Many people have wondered how a book written thousands of years ago and translated hundreds of times could be reliable. In this message, Chase Gardner tackles this question, offering context on Bible variants and what all of it should mean for you and your faith.
Message Notes:
Whether we’re new to Christianity or we’ve been Christians for years, there are questions we think about and sometimes argue about with others. Over the next five weeks, we’ll take a look at the top five questions our community has.
- Is the Bible Reliable?
In the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, one character states, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book…”
Bart Ehrman in his book, Misquoting Jesus, he states, “Not only do we not have the originals, but we don’t even have the first copies of the originals, or the copies of the copies, or the copies of the copies of the copies or the originals.”
New Testament:
Three questions we should answer to know whether we can trust the Bible:
1. How many discrepancies do we have in the New Testament? (variants)
2. What is the quality of the variants?
3. Do these affect our theology?
In fact, 70% of the variants we have are spelling differences. Not errors…just differences.
If we add up spelling differences and non-translatable differences, how many of those 400,000 variants are those? 99%
1/4 of 1% of the variants are viable and meaningful.
One example is Mark 9:29 and whether the Scripture says “prayer” or “prayer and fasting.”
These things are not critical to the foundations of the Gospel.
Even Bart Ehrman in the back of his book states, “Essential Christian belief is not affected by textual variant in the manuscript tradition of the new testament.”
Old Testament:
For many years, we based our Old Testament on three collections of the entire Old Testament from about 900 AD.
In the 1940’s, scrolls of all the books in the Old Testament except Esther were found from at least 100 BC. Only minor differences (not affecting the meaning) occurred in that one-thousand-year gap.
Isaiah 53:1-6 (ESV)
There is no other book in human history like the Bible with the amount of copies, in all the languages, reaching as far back into history and agreeing as much as it does.
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