![]() Indeed, not all of the copies that “descended” from Ted’s copy would repeat the same error, because the later copyists would often catch his error from their previous knowledge of John 3:16 or recognize it as a mistake. ![]() The copies based on Ted’s copy might well retain his error, but not copies based on the copies produced by his contemporaries Fred and Jed. Suppose a copyist named Ted living in the third century made an error when copying John 3:16. After a book of the Bible was written, it was copied several times by different copyists, and their copies were copied by multiple scribes, and so on. Again, this is simply not factually correct. ![]() Some earlier English translations were based on a Latin translation, but again the Greek text continued to be copied-and all contemporary English versions are translated from the Greek, not from Latin or any other language.Īnother misconception is that whenever a scribe made an error in copying a biblical manuscript, that error was perpetuated in all future copies, so that the original wording was lost. The New Testament was translated into Latin, but it also continued to be copied in Greek right along. However, this claim misunderstands some basic facts about the biblical manuscripts.Ī common misconception is that our modern translations are “translations of translations.” People imagine that the New Testament was written in Greek, then the Greek was translated into Latin, then, say, the Latin into German, and then the German into English meanwhile, the Greek was lost. What have survived are copies of copies-a fact that many critics claim means that we cannot be confident that what we have now is a reliable reproduction of the original texts. Since the writing materials used were highly perishable (typically papyrus and later parchment and similar materials), the original documents as well as the oldest copies have not survived. The Hebrew text of the Old Testament was preserved and copied primarily by Jewish scribes, while the Greek New Testament writings were copied by Christians. The main part of that Greek translation is known as the Septuagint.Īs is well known, the books of the Bible were copied by hand until the development of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe. The Old Testament books had also been translated into Greek by the time of Jesus and the apostles. The books of the Old Testament were originally written mainly in Hebrew (with a little Aramaic) while the books of the New Testament were originally written in Greek (with an even smaller amount of Aramaic). This article will address the first question the other two questions will be answered in the next two installments of this series. But how do we know that the words that we read in the Bible accurately represent what the biblical writings originally said? There are three issues about the Bible that need to be kept distinct here: its transmission (the copying of its words in the original language from one generation to the next), its translation (rendering what the Bible says in other languages such as Spanish or English), and its canon (what books should be accepted as the word of God). Christians believe that the Bible is the word of God.
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