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How Reliable Is Our Bible Text?Awake!—1972 | June 22
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Not so long ago it was thought that many words in the Christian Greek Scriptures were special Bible words, so to speak. But now these same words have been found in ordinary correspondence of Bible times—in deeds, official documents, and even in receipts. Seeing how these words were used in secular documents of the time has been helpful in achieving, in certain instances, a more precise Bible translation.
A third important reason for new Bible translations is the discovery of more and more ancient Bible manuscripts. For the Christian Greek Scriptures alone there are now over 4,600 extant manuscript copies, in whole or in part, in Greek;
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How Reliable Is Our Bible Text?Awake!—1972 | June 22
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As one example of the work of textual scholars, consider the Bible verse 1 Timothy 3:16. The King James Version reads, “God was manifest in the flesh.” However, most modern translations say: “He was made manifest in flesh.” Why the difference? And why have modern translations replaced “God” with “He”? It is because of the identification by textual scholars of how the original text of the Bible writer obviously read.
The ancient contraction for “God” was represented by the Greek form [Artwork—Greek characters], while the Greek letters literally meaning “who” in the uncial or capital-like lettering were OC. You can see how easy it would be to convert “who” to the title “God” by just putting a single stroke through the “O” and a bar over the top of both letters. And this is an alteration that was made in some ancient manuscripts.
Textual scholars have exposed this alteration. Westcott and Hort show in their Notes on Select Readings that the alteration is found only in manuscripts written from the end of the fourth century C.E. onward. Even in the famous fifth-century Alexandrine manuscript in the British Museum, a microscope examination has revealed that the stroke and bar were added by another hand at a much later time!
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How Reliable Is Our Bible Text?Awake!—1972 | June 22
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Manuscripts copied in Greek give evidence of the work of correction. This can be seen, for example, in the famous Codex Sinaiticus, a Greek Septuagint manuscript of the fourth century. The corrector added in the top margin a passage that had been omitted in error from First Corinthians chapter thirteen. Then he placed arrows to indicate where the passage should have appeared in the actual text.
Regarding the effect of such scrupulous care, Dr. Hort notes: “The great bulk of the words of the New Testament stand out above all discriminative processes of criticism, because they are free from variation, and need only to be transcribed. If comparative trivialities . . . are set aside, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt can hardly amount to more than a thousandth part of the whole New Testament.”
The late Bible text scholar Sir Frederic Kenyon made this reassuring statement in the introduction to his seven volumes on the “Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri”: “The first and most important conclusion derived from the examination of them [the then recently discovered second- to fourth-century papyri] is the satisfactory one that they confirm the essential soundness of the existing texts. No striking or fundamental variation is shown either in the Old or the New Testament. There are no important omissions or additions of passages, and no variations which affect vital facts or doctrines. The variations of text affect minor matters, such as the order of words or the precise words used.”
That care in copying was effective in practically eliminating errors is also evidenced by the recently discovered Dead Sea Scroll “A” of Isaiah, which is dated around 100 B.C.E. This scroll is about a thousand years older than what was formerly the oldest known copy of the Bible book of Isaiah in Hebrew.
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