little more word-for-word. Other translations are gonna pull out the meaning, and even something like the NLT, I rarely disagree with their interpretation of the verse. But you can trust them. These are good ways to understand. I think knowing Greek is great, and there are some people that need to do it. But you can really be comfortable with your translations. 

I don’t want to interject a bunch of questions and doubts. I just want you to know why they are different. But I would really encourage you to read more than one. And don’t read like the NASB and the ESV. Don’t read two pretty much formal equivalent translations. And certainly don’t read two paraphrases; don’t read Phillips and the NLT. But I would encourage you to pick one primary Bible; it should be closer to the formal equivalent side. So you can trust the words more, because we hang onto words, you notice that? You see a word in a verse and you want to hang on. You wanna make sure that word’s there in the Greek. So the encouragement is get something like an NASB or an RSV or an ESV, or maybe even an NIV which are gonna be more on the word-for-word side, and I think that should be your primary study Bible; But by all means find something on the other side of the spectrum; get a Phillips, get a New Living, and read them together, and when you read them together you can be really confident that what you are seeing is what the text says. So that would be my encouragement to you. 

If you would like to see a chart of translations, I swiped this off the Zondervan website, and you can just get an idea. Far left, word-for-word, are interlinears, and the NASB’s, and as you start going more thought-for-thought, translating meaning instead of words, RSV, King James, New King James, New RSV. New RSV is hard to peg because it’s more literal of a translation, more word-for-word, but it won’t use male oriented language. So brother becomes…whatever. So that pushes it further to this side. The NIV, then Zondervan’s new Bible the TNIV. Then you are moving down here to the NLT, Good News, the Living Bible and the Message. So that kind of gives you an idea of where translations are. And I think that chart’s basically accurate. 

If you want more information, there’s a character named Bill Mounce who wrote a book called Greek for the Rest of Us. And this whole issue from canonization through transmission through translations is in the book, and he recorded all of his lectures and they’re included in the back of the book, and you can also go to www.biblicaltraining.org. And as soon as I get them up you can listen to the lecture if you want without buying the book. How’s that? So anyway there’s a lot more information and there’s a bibliography in the book, and so forth.

Student: [inaudible]

Dr. Mounce: The verses came into being somewhere around the 12th century. And there are several different schemes. You’ll find, for example, the NASB in places is different from the NIV. But they were added in. Greek was originally written in all capital letters, no spaces; very, very difficult to read. But somewhere around the 12th century; they went to upper and lower case stuff centuries later, and periods and commas, and that kind of stuff all got added later. So you can ignore that if you want.

Okay, thanks a lot you all. And we will get going in Mark. It’s really important that you read Mark before you come. So read that. The website’s been updated in terms of what we’re going to talk about, kind of. I thought we could do it today, but it won’t be until for a couple of days. These talks will all be getting up in the web in three or four days.

Let’s pray: “Father, we thank you for time once again. We pray, Father, that admits other questions and the possibilities, that you will deepen our hearts, give us a faith to believe, and an absolute and total trust in your Word; that the books that are there are the ones that you wanted there, that you control them throughout the centuries. The translations are good, and we can bet our lives on the message that’s in them, because that’s exactly what we’re doing. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”