Bart Ehrman contends that we cannot trust the Bible because we do not have the original autographs but only copies of copies of copies which are riddled with scribal errors or textual variants. Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus [Kindle] HarperCollins e-books. 2005) discusses how this issue plagued him in his Biblical studies at Moody, Wheaton, and Princeton:
I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact, we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes— sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways (Kindle location 139).
Bart Ehrman (2005) argues that the Bible cannot be trusted because it is hopelessly plagued with errors or variants.
Ehrman continues: With this abundance of evidence, what can we say about the total number of variants known today? Scholars differ significantly in their estimates— some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all. Perhaps, as I indicated earlier, it is best simply to leave the matter in comparative terms. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament (Kindle location 1454).
How would you answer Bart Ehrman? Does this issue of scribal errors trouble you? Is the reliability of Scripture damaged by the fact of textual variants? This chapter will equip you with answers.
Before we get into the defense of the trustworthiness of Scripture, I want to give the view of Ehrman’s Greek teacher at Princeton on this subject. Ehrman’s teacher was the renowned Greek scholar Bruce Metzger.
Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ. Grand Rapids, 1998) in an interview asked Metzger: “When I first found out that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, I was really skeptical. I thought, if all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written? How do you respond to that?”
“That isn’t an issue that’s unique to the Bible” Metzger replied and proceeded to defend his answer (p. 59).
Conservative Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger (The Text of the New Testament pages 99-100) has full confidence in God’s Word as he expressed to Lee Strobel. Bruce Metzger, Bart Ehrman’s Greek teacher at Princeton, in his interview with Lee Strobel (1998), confirmed what we have already documented:
In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospel into other languages at a relatively early time---Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of others---Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety. How does that help? Because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. In addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church fathers” (p. 59).
In this article, I want to show why we, like Dr. Bruce Metzger, can trust the Bible in spite of scribal errors or textual variants.
Scribal Errors or Textual Variants do not affect the trustworthiness of God’s Word!
Gleason and Nix (1981) write that three links show how God’s Word transferred from His mind onto the pages of our modern translation: “Inspiration, canonization, and transmission.
In the first, inspiration God gave the message to the prophets who received and recorded it.
Canonization, the second link, dealt with recognizing and collecting the prophetic writings. In effect, the objective disclosure was complete when the sixty-six books of the Bible were written and then recognized by their original readers. However, for succeeding generations to share in this revelation, the Scripture had to be copied, translated, recopied, and retranslated. This process not only provided the Scripture for other nations but for other generations as well.
The third link is known as the transmission of the Bible. Since the Scriptures have undergone some two thousand years of transmission, it is only natural to ask: How much has the Bible suffered in the process? Or, to put it more precisely: Is the twenty-century English Bible an accurate reproduction of the first-century Greek Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament?” (p. 211).
In answering the last two questions, we have to recognize that inerrancy and inspiration apply only to the original manuscripts. Has God preserved His Word? YES! But not in one translation. God has preserved His Word in the totality of all the manuscripts and there are over 5000 existing manuscripts in part or in whole. No two manuscripts, however, are exactly the same. Again, God has not preserved His Word in one manuscript or translation. But He has preserved His Word in the totality of all the manuscripts and translations, wherever those translations faithfully reflect the original text.
Not everyone agrees with this view. Young Augustine opposed Jerome’s Vulgate because he feared it would replace the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint (LXX), which he considered inspired. In his work City of God (Book XVIII, Chapter 43), Augustine argued that the Septuagint translators were inspired by the Holy Spirit in such a way that their translation was faithful not only to the letter but also to the spirit of the original texts. He even suggested that, in some cases, the Septuagint might have preserved or revealed meanings that were not as clear in the Hebrew text.
More recently, Dewey M. Beegle (Inspiration of Scripture, 1963) wrote, “There is no evidence to show that the apostles denied the inspiration of the LXX .... The correct inference, therefore, is that in spite of some mistakes, all reasonably accurate translations of Scripture are inspired” (pp. 38-40). In other words, inspired Scripture can have mistakes according to Beegle and with this view, the inerrancy of Scripture is sacrificed.
Paul in 2nd Timothy 3:16 wrote that “all Scripture is inspired by God” not translations. Peter in 2nd Peter 1:21 penned “men of God spoke as they moved by the Holy Spirit” to write Scripture not translators. God has preserved His Word in the totality of all the manuscripts and translations that faithfully reflect the original text.
Unintentional Scribal Errors
There are two kinds of scribal errors or textual variants in the thousands of manuscripts or copies of the originals, according to Geisler & Nix (1974 From God to Us. Chicago, IL: Moody.):
Unintentional scribal errors come from errors of the eye, transposition or the reversal of the position of two letters, errors of the ear, errors of judgment, and errors of writing. Unintentional scribal errors happened regarding numbers in translations. Remember, there were no errors with numbers in the original writings nor errors of any kind. Transposition is the reversal of the position of two letters or words, technically known as metathesis …. This is especially true of Hebrew letters which were used as numerals too. The confusion of such numbers in the Old Testament may be seen in the conflicts of parallel passages. 1 Kings 4:26 says, “And Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen.” The exact parallel account in 2 Chronicles 9:25 reads, “And Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen” (p. 178).
Another example of scribal errors with numbers is in 2 Samuel 24:13 which reads,
So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him, Shall seven years of famine come unto you in your land? Or will you flee three months before your enemies, while they pursue you? Or that there be three days pestilence in your land? Now advise, and see what answer I shall return to him that sent me.
The exact parallel passage must be consulted to determine if there is a scribal error. The parallel passage is 1 Chronicles 21:11-12:
So Gad went to David and said to him, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Take your choice: three years of famine, three months of being swept away before your enemies, with their swords overtaking you, or three days of the sword of the Lord—days of plague in the land, with the angel of the Lord ravaging every part of Israel.’ Now then, decide how I should answer the one who sent me.”
These scribal errors with numbers must be admitted and not be seen as a threat to the inerrancy of the original documents which had either “seven” or “three.” One believer was strongly offended by these scribal errors and tried to correct my thinking on this example by going to other contexts in 2 Samuel 21 and pulling out numbers that were not related to this story in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles. 21. This approach does more harm than good in answering this issue. The three-year famine from 2 Samuel 21:1 is not related to the famine mentioned in 2 Samuel 24. In 2 Samuel 21:1, David enquired what was the reason for this particular three-year famine and the Lord answered, “It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.” The issue in 2 Samuel 24 is not Saul’s sin it is David’s sin. These are two separate stories. Therefore, the three-year famine from 2 Samuel 21 cannot be pulled out of context to solve the variant in 2 Samuel 24. God has preserved His Word, but not in one translation. Inerrancy applies only to the originals.
The Bible Knowledge Commentary comments on the 2 Samuel 24 passage on page 482: “Though the Hebrew reads ‘seven’ years of famine, 1 Chron. 21:12, probable a better-preserved text, reads ‘three,’ as the NIV has it.”
Ryrie explains in Basic Theology on page 99: “When God gave David a choice of punishment, He offered as an option seven years of famine according to 2 Sam. 24: 13 and three years of famine according to 1 Chron. 21:12. The Septuagint translation says three years, so likely the figure in 2 Samuel is a scribal error. Though copies were very carefully made, errors inevitably crept in. This seems to be one, but it is not an error in the original ---- that was inerrant when it was written but inerrancy cannot be extended to the copies.”
I highlighted the last words of Ryrie’s quote because we must remember that scribal errors in our English translations are not an argument against inerrancy. Inerrancy only applies to the original autographs.
Intentional Scribal Errors
In addition to unintentional scribal errors, D. A. Carson writes (1986), that there were intentional scribal errors made with good intentions no doubt but scribal errors.
A scribe sometimes had several manuscripts in front of him when he made his copy. If he discovered that one manuscript had one reading and a second another, he either chose one and left the other; or he put the two together to make a conflated reading. If some manuscripts preserve the reading ‘church of God’ in Acts 20:28, and others preserve ‘church of the Lord,’ some later copyists conflate the two to produce ‘church of the Lord and God,’ providing their readers with the benefit of both readings” (p. 24).
I opened this chapter with Bart Ehrman ridiculing the Bible as untrustworthy because of hundreds of thousands of textual variants. Yet, Ehrman (2005), on another occasion, praised the value of textual criticism:
It is written for anyone who might be interested in seeing how we got our New Testament, seeing how in some instances we don’t even know what the words of the original writers were, seeing in what interesting ways these words occasionally got changed, and seeing how we might, through the application of some rather rigorous methods of analysis, reconstruct what those original words actually were (Kindle location 270).
Ehrman can’t have it both ways. The original autographs cannot be known because of so many textual variants and at the same time through the “rigorous methods” of textual criticism “reconstruct what those original words actually were.” I actually agree with Ehrman’s last conclusion. God who has exalted His Word above His own name has also preserved it for us to exalt in our lives.