Frequently Asked Questions (1)
Larry Hart

The following questions and responses (divided into four separate posts) are related to podcasts 19-24 on Larry’s Inklings. If you prefer listening to reading the questions and answers they can be found as audio on Larry’s Inklings (Podcasts 25-28).

Q) Since we do not have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible, and it has been translated so many times, isn’t it impossible to know what it originally said?

A) That’s a question I haven’t heard in a long time. Perhaps the first thing I should say is something to clear up a slight confusion that exists in the question itself. I think the question may be confusing the translation of the Bible with its transmission. Translation involves rendering the words or text of one language into that of another. So, the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures were, for the most part, originally written in Hebrew and then later translated into various languages. The New Testament was written in koine Greek, common everyday Greek, and fairly early translated into ancient Syriac, Coptic, and Latin. I would assume, given the work of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, that the New Testament has now been translated into every language in the world. What we do not want to think is that the New Testament was written in Greek, which was translated into Syriac, which was translated into Latin, which was translated into Middle English, which was translated into Elizabethan English which was finally translated into modern English. Transmission refers to the ways in which the Biblical texts were copied, preserved, and circulated before the invention of the printing press. With this in mind, I think the question might be reframed as: Given that we do not have the original documents of the New Testament, and wouldn’t know it even if we did, how do we know that the Biblical text we have today reliably represents what the original text said?

While we do not have any of the original manuscripts, the autographs as they are called, we do have more manuscripts and manuscript fragments than we do of any other great work of ancient literature. We only have 2,000 copies of the Iliad, and only about a dozen each for Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Pliny, and Tacitus. For the New Testament we have 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian. About 25,000 in all. Additionally Christian scholars, leaders, and teachers writing in the post-apostolic age, the generation following the Apostles, quoted the New Testament so extensively it would be nearly possible to recreate the New Testament from their quotations.

Since we do not have the original New Testament writings (the autographa), textual critics work with all these ancient manuscripts and fragments in an effort to determine the reliability of the Biblical text as we have it today. The greater the number and the earlier the dating of any ancient book or manuscript scholars have, the easier it is to identify errors or discrepancies and to reconstruct a text closer to the original.

The great Medieval scholar, philosopher, and Catholic theologian Desiderius Erasmus became convinced that the recovery of true Christian spirituality could be greatly helped by recovering the text of the New Testament in its original Greek. He consulted as many old Latin manuscripts of the Bible as well as well as those in the original Greek. He noted and corrected things like obvious copyist errors. Eventually he published a Greek New Testament with a Latin translation. Erasmus’s work was the beginning of what is known as textual criticism and work on  the Textus Receptus (Latin for “received text”) , which forms the base for modern language translations of the New Testament.

New Testament textual critics are concerned with all these ancient manuscripts and fragments of writing we have of the Bible. In short, textual criticism involves the discovery and reading of Biblical manuscripts, cataloguing their contents, and collating the way their text reads in comparison to other copies of the text. The object is to produce a Greek New Testament that represents as closely as possible the original text.

What having so many manuscripts in both the Greek and other ancient languages allow textual scholars to do is to identify whole families of manuscripts and the variants perpetuated within them. That many manuscripts across more than a thousand years serves as a kind of laboratory in which it can be oberserved how and what sorts of mistakes tend to be made; for example, the scribes eye skips a line. When Bart Erhman argued in his debate with Daniel Wallace that the work of later copyists was not as good as those of an earlier period, he didn’t seem to realize he was making Wallace’s point. The question Wallace should have pressed harder than he did was: “How do you know this? How do you know the scribes from one period were better than those from another? How do you know something is a scribal gloss and doesn’t belong in the text? What forms your judgement as to how a text ought best be read? Isn’t it because you have all these manuscripts from across the centuries to analyze and compare with one another?”

Here is what I think we can say with considerable confidence about the textus receptus (the “received tex)t” of the Greek New Testament as it is: (1) The mistakes whether quite minor and inconsequential (as nearly all are), or, those mistakes that represent more serious conscious changes made by copyists, are rather easily detected. I find it amusing that the very reason someone like the agnostic Bart Ehrman can come up with textual mistakes and changes to use in challenging the integrity of the Bible, is that he knows as one professionally trained how the text ought to read. (2) There are no mistakes or textual changes that, when subjected to textual analysis in order to discover the best reading of the text, and when interpreted in the context of the New Testament as a whole, create any difficulty for consistent, coherent, and reasonable Christian thought and practice. (3) There is a high level of probability, As Daniel Wallace argued in his debate with Ehrman, that textual critics have produced a Greek New Testament that is very exact in comparison to the wording of the original autographs. In the debate to which I am referring Ehrman kept replying, “But we don’t know for certain?” He was correct of course. We don’t know for certain because we do not have the original manuscripts for comparison. But Ehrman’s reply is interesting. Notice, he never argued that we do not have a high level of probability, but that we can’t be certain. What all of this results in is not evidence that what the Bible says is true, that’s a different matter, but that the received Greek text used as the basis for translating the New Testament into any modern language is fundamentally reliable and trustworthy in its correspondence to the original manuscripts of the New Testament.

Q) I struggle with the idea that the Bible is metaphorical rather than factual. It feels like that is just a way of explaining away rather than explaining difficulties. I know that it is argued something in the Bible can be metaphorically true but factually false. I have a hard time telling whether you agree or disagree with that?

A) Well first of all, let me say I am disappointed in myself for not being clear about that. I thought I was, but maybe not. I will try to do better in responding to you here.

First of all, I think the ever-changing vocabulary of scholars and the way they make words mean something they don’t ordinarily mean make following them difficult. So, when you read the Bible has to be read figuratively or metaphorically, it does not mean metaphorical in the sense  you learned in your high school English class, rather it is frequently code for saying the events and stories which you read in the Bible are fiction, but they contain philosophical truths and helpful insights for living life.

Now, a story obviously need not be factual in order to express a true principle, moral, or deep meaning. Consider for example, Aesop’s Fables, Dostoevsky’s short stories How Much Land Does a Man Need or The Peasant Marey, the children’s fantasy Little Red Riding Hood, or Biblical parables like “The Good Samaritan,” “The Prodigal Son,” or “The Pearl of Great Price;” none of which are meant to be understood or explored as real events. They are all fictional stories communicating some bit of folk wisdom or spiritual insight. I would say that to read them metaphorically is to read them literally because it respects their genre––their metaphorical or figurative quality if you will. It is how they were meant to be read.

I doubt the Book of Jonah is about a real event. For one thing it lacks some of the elements, like oracles, characteristic of other books of prophecy; and, for another the ending is not really about Nineveh but Jonah’s bigoted attitude and self-centered values. In that narrative Nineveh comes under the inditement of God for its oppression of the poor and is urged to repent or be destroyed. But ironically, in the end Jonah is the one who lacks divine compassion and needs to repent.

There are, then, many stories in the Bible whose factuality (whether they happened in any sense) really does not matter. A fictional story or metaphor can teach true truth. However, there are other stories where whether they happened matters. and matters greatly. The process God used in creating the cosmos is immaterial, but whether God is the source of all the beauty, and goodness and earthly reality in which we are immersed matters supremely; that is, God either was or was not the agent of our creation and which of those alternatives we commit to is of ultimate significance. If the Exodus is merely a metaphor, as popular authors like Marcus Borg and Richard Rohr contend, for the human longing for liberation, then it is only of passing sentimental interests. But if the Exodus, not the Exodus imagined by Hollywood, but the Exodus of real Hebrew slaves led to freedom by Moses happened, if it was a moment in which God acted to effect real human liberation, then it was something unutterably marvelous and consequential.

Let me put it this way. Theologians and Bible scholars have long noted the Bible’s use of what is known grammatically as the indicative and imperative moods. Over time their observations led to the formulation of a profound paradigm which can be concisely stated like this: “The imperative for the person of faith always arises out of the indicative of God.” In Scripture the indicative mood states what God has done, is doing, or will do. The imperative mood is used for what we should do in response to something or someone. Even faith itself, is not so much about belief, as it is our response to what God has done in Christ. If it’s hard for you to grasp faith in that way maybe you can see it by comparing faith to love which is perhaps a little easier to understand as responsiveness, love responding to love. The imperative arises out of the indicative. The popular religion author Marcus Borg likes to argue that God does not intervene or interfere in human affairs. But if that is the case there is  no indicative, and if there is no indicative there is no imperative and we are left adrift on a rough sea without rudder, or oar, or compass.

I will say this as a final response to this question about metaphor and how it relates to factuality. Non-confessing, liberal, progressive, secular scholars, or whatever you call them, are correct in their assertion that we can become overly concerned, obsessed with factuality. What nearly every one of them fails to recognize, however, is that they are as obsessed with factuality as the most confessing, conservative, “born again” fundamentalist. If the conservative Christian is the Scripture addict, the liberal is the co-dependent. I am not saying that facts don’t matter, they do. Truth at every level matters,  but in the end I would rather live Scripture well than debate it well.