No Bad Questions Q & A: Can You Trust the Bible?

Hey, good afternoon, CTK community. This is Pastor Jeff Bradford. As promised, I'm answering some of the questions that have come through on questions at ctkrally.org in our "No Bad Questions" series. I'm doing one or two of these every week. Today, related to the sermon from this past Sunday, is this question: What about all the errors and transmission in the Bible? Great question.

I'm going to do this briefly. Since the late 1800s, there's been a lot of writing and hypotheses that have come out of scholarship around the variants, contradictions, and errors in transmission of the Bible. Most famously, many people are aware of Doctor Bart Ehrman at UNC Chapel Hill, who wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus. It's been very popular, and he throws out the number 400,000—400,000 errors or variants in our Bible. That's a really defeating number, isn't it? A lot of people hear that and throw up their hands in despair and say, "How can we trust any part of it if that's the case?"

Manuscript Evidence

Briefly, in response, I want to make a couple of notes. First, how many documents or manuscripts are we actually talking about? If you compare the Bible to other works of antiquity, the Bible is astonishingly well documented. The two runners up to the Bible in terms of the most number of manuscripts are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and we have a total of about 2,500 manuscripts of those works. Many of the other ancient texts that have survived into the present day, we have numbers only in the double digits.

By comparison, in the New Testament, we have somewhere around 25,000 different manuscripts available to us to study and to compare and contrast.

The Nature of Variants

What kind of variants are we talking about? It's easy to hear the word 400,000 and despair. The question is, are they major? Are they minor? If you take Bart Ehrman's number, 400,000, and divide it by the 25,000 manuscripts we have, that roughly comes down to about 16 variants per manuscript. And no other ancient book is so well authenticated.

Princeton professor Bruce Metzger takes that and looks at other ancient works of antiquity like the Mahabharata of Hinduism. It comes out about 90% accurate in terms of comparing different manuscripts. Homer's Iliad is about 95% accurate. If you take all those variants comparing across all the manuscripts, we have confidence of 99.5% accuracy with understanding exactly what the text is meant to say in all its parts.

The vast majority of those variants are textual variants that are really uninteresting. Things like the inclusion or the omission of the article "a" or "the" before a word, doubling a word, the misspelling of a word, the omission of a word, reversing word order—other minor variants that leave the major portion of the text unaffected and still very understandable. Others are longer, but things like skipping a line, writing the same line twice, mixing word order, leaving out a phrase. In other words, a Greek or Hebrew seminary student with just a few hours of training can look at a New Testament, look at all the different textual variants, and very quickly figure out what are major and what are minor.

There are only two passages at length that are all questioned. One is John chapter seven. The other is in Mark chapter 16. If you read a good Bible, they always have before and after it an editor's note about those passages. And a good study Bible will allow you to go through and understand even variations in manuscripts.

The Theological Bottom Line

What's fascinating, though—and this is the main thing to note—is that none of these are theologically problematic. No Orthodox doctrine, none of our major practices are affected in any way by these textual variants. Even Bart Ehrman concedes. He says this: "Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by any textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."

In other words, you can read your Bible, you can understand it, and you can trust it. Thanks for asking. Keep the questions coming. Have a great day.