A few years ago I preached through the series God Questions. One
of the questions was, Is the Bible true? To find a major part of the answer we must consider how
the Bible has been copied and translated. This is a longer than usual
blog but full of lots of information on the subject which I think you'll find very interesting.
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.
Know what God's Word says - and apply it to your life. Amen?
