When was the New Testament canon finalized?

The finalization of the New Testament canon occurred gradually rather than at a single moment, with significant variation across different Christian communities.

The New Testament’s textual content was completed around AD 98 when John wrote Revelation[1], but individual churches received the complete collection slowly due to the constraints of hand-copying and distribution, meaning which texts were recognized varied by location[1]. By the late second century, early church figures like Irenaeus (c. 175) were using essentially the same 27-book canon we possess today, with possible exceptions only for brief epistles like Jude and 2–3 John[1].

However, universal agreement on which books belonged in the canon remained elusive through the middle of the fourth century, with Western churches disputing Hebrews, James, and several shorter epistles, while Eastern churches used different collections altogether[2]. By the early fourth century, all twenty-seven books were tentatively considered canonical, though twenty-two were undisputed[3].

The decisive moment came in the late fourth century. In 367, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria issued his Thirty-Ninth Festal Epistle listing the twenty-seven books as canonical—not merely confirming an existing consensus but establishing a new authoritative list that was subsequently accepted by the synods of Rome (382), Hippo Regius (393), and Carthage (397)[2]. In the West, Augustine’s pronouncement in 393 effectively closed the canon[3]. The present 27-book canon surfaces definitively at the end of the fourth century and achieved near-universal acceptance by the end of the sixth century[2], though Eastern churches continued to show greater variation, with some fathers disagreeing with Athanasius’s list[3].

[1] Fred G. Zaspel, The Theology of B. B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 146.
[2] Eckhard Schnabel, “History, Theology and the Biblical Canon: An Introduction to Basic Issues,” Themelios (1995), 20:2:18.
[3] J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss the Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2006), 130.

THE CANON AND LATER TRANSLATIONS

THE CANON AND LATER TRANSLATIONS

Although it is asserted that the autographs were inspired by God, we no longer have them. (They were probably worn out by frequent use and repeated copying.) So how, then, can we trust the text we have in our modern Bibles? The trustworthiness of our Bibles today is tied into canon history and the transmission and translation of the books of the Bible.

The word “canon” means “a rule, a standard, a measuring rod.” Therefore, a book considered canonical is a book that has met certain criteria, or standards. By the time of Jesus and the apostles the thirty-nine Old Testament books were solidly accepted by Judaism as inspired by God. Jesus repeatedly referred to the Old Testament, recognizing that God himself was speaking (e.g., Matt 19:4; 22:29). To attest to the confidence the writers of the New Testament had in the Old, one need but consider that in the hundreds of quotations of Old Testament passages scattered throughout the New Testament, there is only one place where possibly an apocryphal (spurious or doubtful) Old Testament book is quoted. That single reference is in Jude 14–15, where there appears to be a similarity to the Book of Enoch 1:9, and even this is not difficult to attribute to a common oral tradition available both to the writer of the Book of Enoch and to Jude.

What of the New Testament canon? This is a fascinating story all its own, but let us move to the conclusion of the story, into the fourth century. In A.D. 367, the most orthodox theologian of the time, the great champion of biblical truth, Athanasius, sifted through all the books being circulated in the Mediterranean world purporting to be apostolic documents. His examination disclosed twenty-seven books, the ones we have today, to be God’s Word.11 Thirty years later, quite independently of Athanasius, a church council met in Carthage to discuss the problem of what books were genuinely Scripture.12 They applied four tests to the documents considered: (1) Apostolicity: Was the book the product of an apostle or a close associate of an apostle? (2) Universality: was the book widely accepted and used in the churches? (3) Contents: Did the subject matter of the book appear to be on a plan with known Scripture? (4) Inspiration: Did the book bear the special quality that speaks of divine inspiration? Note that three of the four tests to which the books were subjected were objective, a matter of factual evidence. Only the fourth, the matter of inspiration, could be considered subjective, a matter of personal judgment. The Council of Carthage, after considering the facts, concluded that the twenty-seven books we now have in our New Testament were the only books in circulation at that time that measured up to the criteria established. For all practical purposes, the question of canon was closed until the advent of modern rationalism.

The other question remaining about the trustworthiness of the Bible is the accuracy of the transmission of the text. Inspiration extends only to the autograph; no case is made for the inspiration of any particular translation (version) of the Bible. You may ask, Just how nearly does my Bible conform to the original documents inspired by God?

Let us look first at the New Testament, which is nearer to us in time than the Old Testament text. Most remarkable is that there are over 5,300 ancient hand-written copies (manuscripts) of the New Testament in the original Greek. Some come from the third and fourth centuries. One fragment of the Gospel of John comes from about A.D. 125, within 30 years of the time it was written. This is in contrast to other ancient writings. The oldest manuscript we have of Virgil comes from about 350 years after his death. The oldest of Horace is from 900 years after his death. Most of the manuscripts of Plato come from 1,300 years after his death.13 Sir Frederic Kenyon, noted biblical scholar, speaking of modern discoveries in biblical archeology, said, “They have established, with a wealth of evidence which no other work of ancient literature can even approach, the substantial authenticity and integrity of the text of the Bible as we now possess it.”14

The Old Testament text has had a dramatic breakthrough in this century. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, manuscripts of all or part of every Old Testament book except Esther have been uncovered. They come from as early as 250 B.C., taking us back 1000 years earlier than the previous best manuscripts available in the Hebrew text. In fact, probably the most important contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the light cast on the text of the Old Testament books. The net result is that we are given massive reassurance of the accuracy of our Bibles. They make possible the comparison of a large number of texts that let us know the Old Testament “has remained virtually unchanged for the last two thousand years.”15 In fact, there is remarkable conformity of the Dead Sea documents to our present-known texts.

God’s purpose in calling Abraham and choosing Israel as His servant (Isa. 44:1) was to prepare the way to bring blessing to all the nations of the earth (Gen. 12:3; 22:18). It was important therefore that the Bible be put into the various languages of other nations. All nations need the Bible because it is the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17); it is the only means of winning spiritual victories. It is also God’s hammer, His tool to break down opposition and to build God’s building (Jer. 23:29). It is a lamp to light life’s pathway (Ps. 119:105). Even when people are blinded by sin, and the Bible seems foolish to them, such “foolishness” still gives to preaching the wise and powerful content that the Holy Spirit uses to save those who believe (1 Cor. 1:18, 21). The Bible is also necessary for the continued growth of believers. Consequently, as soon as the Church began to spread into countries where they did not speak the original Hebrew and Greek of the Bible, Christians wanted the Bible translated into their own languages.

The story of Bible versions (translations) is thrilling.16 It actually begins before the time of Jesus. As a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek became the language of trade, commerce, and education in the Middle East. The city of Alexandria in Egypt became the great center of Greek language, learning, and culture. Jews living there wanted the Old Testament in Greek. Over the period of 250 to 150 B.C. they gave the world the famous Septuagint Version.17 This version was often used by early Christians in preaching the gospel during the first generation after Pentecost. (This is indicated by New Testament usage.) At the same time the Holy Spirit directed the writers of the New Testament to write their books, not in the classical Greek used several hundred years before by the great Greek philosophers, but in the everyday Greek spoken by the common people on the street and in the marketplace.

God has always wanted His Word to be preached in the language the people actually spoke. Moses wrote the Law not in the hieroglyphics used by the scholars of Egypt but in the Hebrew spoken in the tents of Israel. Jesus preached and taught with a simplicity of language that made the common people listen to Him with delight (Mark 12:37). When the gospel spread, people naturally began to translate the Bible into their own languages. Four centuries after Christ, when neither Greek nor the old Latin was spoken any longer in the Western Roman Empire, Jerome made a new translation into the “vulgar,” or “common,” Latin spoken in his day. This version became known as the Vulgate.18

Unfortunately, the Vulgate was made the official version of Western Europe and England. Further attempts to translate the Bible were discouraged even though in time the common people did not speak Latin at all. When in A.D. 1380 Wycliffe translated the Vulgate into English, large numbers were converted to Christ. But after his death in 1384, persecution of his followers arose due to their rejection of some Roman Catholic doctrines. In 1415 a general council of the Roman Catholic Church condemned his teaching. Then in 1428 Bishop Richard Fleming had his bones dug up, burned, and the ashes thrown into a stream.19 Most of the copies of his handwritten Bible were also burned.

God, however, was working. The invention of printing made a difference. Between 1462 and 1522 at least seventeen versions and editions of the Bible appeared in German. They helped prepare the way for the Reformation under Martin Luther, which brought to the people a scriptural understanding of salvation by grace through faith. Martin Luther himself then went to the Hebrew and Greek to make a new, better translation into German. As a result of Luther’s influence, William Tyndale made the first important printed translation of the New Testament into English in 1525.20 Many copies were burned but the printing presses kept pouring out floods of Bibles. Since they could not burn all the Bibles, they arrested Tyndale and burned him at the stake. Even so, other translations soon followed. After Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, a translation known as the Bishop’s Bible became the authorized version of the English Church. It was not popular, however, and most people preferred the Geneva Bible, a version translated by English refugees who fled from Catholic persecution to Switzerland. It was this version that was brought to America by the Pilgrims and Puritans in 1620 and 1630.21

Many English leaders recognized the need for a better translation, so King James I appointed several groups of scholars to revise the Bishop’s Bible. It was an opportune time: The English language under the influence of Shakespeare and other literary giants, was at a new height. All the best English was poured into this revision, which was completed in 1611 and “authorized” by King James to be read in the churches of England; it ultimately became known as the King James Version (KJV). It was not only beautiful English; it was the English of the day. In fact, the KJV translators took pains to make the Bible more understandable to the common people than the previous English translations were. For example, they took the Israelite expression “Let the king live!” and translated it by the corresponding phrase then used in England: “God save the King!” In the New Testament, the Greek phrase meaning “Let it not be!”, or “Do not let it happen!” is very emphatic—more emphatic than a literal translation would make it, so the KJV translators substituted a phrase the people would understand: “God forbid!” They also translated the Greek word ekklēsia, meaning “assembly” (an assembly of free citizens), by the more common word “church,” though they did translate it “assembly” in three passages (Acts 19:32, 39, 41).

Translating from one language to another has its own set of problems.22 There is, for example, no one Greek word for “miracle,” but two words contain that idea (dunamis and semēion). So the KJV translators used “miracle” for both; but for variety, and to bring out other shades of meaning, they also translated them as “powers” (Heb. 6:5), “mighty works” (Matt. 11:21–23), “strength” (Rev. 10:10), “might” (Eph. 3:16), “virtue” (Luke 6:19; 8:46), “mighty deed” (2 Cor. 12:12), “sign” (John 20:30), “wonder” (Rev. 13:13), and “token” (2 Thess. 3:17). Still another problem came from the fact that both Anglicans and Puritans practiced sprinkling for water baptism, and the Greek word baptizō means “plunge under,” “dip,” “immerse.” So the KJV translators did not translate the word. Instead, they transliterated the Greek word into English letters (thereby giving us the word “baptize”). In this way they avoided a controversy that might have kept some people from reading this new version of the Bible. At other times they were overliteral. For example, they took the Greek word monogenēs apart, translating mono as “only” and genēs as “begotten.”23 However, the word in New Testament times had come to mean simply “only,” in the sense of unique, special. Hebrews 11:17 uses it of Isaac as the special, promised son, even though Abraham had another son, Ishmael. Though we become “sons” [children] of God through Christ, Jesus is God’s beloved Son in a special, unique sense that we never can be.

The richness of the Greek also is difficult to put into English. The KJV translators used one English word for a number of different Greek words. For example, they translated nine different Greek words as “abide,” twelve different ones as “bear,” five as “cast out,” thirty-one as “come,” twelve as “deliver,” fifteen as “keep,” nine as “mind,” six as “power,” six as “preach,” twelve as “think.” In each case, each Greek word represents fine shades of meaning. However, in English a great number of words would have to be used to describe the shade of meaning. This is one of the reasons commentaries and expanded or amplified translations are helpful.

In many cases, however, the KJV translators tried to bring out whatever shade of meaning is being emphasized in a particular passage.

GREEK WORD

TRANSLATIONS IN THE KJV

ekballō

“cast out” (John 6:37); “bring forth” (Matt. 12:25); “send forth” (Matt. 9:38); “send out” (James 2:25); “leave out” (Rev. 11:2)

apolutrōsis

“redemption” (Eph. 1:7); “deliverance” (Heb. 11:25)

hislastērion

“propitiation” (Rom. 3:25); “mercy seat” (Heb. 9:5)

hilaskomai

“make reconciliation” (Heb. 2:17); “be merciful” (Luke 18:13)

Amen (Heb.)

“amen” (Deut. 27:15–26; Rom. 1:25); “so be it” (Jer. 11:5); “truth” (Isa. 65:16); “verily” (Matt. 5:18)

anomia

“iniquity” (Matt. 7:23); “transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4); “unrighteousness” (2 Cor. 6:14)

hikanos

“meet” (1 Cor. 15:9); “worthy” (Matt. 3:11); “sufficient” (2 Cor. 2:16); “able” (2 Tim. 2:2); “good” (Acts 18:18); “great” (Mark 10:46)

apeitheō

“disobedient” (Romans 1:21); “unbelieving” (Acts 14:2)

agapē

“love” (John 15:9–10, 13); “charity” (1 Cor. 1–13); “feast of charity” (Jude 12); “dear” (Col. 1:13)

aiōnōn

“ages” (Col. 1:26); “the beginning of the world” (Eph. 3:9)

chrisma

“anointing” (1 John 2:27); “unction” (1 John 2:20)

sōzō

“save” (Matt. 1:21); “heal” (Acts 14:9); “whole” (Matt. 9:21); “make whole” (Matt. 9:22); “preserve” (2 Tim. 4:18)

elegchō

“reprove” (John 16:8); “rebuke” (Rev. 3:19); “convict” (John 8:9); “convince” (John 8:46); “tell [his] fault”

elpizō

“hope” (1 Pet. 1:13); “trust” (Matt. 12:21)

kairos

“season” (Mark 12:2); “time” (Matt. 13:30); “opportunity” (Gal. 6:10)

makarios

“blessed” (Matt. 5:3–11); “happy” (John 13:17)

marturia

“witness” (John 1:7); “testimony” (John 3:32–33); “record” (John 1:19); “report” (1 Tim. 3:7)

homologeō

“profess” (1 Tim. 6:12); “confess” (Matt 10:32); “promise” (Matt. 14:7); “give thanks” (Heb. 13:15)

paraklesis

“consolation” (Rom. 15:5); “exhortation” (Acts 13:15); “comfort” (Rom. 15:4); “entreaty” (2 Cor. 8:4)

Then because the Hebrew does not contain the word “have,” nor does it use many common English words, such as helping verbs or “to be” as connectives, the KJV translators added them and many other words to make the translation understandable and smooth reading in English. For example, they added the word “art” in Nathan’s words to David, “Thou art the man” (2 Sam. 12:7).24 The result was an excellent translation in the language of the people who lived in England in 1611.

At first the KJV, as a new version, was rejected by many. The clergy preached against it. One Hugh Broughton went so far as to say “that it was so poorly done that it would grieve him as long as he lived. He insisted that he would rather be tied between wild horses and torn apart than to let it go forth among the people.”25 For fifty years many continued to condemn it, but it gradually won favor because it was a superior translation. It was worthy of the place it came to have in the hearts of the people.

Unfortunately, all languages are constantly changing. We no longer speak Shakespearian English with its “thees” and “thous.” In fact, meanings of some words have changed considerably: “Let” in 1611 meant “hinder.” “Prevent” meant “precede.” “By and by” meant “immediately.” “Charger” meant “wooden platter.”

Missionaries want to get the Bible into the language the people actually speak. Believers everywhere are blessed when they read an easy-to-understand version in their own language. The world, including the English-speaking world, is a mission field today. This is the reality that has called forth new versions in modern English. Admittedly, none of them are final perfection, but all, except those put out by some of the cults, have enough truth in them for the Holy Spirit to use them to make the way of salvation clear.

Some modern versions, such as the New Berkeley Version, use a high English style that seems to be aimed at college professors instead of the average reader. In contrast, the New Century Version is aimed at a third-grade reading level. Some, such as The Good News Bible26, The Living Bible, the Phillips translation, and the New English Bible, are paraphrases, which do more interpretation than strict translation. The Phillips translation seems to catch the spirit of the Greek, however, especially in Paul’s epistles. The Revised Standard Version is fairly good in the New Testament, but the Old Testament is too subjective in the way it changes the Hebrew vowels and divides Hebrew words, so it is not useful as a study Bible. The New Revised Standard Version is an improvement over the earlier RSV. The New American Standard Bible is faithful to the original languages, but sometimes overliteral and not very readable. In between is the New International Version (NIV), which is a good translation made by Bible believers and is also very readable.27 Whichever version you choose, it is important to seek out the full meaning of the original languages (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic) using concordances, commentaries, Bible dictionaries, as well as comparing with other versions.

Reading a new translation may stimulate thinking. Comparing various translations also helps one to see the various shades of meaning that are in the Scripture. As Dr. Jack Lewis points out, “The religious problems of the world are not caused by people reading different translations; the most serious problem is that many read no translation.”28

The KJV is still a good translation and worthy of respect. Its beauty, especially in the Psalms, will probably never be surpassed. But the important thing is to get people to read the Bible. As the people read, the Holy Spirit will illuminate their hearts and minds and make the truth of God’s Word real to them. In the providence of God, the inspired words of prophets and apostles of old have been preserved for us in the most remarkable of all books, the Holy Bible.

The Bible is a miracle of God’s care. The Holy Spirit acted at the time of the first writing. This we call inspiration. He has preserved for us the text. Now, today, the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writers helps the reader and the hearer. The unregenerate is not promised this assistance, being blind to the truth of God (1 Cor. 2:14). But the believer is promised special assistance from the Holy Spirit (John 16:13–16; 1 Cor. 2:10). God wishes to speak to the reader—and His Spirit is pleased to shed light on the truth and its application to your life.

11 Everett F. Harrison, Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1982), 108.

12 Ibid.

13 Sir Frederic Kenyon, The Story of the Bible, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1964), 26.

14 Sir Frederic Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, 5th ed. rev. (London: Eeyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), 318–319.

15 Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 2d. ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1975), 12.

16 Much of the following discussion of translations is taken from Stanley M. Horton, “Perspective on Those New Translations,” Pentecostal Evangel, 11 July 1971, 6–8.

17 Gleason L. Archer, Jr., A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, rev. ed. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1981), 44.

18 Ibid., 80.

19 Jack P. Lewis, The English Bible/From KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981), 19–20; K.B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe (London: The English Universities Press, 1952), 106.

20 Ibid., 20–21.

21 However, “John Alden’s Bible, preserved in Pilgrim Hall at Plymouthm Massachusetts, is a KJV.” Ibid., 32–33. See also Christopher Anderson, The Annals of the English Bible, abridged and continued by S.I. Prime. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1849), 486.

KJV King James Version

KJV King James Version

22 One of the problems missionaries face today is that in translating from one language to another it is often difficult to find exactly equivalent words in both languages. For example, Missionary John Hall told of a problem he had while translating the Bible into the Mossi language of Africa. The Mossi people had no word for “anchor.” They were an inland people who rode horses. They tied their horses to picketing pegs, so Hall translated the first part of Heb. 6:19: “Which hope we have as a ‘picketing peg’ for the soul which cannot be rocked loose or broken.”

KJV King James Version

KJV King James Version

23 In Luke 7:12; 8:42; and 9:38, the KJV translators did use the word “only” instead of “only begotten.”

KJV King James Version

KJV King James Version

KJV King James Version

KJV King James Version

24 Many (though by no means all) of these added words, which are necessary in English, the KJV translators put in italics.

KJV King James Version

25 Lewis, English Bible, 29; cf. Hugh Broughton, A Censure of the Late Translation for Our Churches, ca. 1612 (S.T.C. 3847).

26 Today’s English Version. Some Bible versions are published under more than one name.

27 Several Assemblies of God scholars have been involved in some of the recent translations.

28 Lewis, English Bible, 366.

KJV King James Version

William W. Menzies, Bible Doctrines: A Pentecostal Perspective, ed. Stanley M. Horton (Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 1993), 28–39.

Conclusion: The Enduring and Accessible Word of God

The trustworthiness of our modern Bibles rests on a remarkably solid foundation. Through the rigorous historical process of canonization and the discovery of thousands of ancient manuscripts—including the Dead Sea Scrolls—we have massive objective evidence that the biblical text has been preserved with unparalleled accuracy.

Beyond its historical reliability, the story of the Bible is one of continued accessibility. From the Greek Septuagint to the King James Version and today’s modern English translations, the goal has always been to put God’s Word into the everyday language of the people. Because languages constantly evolve, the emergence of new translations is both necessary and a blessing, helping to capture the rich, nuanced meanings of the original Hebrew and Greek texts.

Ultimately, the specific translation you choose matters less than the act of reading it. The Bible is a miracle not just of ancient inspiration and historical preservation, but of active, present-day application. The same Holy Spirit who inspired the original writers stands ready today to illuminate the text, bridging the centuries to make God's truth real and transformative in the life of the believer.

THE INFALLIBLE RULE

THE INFALLIBLE RULE

The divine source and authority of the Scripture assure us that the Bible is also infallible, that is, incapable of error and therefore not capable of misleading, deceiving, or disappointing us. Some writers make a distinction between inerrancy (“exempt from error”) and infallibility, but they are very near synonyms. “If there is any difference in the shade of meaning between the two terms, inerrancy emphasizes the truthfulness of Scripture, while infallibility emphasizes the trustworthiness of Scripture. Such inerrancy and infallibility apply to all of Scripture and include both revelational inerrancy and factual inerrancy. It is truth (2 Sam. 7:28; Ps. 119:43, 160; John 17:17, 19; Col 1:5).”5

Humanistic unbelief is the real source of objections to the authority and infallibility of the Bible. Its arguments are not new. Ancient writers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Augustine had to combat some of them and in doing so declared their own confidence in the Scriptures. The reformers Zwingli, Calvin, and Luther also accepted the full authority of Scripture.6 Over the years unbelieving critics have made extensive lists of what they called discrepancies in the Bible, and some have claimed the Bible was indisputably in error. In 1874 J.W. Haley did a thorough study that is still worth reading.7 He classified these alleged discrepancies and found they arose from several causes:

1. A failure to read exactly what the Bible says.

2. False interpretations of the Bible, especially those which fail to take into account ancient customs and modes of speech.

3. Wrong ideas of the Bible as a whole and a failure to recognize that the Bible on occasion records the words of Satan and of evil people. For example, God told Job’s friends, “You have not spoken of me what is right” (Job 42:8). But the Bible gives a true record of what they said, even though they were wrong.

4. A failure to recognize that some accounts are condensations of what was said or done.

5. Chronological difficulties due to the fact that Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all used different systems of measuring time or dating. Even Israel and Judah sometimes differed in their methods of counting kings’ reigns.8

6. Apparent discrepancies in numbers due to the fact that some passages use round numbers, others give more exact figures, depending on the purpose of the writer.

7. In some places copyists’ errors crept into certain ancient manuscripts. A comparison of manuscripts has corrected most of these errors. (In fact, most scholars agree on what was the original reading in the vast majority of the cases.9 Furthermore, those cases where we cannot be sure do not affect the teachings of the Bible in any way.)

8. Finally, some so-called discrepancies were just a matter of a Hebrew or Greek word having more than one meaning, just as some of our English words do (e.g., compare “lead” in “lead weight” and “lead the blind”).

One after another, alleged mistakes and discrepancies have been proved false. Again and again new discoveries by archaeologists and other scholars and scientists have shown that the so-called errors were errors of the critics due to their unbelief and insufficient knowledge.10

Some who deny the infallibility of Scripture nevertheless believe the Bible has value. That is, they say it does not matter whether the history and science of the Bible are true. They say that a sinner can be saved without knowing the whole Bible or its claims to inspiration. It is true that the sinner does not need to know about the Virgin Birth, divine healing, sanctification, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the second coming of Christ in order to be saved. But once a person becomes a believer, such teachings will become the means of becoming mature in the faith (cf. Heb. 5:11 to 6:2).

For those who are troubled by what they consider the imprecision of the Bible in describing natural phenomena, they should realize that scientific language and terminology have developed only in modern times. Moreover, each science develops its own vocabulary. For example, the word “nucleus” means one thing to the biologist and quite another thing to the astrophysicist. Even ordinary words can be given new meanings by scientists. To the botanist, for example, the word “transpire” means “to give off moisture through pores (stomata).” Consequently, the Bible uses nontechnical, everyday language; we can expects its use of terms such as “sunrise” and “sunset” to be just like ours, even though we now know that it is the movement of the earth that is taking place, not that of the sun. nevertheless, when the Bible does make an authoritative, propositional statement, such as “God created the heavens and the earth,” we can be sure the Bible is infallible.

The Bible will not lead us astray. It is a wonderful revelation of God as our Creator and Redeemer; a personal God who loves us and is concerned about us; a God who has a plan, who sent His Son to die for us (1 Cor. 15:3), and who will continue to do His work until Satan is crushed, death destroyed, and a new heavens and earth established. The whole Bible shows that He is reliable, dependable, trustworthy, and that His very nature guarantees the authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of His Word.

5 Where We Stand, 7–8.

6 Ibid., 9.

7 John W. Haley, Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1988).

8 For a good discussion of this, see Edwin. R. Theile, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983).

9 R.K. Harrison and others, Biblical Criticism: Historical, Literary and Textual (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1980), 150.

10 For example, Dr. Stanley Horton heard a Harvard professor say that sevenfold lamps were not in existence in Moses’ time; therefore, the Bible was mistaken when it told of one being made and placed in the tabernacle (see Exod. 37:17–24). However, on an archaeological expedition at Dothan in 1962 with Dr. Joseph Free of Wheaton College, Dr. Horton watched workmen uncover a sevenfold lamp dating from 1400 B.C, right from the time of Moses. Stanley M. Horton, “Why the Bible is Reliable,” Pentecostal Evangel, 14 January 1973, 8–11.

William W. Menzies, Bible Doctrines: A Pentecostal Perspective, ed. Stanley M. Horton (Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 1993), 26–28.

Conclusion:

The Bible is infallible and trustworthy because it comes from God, whose nature guarantees the truth and reliability of His Word. Although critics have pointed to apparent contradictions, errors, or scientific and historical difficulties, many of these concerns result from misunderstandings, differences in language and culture, dating systems, numerical conventions, or manuscript-copying issues rather than actual errors in Scripture.

Ultimately, the Bible should be trusted not only for spiritual matters but as God’s authoritative revelation. Its teachings reveal God as Creator and Redeemer and point to His plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. Therefore, believers can confidently rely on Scripture to guide their faith and lives because God is reliable, dependable, and trustworthy, and His Word reflects those same qualities.

Question 4

 Who are the 144,000 sealed in heaven (Revelation 7)?

The text says quite specifically that this is “the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel.”

The real challenge in explaining this passage lies in the meaning of the tribes of Israel.

A common interpretation of Revelation says that this is the number of the Jewish martyrs from the Great Tribulation. The number in this case derives from the number of the tribes, twelve, multiplied by 12,000: 12 × 1,000 × 12 = 144,000.

In Bible times, 1,000 was the largest number for which there was a special word. They had no need for the word million because they knew of nothing that numerous, except perhaps grains of sand, and they were considered countless.

The Old Testament used the word thousand the way we might use million, or one of the larger words our national debt has forced on our collective consciousness.

When God told Israel that He would, “keep[ing] his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands” (Deuteronomy 7:9). He wanted them to know that His faithfulness was everlasting.

Think about it. We frequently use such words as trillions or billions as if they meant infinity or eternity. And that’s the use the Bible makes of its largest number word. When the Bible uses 1,000 in a symbolic sense, it means all there is or all there could be.

The first twelve in our equation is simple to understand. Twelve is used throughout Scripture as the number for Israel, and it comes from the twelve patriarchs. That gets us up to 12,000. We could stop there, since the text tells us there were 12,000 from each of the tribes. Many commentators do. They’re the ones who identify these as the Jewish martyrs. They do this because their larger interpretive framework views all of Revelation, after chapter 3, as relating to Israel.

I disagree. Revelation gives pretty clear indication as to its attitude toward ethnic Israel. Christ spoke to the church at Smyrna and encouraged them in the face of “the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9). This slander went beyond gossip and backbiting. It eventaully led to persecution and imprisonment. The church at Philadelphia received an even more direct statement about those who claimed to be Jews. Revelation 3:9 said they were liars.

In addition to the twelve tribes of Israel, another group of twelve figured prominently in the Bible, this time in the New Testament. That’s right. There were twelve disciples, later called apostles, who were known in the early church simply as “the Twelve.” Revelation includes the Apostles with the twelve tribes. The New Jerusalem bears the names of the tribes on its gates, and the twelve foundations bear the names of the apostles.

The New Testament doesn’t completely ignore Israel in a biological, ethnic sense. But often biological descent from the patriarchs was de-emphasized.

Paul talked about those who had Abraham for a forefather, “as pertaining to the flesh” (Romans 4:1, KJV). He talked about Israelites who were his kinsmen “according to the flesh” (Romans 9:3).

This qualifier is important in light of what Paul said in Romans 9:6–8. Paul’s intention here should be clear. Not all who are descended from Israel, that is, Israel after the flesh, are Israel. Not everyone who is Abraham’s descendant is his child. It is the children of promise, Paul said, who are Israel! He talked about the “Israel of God” at the end of Galatians (6:16), which is a particularly telling verse, because it comes at the conclusion of a book aimed at the heresy of Judaizing.

The Galatians had been told they must become observant Jews to be Christians. Paul attacked the idea in the most forceful way throughout the book. He ended by reminding them that the new creation which is in Christ was what really counted, not circumcision or uncircumcision (6:15). In other words circumcision, considered vital by Judaizers and the mark of the orthodox Jew, was irrelevant.

What mattered was that the Galatians had been made new creatures in Christ, the act that abolished the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14) and made the two one, so Paul could say that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28). After negating the importance of biological descent, Paul showed the positive side: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). He couldn’t have said it much more plainly. For many Christians the idea of the Church as spiritual Israel and heir to all the promises of God is anathema. But I am convinced that this is what the Bible teaches.

The problem with interpreting the 144,000 as Jewish martyrs lies in the assumption that Revelation uses Israel in a strictly literal sense. Those who take this literal view interpret other nations symbolically, but not Israel. Why insist that Israel must be ethnic Israel when Babylon has become Rome and then some ten-nation European super-state?

Why must Israel be ethnic Israel when so many places in the New Testament say that we are now under new terms of agreement between God and humanity. Under those terms, Israel is free to share with everyone else, but has no priority. If the Gentiles are now the seed of Abraham, and heirs according to the promise, why must we see Israel in Revelation?

In fact, there’s no hint whatsoever that the church has been removed at the beginning of Revelation. Some will argue that the call of John to come through the door into heaven is the Rapture. It takes some very inventive interpretation to make a case for that idea.

The speaker clearly identifies this vision as “what must take place after this” (Revelation 4:1). John records his observations as his own first-person-singular experiences. There’s no hint anywhere in the text that he represents the church.

Where has the church disappeared to in this book?

I suggest they haven’t disappeared at all. They make their appearance in the 144,000 of chapters 7 and 14.

We’ve established that the number is 12 × 12 × 1,000. We’ve also established that twelve is the number of Israel. Twelve times twelve is a number that signifies the perfection of itself. It stands for the perfect, ideal Israel.

That number may come from the multiplication of twelve tribes times twelve apostles. We see that combination in 21:12–14. One thousand is the number of completion. In other words, it stands for the totality of God’s people, Jew and Gentile, brought together under the banner of the Lamb in that last terrible, climactic moment when the forces of evil rise up in the violence of their death throes.

In the 144,000 we find the fulfillment of God’s eternal plan of redemption, the calling out of a people for His name, the creation of a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The number is the symbolic representation of what Paul described in Ephesians. It’s the body in which race, gender, and social status are all irrelevant (Galatians 3:28). It includes the full number of those who will be saved, set aside for protection by the seal of God. The Body of Christ, in that generation, will stand complete.

Although the nations continue to rage against Christ and His bride, they have the assurance that they have been marked with God’s seal of ownership, and that “neither death nor life, angels, nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 102–105.

Question 3

Why does the King James Version mention the Trinity in 1 John 5:8 and the newer translations don’t?

Once the canon of Scripture had been set, the history of the text seemingly should have ended. But that’s not the case. The continuing history of the biblical text comes through the pens of generations of copyists, men who laboriously hand-copied the Scriptures.

The Chinese developed moveable type in the eleventh century, but it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that it was discovered in Europe. In 1454, or thereabouts, Johann Gutenberg used his “new” invention to print the first Bible that wasn’t handwritten. Before that time, making a book was a costly, time-consuming process with immeasurable opportunity for copyists to make mistakes.

Even the Bible, which was copied carefully and reverently over the centuries, had thousands of copyists’ errors that crept into the text. Not every copyist was as accurate as the next. Some were terrible spellers. Some were inclined to drop words. Others would repeat whole lines without realizing it.

These tiny variations have given rise to a class of scholarship called textual criticism. The work of the textual critic is to compare all the existing ancient copies of the Bible and attempt to eliminate the copyists’ errors. Most of this work has had little bearing on the meaning of the text, but occasionally they have to deal with the kind of thing that happened in 1 John 5.

Modern Christians are not the first people to write notes in the margins of their Bibles. Apparently copyists through the centuries made notes of a devotional or explanatory nature in the margins of texts they were copying. The evidence of the ancient manuscripts suggests strongly that this is what happened with 1 John 5:8. Of the approximately 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, only eight contain the words “testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth.”

Of those eight manuscripts, only four contain the passage in the text itself. The other four show it as a note in the margin. What’s more, none of these can be dated earlier than A.D. 1500. Moving closer to the time the letter was written, we find that some Old Latin texts from as early as the 600s have the Trinitarian statement. Most of these texts came from North Africa, where the church was very large but was also torn by controversies over the Trinity! Perhaps the words were in the original but were deleted by someone who didn’t agree with the doctrine of the Trinity. We can never eliminate that possibility entirely, but the available evidence points in the other direction. This is the most convincing argument that this passage was a late addition to the text.

The absence of the passage from ancient Greek texts may not prove anything. But the absence of the passage from the writings of the ancient church fathers lends powerful evidence against the existence of this sentence in the original autograph. Even when the early church writers quoted 1 John 5:7–8, they quoted it without the addition. And the post-apostolic fathers who quote the verse could have used the addition to strengthen their Trinitarian position, had it existed.

The phrase does appear in several non-biblical Latin manuscripts, but even there it doesn’t make its appearance until after A.D. 600. Probably written originally as a meditation on the text of 1 John 5:7–8, it found its way into the margins of Old Latin manuscripts and eventually into the text itself.

The text used in the translation of the King James Version was one influenced by this line of Old Latin texts. More recent translations, aware of the history of the phrase, have either left it out altogether or made a note of it in the margin.

I think that’s appropriate. What began as a devotional commentary on the puzzling statement about the Spirit, the water, and the blood, has been returned to its rightful place in the margin.

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 50–52.

Question 2

There are places in the Old Testament where numbers don’t agree from one book to another. Does this mean there are mistakes in Scripture?

It’s common for writers to point to these discrepancies as proof of the Bible’s fallibility. “Aha,” they cry, “we knew the Bible was full of mistakes and here’s the proof!” Sincere believers have been troubled by these inconsistencies because a comparison of the texts will demonstrate that numbers in parallel passages do sometimes disagree.

If the question is, do our present versions of the Bible contain mistakes, I’m afraid the answer is a qualified yes. When it comes to numbers, the ancient texts have suffered a great deal. And if the ancient texts have been damaged in transmission, the modern translations can’t help but reflect that damage. I could list numerous places where numbers have gotten changed, omitted, enlarged, or shrunk. But does that mean the Bible is in error? No. Most evangelicals say that the Bible is inerrant in the original autographs. For those who think of baseball players and pop singers when they hear the word autograph, in biblical studies it refers to the original text as it came from the hand of the first writer. In other words, the book as it was first written is without error.

I’ve tried to show how the modern text of the Bible is reliable, but no one I’m aware of would argue that the NIV is inerrant. The original autograph was inerrant. The text we have today is reliable because the comparison of ancient texts and versions has shown that no copyist’s error or scribal gloss has changed the meaning of any doctrine or teaching. There are numerous places, however, where the precise reading of a particular text is uncertain.

That’s particularly true when it comes to numbers. We can’t always prove that the numbers in the original autographs were different from the numbers we have in the available manuscripts. But there’s enough evidence that numbers fared very poorly over the centuries that it is a plausible explanation for most of the variant numbers we find in the text.

For example, 1 Samuel 13:1, in the Hebrew text, reads, “Saul was [_____] years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel [_____] two years.”

You read it right. Saul’s age isn’t given in the Hebrew text. Bible translators have figured it out from the Septuagint. And the Hebrew gives the length of his reign as 2 years. We get the round number “40” from Acts 13:21. That’s a good example of numbers that have been so damaged in the transmission of the text that they have to be pieced together from other sources.

Later in the same chapter, the number of chariots used by the Philistines is given as “thirty thousand chariots, six thousand charioteers, and soldiers as numerous as the sands on the seashore” (13:5). Anyone with a smattering of mathematical sense can figure out that there were five chariots for every charioteer. Even if the Philistines had abnormally long legs, one man would have had a terrible time straddling five chariots. Since we know that the Philistines used chariots that held two men, and since the Septuagint reads three thousand chariots, most recent translations read “three thousand chariots, six thousand charioteers.”

What’s the point I’m trying to make here? Simply this. Anyone who has ever dialed a wrong number on the telephone, or has trouble remembering numbers larger than three digits, should be able to understand how easily copyists could garble numbers.

The fact that the Septuagint preserves the more plausible reading in these two cases probably points back to an earlier Hebrew text that hasn’t survived the centuries. This means that the Septuagint translator of 1 Samuel had access to a text older than the one containing the copyist’s error.

We find another example of conflicting numbers in Genesis 46:27, which says that Jacob’s household of seventy went down to Egypt. Acts 7:14 says seventy-five. The culprit here is probably the Septuagint.

By Christ’s time, this Greek translation of the Old Testament had become the accepted text of the Bible for most of the world’s Greek-speaking Jews. The problem arises out of a quotation in Acts 7:14, the part of Stephen’s sermon for which he was martyred.

To clear up this problem we need to know a little more about this powerful preacher. We first met him in Acts 6:5. A dispute had arisen in the Jerusalem church over a fund for the care for widows and orphans. The Greek-speaking believers complained that the Hebrew-speaking believers were unfairly overlooking their widows in the distribution of food. In an act of inspired wisdom, the church appointed seven men to oversee the distribution; all seven were from the Greek-speaking, or Hellenistic, community. Stephen is mentioned first in this group. Even his name, which is Greek, attests to the fact that he or his family had come from the Jewish world outside Palestine. This means that Stephen, when he preached in Acts 7, used the Greek Septuagint of the Diaspora, not the Hebrew Bible of Palestine.

The Septuagint, in its translation of Genesis 46:27, adds two sons of Manasseh, two sons of Ephraim, and one of Ephraim’s grandsons to the patriarchal census. With these five added to the list, the number in Stephen’s Bible totaled seventy-five. And so, in quoting from the Septuagint, Stephen gave the number of Jacob’s family as seventy-five.

Does that mean Acts is wrong?

Absolutely not. In fact, Acts 7:14 records Stephen’s statement with great accuracy.

I’ve grown accustomed to using the newer translations of the Bible. I preach from the NIV or NASB, I read the NIV or NEB, and I study from the NASB. But after years of that, when I quote Scripture in a sermon I almost invariably fall back into the wording of the King James. I can’t help it. That’s the version I memorized as a boy.

Knowing that Stephen was raised in the Diaspora and educated in Scriptures from the Septuagint, what version would we expect him to quote when surrounded by a potential lynch mob? If Acts 7:14 was a quotation from the Hebrew, I might be inclined to doubt its accuracy, even if it did agree with Genesis. A Greek-speaking Jew would be expected to quote from the Greek Old Testament!

Then is Genesis wrong?

Again, absolutely not. Genesis, using the list of people it does, accurately numbers seventy.

On Sunday mornings at the church I previously served, our head usher counted the congregation and entered the count in a record book. I never changed his number, but he took his count early in the service and our congregation tended to be very relaxed about the clock. Therefore, there were frequently more people when we dismissed than when he made his count.

Does that mean he had counted incorrectly? Of course it doesn’t. He counted everyone who was there when he counted. The fact that another six or seven people came after he finished counting doesn’t render his count inaccurate.

The list of family members Moses chose to count numbered seventy. The Septuagint, translated a thousand years later, took the liberty of adding members of the lines of Ephraim and Manasseh. For them, apparently it was important to extend the count to include two of the dominant tribes in later history.

While the numbers in the two books disagree, both are accurate in what they record. Moses provided us with he biological building blocks for the greatly multiplied people of Israel.

I don’t mean to imply that every number problem in the Old Testament can be dealt with simply by blaming a ham-handed stenographer. But the frequency of copyist’s error in the transmission of numbers makes it foolish to think that numerical problems in the text are proof that the Bible is riddled with errors.

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 45–48.

Question 1

How do we know there aren’t places where the Bible has been changed over the years to promote some false doctrine?

It amazes me how people who have no use for the clear teaching of the Bible like to use it for their own purposes. They either appeal to some twisted “spiritual” reading of the text or they claim that Christians or Jews have changed the text to suit their purposes.

The first method is easy to beat if we stick to the clearest possible meaning of the text as the original readers would have understood it. The second method requires a bit more work.

A special breed of Bible student has made answering that accusation their life’s work. These are the people who figured out the answer to the question about 1 John 5:7–8. Their task is tedious, technical, and trying. I could never do it. But thanks to them we can have certainty that no doctrine of Scripture has been damaged by tampering.

Textual critics compare all the available copies and track the occurrence of variations all the way back to the very earliest manuscripts. By doing this, they discover both where and when variations began to appear.

They go about their work with a few rules of the road.

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 42–43.

Erasmus may be regarded as the chief founder of modern textual and Biblical criticism

Erasmus may be regarded as the chief founder of modern textual and Biblical criticism. He must always hold an honoured place among the interpreters of Scripture. In his Paraphrases, which Luther bitterly called Paraphroneses, he endeavoured, he says, “to supply gaps, to soften the abrupt, to arrange the confused, to simplify the involved, to untie the knotty, to throw light on the obscure, to give the Roman franchise to Hebraisms … to say the same things though in another way.” It was his aim, above all, to brighten the meaning of words which had been partly deadened by familiarity, partly perverted by mistaken applications.(Dedicat. Paraphr. in Ep. ad Rom. Herder said that his Paraphrases were worth their weight in gold. Tischendorf, Lachmann, and Tregelles do justice to his merits.)

...He pointed out the strange textual phenomena of the passage about the woman taken in adultery. In his Annotations he described the general characteristics of Hellenistic Greek, and many of the peculiarities which mark the style of St. Paul. He did not deny the possibility of trivial errors and discrepancies in the sacred writers.(Annott. in Luke 22:36; John 2:19, 20, &c.) He usefully illustrates, the form into which our Lord sometimes threw His teaching. He did not confuse inspiration with supernatural infallibility in expressions and details.1 “Christ alone,” he said, “is called the Truth. He alone was free from all error.”

Frederic William Farrar, History of Interpretation (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886), 320–321.

THE GOAL OF INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

THE GOAL OF INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

For Augustine, the goal of reading and interpreting Scripture is to love God and love our neighbor. In the following excerpt from his book On Christian Teaching, Augustine says that if someone errs in his or her interpretation, yet it leads to loving God and loving neighbor, this is not a harmful interpretation. However, Augustine does instruct us to teach such a person how to interpret the Bible rightly.

Whoever … thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought. If, on the other hand, a man draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception. For there is involved in deception the intention to say what is false; and we find plenty of people who intend to deceive, but nobody who wishes to be deceived. Since, then, the man who knows practices deceit, and the ignorant man is practiced upon, it is quite clear that in any particular case the man who is deceived is a better man than he who deceives, seeing that it is better to suffer than to commit injustice. Now every man who lies commits an injustice; and if any man thinks that a lie is ever useful, he must think that injustice is sometimes useful. For no liar keeps faith in the matter about which he lies. He wishes, of course, that the man to whom he lies should place confidence in him; and yet he betrays his confidence by lying to him. Now every man who breaks faith is unjust. Either, then, injustice is sometimes useful (which is impossible), or a lie is never useful.

¶ Whoever takes another meaning out of Scripture than the writer intended, goes astray, but not through any falsehood in Scripture. Nevertheless, as I was going to say, if his mistaken interpretation tends to build up love, which is the end of the commandment, he goes astray in much the same way as a man who by mistake quits the high road, but yet reaches through the fields the same place to which the road leads. He is to be corrected, however, and to be shown how much better it is not to quit the straight road, lest, if he get into a habit of going astray, he may sometimes take cross roads, or even go in the wrong direction altogether.

¶ For if he takes up rashly a meaning which the author whom he is reading did not intend, he often falls in with other statements which he cannot harmonize with this meaning. And if he admits that these statements are true and certain, then it follows that the meaning he had put upon the former passage cannot be the true one: and so it comes to pass, one can hardly tell how, that, out of love for his own opinion, he begins to feel more angry with Scripture than he is with himself. And if he should once permit that evil to creep in, it will utterly destroy him. “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” Now faith will totter if the authority of Scripture begin to shake. And then, if faith totter, love itself will grow cold. For if a man has fallen from faith, he must necessarily also fall from love; for he cannot love what he does not believe to exist. But if he both believes and loves, then through good works, and through diligent attention to the precepts of morality, he comes to hope also that he shall attain the object of his love. And so these are the three things to which all knowledge and all prophecy are subservient: faith, hope, love.

copied from James Stuart Bell, ed., Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 1210–1211.

Early Christian Awareness of Textual Corruption

 

Early Christian Awareness of Textual Corruption: Origen, Jerome, and Tertullian on the Reliability of Biblical Manuscripts

Introduction

Long before the modern discipline of textual criticism existed, Christian writers of the second through fifth centuries were already grappling with a problem that continues to occupy scholars today: the biblical text did not arrive at any single reader in a single, stable form. Copies diverged from one another, sometimes trivially and sometimes substantively, and educated Christians noticed. Three witnesses are especially instructive because they approach the problem from different angles and for different purposes: Origen, working as an exegete and textual scholar in third-century Alexandria and Caesarea; Jerome, a century and a half later, revising the Old Latin Gospels against Greek exemplars at the request of Pope Damasus; and Tertullian, a generation before Origen, using the fact of textual dispute rhetorically in his polemic against heretical groups. Read together, these three figures show that an awareness of manuscript divergence — and a vocabulary for describing it as error, corruption, or adulteration — was present in Christian thought from a very early period, well before any organized science of textual criticism.

Origen and the Proliferation of Variant Readings

Origen's most direct statement on the subject occurs in his Commentary on Matthew (15.14), written in the mid-third century. Commenting on discrepancies he had encountered among Gospel copies, Origen observed that manuscript differences had grown considerable, and he attributed this to two distinct causes: carelessness on the part of some copyists, and an excessive willingness on the part of others to alter what they were transcribing. In a widely cited rendering of the passage, Origen states that "the differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please."

Several features of this passage are worth drawing out. First, Origen distinguishes two separate mechanisms of error — unintentional negligence and deliberate intervention — rather than treating all variation as a single undifferentiated phenomenon. This is a genuinely analytical move: he is not merely complaining that texts differ, but proposing an explanation for why they differ, which is the beginning of a diagnostic approach to variants. Second, the passage shows that Origen had actually compared manuscripts closely enough to notice patterns of addition and omission, which is corroborated elsewhere in his corpus, where he discusses specific variant readings (for instance, his preference for the place-name "Bethabara" over "Bethany" in John 1:28, argued on the grounds of manuscript and topographical evidence). Origen's complaint should therefore be read not as an isolated rhetorical flourish but as the byproduct of sustained, comparative work with Gospel exemplars — the same impulse that also produced his massive Hexapla, a six-column comparative edition of the Old Testament text.

Jerome and the Correction of the Latin Text

More than a century later, Jerome confronted a parallel but distinct problem: not merely those variations that had crept into the Greek transmission, but the far more chaotic state of the Old Latin versions circulating in the West. In his preface to the Vulgate Gospels, addressed to Pope Damasus around 383 CE, Jerome frames his task explicitly as one of adjudicating among competing copies. He tells Damasus that he has been urged to revise the old Latin version and, in his words, "to sit in judgment on the copies of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world," given that they differ from one another and someone must decide which of them agree with the Greek original.

This framing is significant for several reasons. Jerome does not treat the existing Latin copies as a single, uniform textual tradition; he treats them as a scattered, internally inconsistent body of material requiring editorial judgment. His proposed method — checking Latin copies against early Greek manuscripts rather than simply picking the most popular or most recent Latin exemplar — anticipates a core principle of later textual criticism, namely that proximity to the source language and antiquity of witness matter more than majority usage. Later tradition summarized the disorder Jerome faced by saying that there were nearly as many different readings as there were manuscript copies, a state of affairs vivid enough that it became something of a byword for the disorganization of the pre-Vulgate Latin textual tradition. Jerome's own prefaces to other biblical books extend this same self-consciousness about corruption: in his preface to Job, for example, he complains that even his revised work had been subject to a great deal of criticism, and that many readers preferred old, familiar, but faulty copies to new, corrected ones — a complaint that reveals as much about the conservatism of ancient audiences as about the state of the text itself.

Tertullian and the Rhetoric of Adulteration

Tertullian, writing in North Africa around the turn of the third century — earlier than either Origen or Jerome — approaches textual corruption from a polemical rather than an editorial standpoint. In De Praescriptione Haereticorum ("The Prescription Against Heretics"), Tertullian argues that heretical groups have no legitimate claim to interpret Scripture because they do not possess Scripture in its authentic form. He charges that such groups reject the writings that refute them, rely instead on texts they have "falsely put together," and select passages for their ambiguity. He generalizes the point with a memorable formulation: that truth is opposed just as much by a distortion of meaning as it is by an actual corruption of the text itself.

Elsewhere in the same treatise Tertullian goes further, accusing heretical interpreters of tampering with, mutilating, and altering the scriptural text outright, in contrast to the catholic (universal) church, which he claims has preserved the text without such interference. Tertullian's argument is not primarily philological — he is not comparing manuscript readings the way Origen or Jerome does — but it depends on the same underlying premise that his contemporaries and successors made explicit: that a text can exist in an authentic, original form and also in corrupted or adulterated forms, and that the difference between the two is both real and consequential. His polemical use of "corruption" and "adulteration" language shows that by his time these were already available concepts in Christian discourse, ready to be deployed rhetorically even by a writer with no direct interest in manuscript comparison for its own sake.

Synthesis: A Common Awareness Across Three Contexts

Taken together, these three figures illustrate that concern over textual corruption in early Christianity was not confined to any one genre, region, or century. Origen's concern is scholarly and diagnostic, rooted in close manuscript comparison and aimed at explaining how errors arose. Jerome's concern is editorial and practical, aimed at producing a corrected, authoritative Latin text through comparison with Greek exemplars. Tertullian's concern is polemical, using the fact of textual corruption — real or alleged — as a weapon in doctrinal dispute. Despite these different aims, all three writers share a common conceptual apparatus: they assume that an authentic or original text exists in principle, that extant copies can and do depart from it, and that such departures arise from identifiable human causes — carelessness, willful alteration, or theological motive.

This convergence is itself historically significant. It suggests that an awareness of textual instability was not a marginal or eccentric position within early Christianity but a widely shared assumption, one confident enough to be invoked in a technical commentary, an editorial preface addressed to a pope, and a polemical treatise against rival sects, without any of the three authors feeling the need to justify the basic premise that manuscripts could become corrupted over time.

Conclusion

Origen, Jerome, and Tertullian approached the problem of manuscript divergence from three different vantage points — the exegete's workbench, the editor's desk, and the polemicist's pulpit — yet each testifies independently to the same underlying reality: that by the third and fourth centuries, educated Christians were well aware that the biblical text they possessed existed in multiple, imperfectly agreeing forms, and that this variation demanded explanation, correction, or rhetorical exploitation. Their combined testimony is among the earliest evidence for what would eventually become the discipline of New Testament textual criticism, and it demonstrates that the tension between an idealized "original" text and the messy, human history of its transmission was recognized from a very early stage in Christian intellectual history.

Sources

• Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14, as discussed in Bruce M. Metzger, "Explicit References in the Works of Origen to Variant Readings in New Testament Manuscripts," in Biblical and Patristic Studies in Memory of Robert Pierce Casey (Freiburg: Herder, 1968).
• Jerome, "Preface to the Four Gospels," in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 6, trans. W. H. Fremantle (public domain).
• Jerome, "Preface to Job," in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 6 (public domain).
• Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum (The Prescription Against Heretics), chs. 17 and 38, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes (public domain).

The Church Fathers provide evidence

The Fathers provide evidence both that manuscripts differed and that copyists could introduce errors; however, they did not all describe these differences specifically as “many unintentional copying errors.”

Direct patristic evidence

• Origen complained that differences among Gospel manuscripts had become considerable, attributing them to scribal carelessness, excessive boldness in altering texts, or inadequate correction. He wrote that “the differences among the manuscripts have become great,” naming “the negligence of some copyists” among the causes.[biblequestions]
• Jerome likewise discussed divergent Latin biblical copies and undertook revision by comparison with Greek manuscripts, reflecting an awareness that transmission had produced conflicting readings.[biblequestions]
• Tertullian accused opponents of corrupting or adulterating biblical texts, showing that early Christians could distinguish a disputed textual form from what they considered the authentic one.[newadvent]

Important qualification

The Fathers’ comments establish that textual variation was already visible in antiquity, and that at least some writers blamed ordinary copying negligence. But they also attributed some variants to deliberate alteration, especially by theological opponents; Tertullian is a prominent example.[newadvent][biblequestions]

So a careful formulation would be:

Church Fathers such as Origen and Jerome recognized substantial variation among biblical manuscripts. Origen explicitly included copyists’ negligence among its causes, while other Fathers also alleged intentional textual alteration by opponents.[biblequestions][newadvent]

That is stronger historically than claiming the Fathers uniformly said that “many” variants were unintentional, since their surviving remarks address both accidental and intentional causes.

The law cannot justify anyone before God

Paul explicitly states that the law cannot justify anyone before God; instead, it functions to expose human sinfulness. (Rom 3:19–28) This distinction is fundamental to understanding his position. Jewish people pursued righteousness through the law as if it were the path to acceptance with God, but they pursued it through works rather than through faith. (Rom 9:30–32)

The law itself was never designed as a mechanism for salvation. If the law could impart life, then righteousness would come through observing it. (Gal 3:19–25) But the law served as a guardian until Christ arrived, at which point believers would be justified through faith rather than legal observance. (Gal 3:19–25) All people—both Jews and Gentiles—are justified freely by God’s grace through Christ’s redemption, received by faith. (Rom 3:19–28)

Works of the law refers to all that is commanded in the law, with the phrase naturally designating the entire law and all commands or deeds it requires.[1] While some scholars emphasize Gentile inclusion, Paul’s fundamental complaint against the Jewish people centers on their failure to keep the law they treasured and taught.[2]

What is the law? The law reveals what sin is—without it, people would lack awareness of transgression. (Rom 7:7–13) The law addresses those under it to silence every defense and hold all humanity accountable before God. (Rom 3:19–28) Though the law was powerless to accomplish righteousness due to human weakness, God fulfilled its righteous requirements through Christ’s sacrifice, so that believers might live according to the Spirit rather than the flesh. (Rom 8:3–4)

[1] Thomas R. Schreiner, “Another Look At The New Perspective,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology Volume 14, ed. Stephen J. Wellum (2010), 14:3:7.
[2] Thomas R. Schreiner, “Justification apart from and by Works: At the Final Judgment Works Will Confirmjustification,” in Four Views on the Role of Works at the Final Judgment, ed. Alan P. Stanley and Stanley N. Gundry, Zondervan Counterpoints Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 75.

Textual variants emerged early in Christian manuscript transmission

Textual variants emerged early in Christian manuscript transmission, with evidence appearing both in the earliest period and throughout the patristic era.

Early Church Period

During the church’s earliest centuries, individual Christians produced biblical manuscripts for personal use or local congregations. As Christian numbers expanded rapidly, demand for copies increased, and production speed sometimes compromised accuracy.[1] This pattern of higher error rates in earlier manuscripts continued through the mid-fourth century.[1]

Beyond unintentional copying errors, second-century Church Fathers complained about deliberate textual alterations made by heretics, and evidence suggests such persons produced numerous copies incorporating their changes during the second century and possibly earlier.[2] In some instances, theological commitment apparently outweighed fidelity to the original text.[2]

Patristic Evidence

The Church Fathers themselves provide substantial witness to textual variation. Patristic quotations of the New Testament exceed one million instances—so extensive that they could reconstruct nearly the entire New Testament if all other sources vanished.[3] Some Fathers date to the late first century, with an expanding stream of writings through the thirteenth century, making them extraordinarily valuable for determining original wording.[3]

However, some Fathers quoted the same passage differently due to carelessness, memory lapses, use of different manuscripts, or paraphrasing rather than direct quotation.[3] Occasionally, patristic writers themselves discussed textual variants, noting which manuscripts contained particular readings.[3] For instance, Eusebius in the early fourth century observed that accurate Mark manuscripts concluded with “they were afraid,” noting this ending appeared in nearly all copies.[3]

Scope and Significance

Spelling differences account for roughly 75 percent of all variants—between 225,000 and 300,000 instances.[1] Only about 1 percent of variations involve textual meaning.[1] Despite meaningful variants existing, no crucial Christian doctrine remains in doubt after two centuries of textual criticism.[1]

[1] Josh McDowell and Jim Walker, Understanding Islam and Christianity: Beliefs That Separate Us and How to Talk About Them (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2013), 217–218.
[2] Wilbur Pickering, Identity of the New Testament Text (Clube de Autores, 2024), 190.
[3] Daniel B. Wallace, “Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” in The Concise Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021). [See here, here, here, here, here.]