Today we'll continue in the God Questions series answering the question, Is the Bible true? Consider: How the Bible has been copied and translated:
The Bible
was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. 99% of the OT is in Hebrew. The
second half of the book of Daniel is in Aramaic, because Daniel was living in
Babylon, and that was the trade language used there. The NT is all in Koine
Greek.
The Talmudim (Hebrew for, “students,”)
shepherded the transmission of the Torah [Old Testament] from A.D. 100 – 500.
Synagogue
scrolls had to be written on specially prepared skins of clean animals and
fastened with strings taken from clean animals. Each skin had to contain a
certain number of columns. Each column had to have between 48 and 60 lines and
be 30 letters wide. The spacing between consonants, sections and books was
precise, measured by hairs or threads. The ink had to be black and prepared
with a specific recipe. The transcriber could not deviate from the original in
any manner. No words could be written from memory. The person making the copy
had to wash his whole body before beginning and had to be in full Jewish dress.
The scribe had to reverently wipe his pen each time he wrote the word “God”
(“Elohim”), and wash his whole body before writing God’s covenant name
“Yahweh.” The Talmudim were meticulous.
The Massoretes
The
Massoretes, who oversaw the Torah from A.D. 500-900, adopted an even more
elaborate means of insuring transcriptional accuracy. They numbered the verses,
words and letters of each book and calculated the midpoint of each one. When a
scroll was complete, independent sources counted the number of words and
syllables forward, then backward, then from the middle of the text each
direction, to make sure that the exact number had been preserved. Proof reading
and revision had to be done within 30 days of a completed manuscript. Up to two
mistakes on a page could be corrected. Three mistakes on a page condemned the
whole manuscript.
These
scribes treated the text so reverently that older manuscripts were destroyed to
keep them from being misread. Prior to 1947, the oldest extant Hebrew
manuscript was from the 9th century. The discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls enabled us to check the accuracy of our current manuscripts against
ones from 100 B.C. When we compare the
100 B.C. Qumran scrolls to our 9th century manuscripts (a 1000 year
gap), we find that an amazing 95% of the texts are identical, with only minor
variations and a few discrepancies.
If the
Talmudim were meticulous, The Massoretes were MORE meticulous.
The New Testament has
24,000 manuscripts to compare, and The English Bible is
translated directly from the original languages.
Be wise today and always - know what God's Word says.
