The Word of God—Evidences of Authenticity
True or false?—The Bible has been handed down through the ages without alteration.
True or false?—The thousands of variations in Bible manuscripts weaken its claim that it is the Word of God.
BEFORE you answer those questions, consider some information that was presented recently at “The Word of God” Exhibition held in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland.
The tattered, fragmented papyrus pages are wasting away with age. Yet, the Chester Beatty papyri are the most precious manuscripts in the library. They were dug out of a Coptic (Egyptian) graveyard about 1930. “[It was] a discovery,” said Sir Frederic Kenyon, “only to be rivalled by that of the Codex Sinaiticus.”
These handwritten papyrus pages, in codex form, were copied in the second, third, and fourth centuries of our Common Era. “Some,” said Wilfrid Lockwood, the librarian, “may well have been copied within a hundred years of the composition of the original.” (Italics ours.) One codex has the four Gospels and the book of Acts. Another has most of the letters of the apostle Paul, including his letter to the Hebrews.
Copying manuscripts like these was tedious and tiring, and open to error. It was easy to misread a letter or miss a line, however careful the copyist might be. Sometimes the copyist was more interested in getting the substance and meaning of the original than in the exact words. As copies were recopied, mistakes were perpetuated. Textual scholars grouped manuscripts with similar variations into families. These Chester Beatty papyri, the oldest substantial manuscripts of the Greek Bible in existence, gave the scholars an unexpectedly new slant on things, since they fitted into none of the established families.
Before Jesus’ time, and especially following the destruction of Jerusalem (607 B.C.E.) and the subsequent dispersion of the Jews, many handwritten copies of the sacred Hebrew Scriptures were made. About 100 C.E., Jewish authorities used such copies to establish a Hebrew text accepted by orthodox Jews.
They also set out precise rules to try to ensure exact copying of the text. They specified what materials could be used and even the size and spacing of letters, words, lines, and columns. “No word or letter, not even a yod [the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet], must be written from memory,” they said. Thus copyists produced scrolls like the Torah (teaching), comprising the first five books of the Bible, and the book of Esther. Such manuscripts of the Hebrew text, said the exhibition catalog, “exhibit an impressive degree of uniformity.”
How serious were the mistakes that crept into both Hebrew and Christian Greek manuscripts? “It should be stressed,” said Mr. Lockwood, “that the divergences between manuscripts of the Bible are superficial by comparison with those found in the manuscripts of the pagan literature . . . In no case is any point of Christian doctrine affected by scribal corruption.”—Italics ours.
The books of the Bible from before and after Jesus’ time were translated into other languages. One of the oldest of the versions is the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritans were people who occupied the territory of the ten-tribe kingdom of Israel after the king of Assyria took the Israelites into exile (740 B.C.E.). They adopted some features of Jewish worship and accepted only the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. The Samaritan text of these books, written in a form of ancient Hebrew script, has 6,000 variations from the Hebrew text. “Most,” said the exhibition catalog, “are of little importance to the text though of interest as possibly preserving features of ancient pronunciation or grammar.”
In the third century B.C.E., Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, produced the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures, which came to be used by Greek-speaking Jews all over the world. In time the Jews stopped using it, but it became the Bible of the early Christian congregation. When Christian Bible writers quoted from the sacred Hebrew Scriptures, they used the Septuagint. The Chester Beatty papyri of the Hebrew Scriptures include 13 pages of the book of Daniel in the Septuagint.
Later versions of the Bible were produced in languages such as Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian. One example in the exhibition was a vellum codex of a Coptic version of a portion of the Bible from the sixth or seventh century C.E. How do versions like these help Bible scholars and textual critics? Such versions are usually very literal translations of the Greek manuscripts that the translators used. “If the Greek text on which the translator worked was a good one,” explained Mr. Lockwood, “it is evident that the version will provide important help in the work of recovering the original words of the Greek.”
A very precious, unique exhibit in the library is a commentary by a fourth-century Syrian writer, Ephraem, on the Diatessaron by Tatian. About 170 C.E., Tatian compiled a harmonized account of the life and ministry of Jesus, using extracts from the four Gospels (Diatessaron means “through [the] four”). Because no copies survived, some critics in the last century disputed whether such a harmony of the Gospels ever existed. These critics contended that the four Gospels themselves were not written till the middle of the second century.
In the last hundred years, however, the discovery of translations of the Diatessaron in Armenian and Arabic forced the higher critics to retreat. Then, in 1956, Sir Chester Beatty obtained this unique fifth/sixth century commentary that contains long extracts from Tatian’s original work. “It certainly scotched the notion that the four Gospels were not in circulation in that era,” said Mr. Lockwood.
“The Word of God” Exhibition was a reminder of the abundance of material available to Bible scholars and textual critics. Let one of these scholars, Sir Frederic Kenyon, explain the significance of all these Biblical manuscripts that have been discovered and at the same time answer the questions raised at the beginning:
“It may be disturbing to some to part with the conception of a Bible handed down through the ages without alteration . . . It is reassuring in the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.” (The Story of the Bible, page 113)—Psalm 119:105; 1 Peter 1:25.
[Picture on page 27]
Third-century papyrus—2 Corinthians 4:13–5:4
[Credit Line]
Reproduced by permission of the Chester Beatty Library
[Picture on page 28]
18th-century leather and vellum scrolls of Esther
[Credit Line]
Reproduced by permission of the Chester Beatty Library
[Picture on page 29]
Sixth- or seventh-century vellum codex—John 1:1-9, Coptic version
[Credit Line]
Reproduced by permission of the Chester Beatty Library
[Picture on page 30]
Fifth- or sixth-century vellum codex—commentary by Ephraem that includes extracts from Tatian’s Diatessaron, in Syriac
[Credit Line]
Reproduced by permission of the Chester Beatty Library