Why I Trust the Bible

Answers to Real Questions and Doubts People Have about the Bible

William D. Mounce

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780310109952
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Reference

A Clear Guide to Help Readers Understand Why They Can Trust the Bible

We are often told we can no longer assume that the Bible is trustworthy. From social media memes to popular scholarship, so many attacks have been launched on the believability of Scripture that many have serious questions about the Bible, such as:

• Did Jesus actually live?
• Did the biblical writers invent their message?
• How can we trust the gospels since they were written so long after Jesus lived?
• How can we believe a Bible that is full of internal contradictions with itself and external contradictions with science?
• Aren't the biblical manuscripts we have just copies of copies that are so corrupted they don't represent what the original authors wrote?
• Why should we believe the books that are in the Bible, since many good ones were left out, like the Gospel of Thomas?
• Why trust the Bible when there are so many contradictory translations of it?

If you find yourself unable to answer questions such as these, but wanting to, Why I Trust the Bible by eminent Bible scholar and translator William Mounce is for you. These questions and more are discussed and answered in a reasoned, definitive, and winsome way.

The truth is that the Bible is better attested and more defensible today than it ever has been. Questions about the Bible are perhaps the most significant challenge confronting Christian faith today, but they can be answered well and in a way which will lead to a deeper appreciation for the truth and ongoing relevance of the Bible.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Greek Manuscripts through the Centuries

Challenge

Don wrote me the other day about his concern over differences in the Bible. He knows that the scribes who made copies of the original New Testament documents made changes to the text. These changes bother him. If an unknown scribe could change Jesus’ reaction from being “compassionate” to being “indignant” toward the man with leprosy (Mark 1:41), why would we trust other changes, like the different endings of Mark (16:9–20) or the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11)? Don grew up as a conservative Christian with a high view of Scripture, but now he is wondering if the story of Jesus’ resurrection could be due to a scribe’s imagination.

Many people have similar concerns. One scholar emphasizes that we do not have the original writings of the New Testament—and not only that, but we don’t have “copies of the copies of the copies” of the originals. In fact, he claims there are more differences among the Greek New Testament manuscripts (about 400,000) than there are words (138,213). He also claims that the scribes of the first two to three centuries were sloppy and biased, injecting their own ideas into the text, such as Jesus’ divinity.¹

If these claims were true, they would be devastating to the Christian faith. It would do no good to talk about the historical reliability of the Gospels and canonization if the scribes so heavily altered the contents of the Bible that we couldn’t get back to the originals. Why should we think Jesus is divine if in fact the doctrine was created by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and inserted into the biblical texts?

In these three chapters, we will focus on the text of the New Testament. I am indebted to New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace, one of the leading experts in this field, for much of my understanding of textual criticism, both from his debate with Bart Ehrman and from our friendship and personal communication. If you want to go deeper into this topic, I strongly recommend you attend his thirty-five-lecture class at the Biblical Training website (biblicaltraining.org).²

Notes

1. See Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005).

2. Daniel Wallace, “Textual Criticism: The History of the Greek Text behind Modern Translations,” Biblical Training Institute, https://gk2.me/textual-criticism. For a shorter version, go to lecture 22 (“Challenges”) in the “Why We Trust Our Bible” course at the Biblical Training website, https://gk2.me/trust-wallace.

Chapter 7

ARE THE GREEK TEXTS HOPELESSLY CORRUPT?

In this chapter, we will look at the issues of the Greek manuscripts that relay the original writings throughout the centuries, the differences among them, and whether or not those differences are significant.

Nature and Significance of Textual Differences

Historical Process

Let’s start by agreeing with what is right about this challenge. It is true: we don’t have any of the original documents penned by the New Testament authors. And it’s true: all copies of the originals were made by hand, and the scribes did make mistakes, some intentionally and some unintentionally. And it is also true: there are approximately 400,000 differences among all our Greek manuscripts. And we have no manuscripts from the first and very few from the second century, and what we do have is fragmentary—a verse here and a paragraph there. So these are all true statements.

But the real question is, How are these facts significant? At first glance, they seem to create an impenetrable barrier to accepting the claims of Christianity and lead to the inevitable conclusion that the original words written by the New Testament authors have been lost forever. But with a little investigation, we can see that this barrier is not as high as we thought at first glance. I’ll begin by laying out several historical realities so the answers to the challenges will make sense.

First, let’s define a few terms. We use the term autograph to refer to the original document written by the author. In most cases, it would have been dictated and written down by an “amanuensis”—that is, a secretary. Paul used Tertius to write Romans (Rom 16:22), and Peter may have used Silas (also named Silvanus) to write 1 Peter (1 Pet 5:12). I’m convinced that Paul used Luke to write 1 Timothy and perhaps 2 Timothy and Titus.¹

As a general rule, the amanuensis would have been given some freedom as to what he wrote—word choice, grammar, style. This would explain the unusual frequency of medical imagery in 1 and 2 Timothy, since Luke was a physician. The author would have proofread the written document and, if necessary, made corrections. We also believe that in many cases a copy would have been made by the amanuensis.² One of these manuscripts would then be sent to the recipient, and the second kept as a backup.

You can imagine the church in Rome receiving Paul’s letter and then instantly desiring copies, or what we call “manuscripts” (often abbreviated “ms” or in the plural “mss” in the footnotes in your Bibles). Wealthy Christians may have wanted their own copies, or perhaps a church in another city had heard about the letter and wanted a copy (Col 4:16). In the pre-Gutenberg era (prior to 1516), all of these copies would have been made by hand. We know that some of the scribes copied one or two letters at a time; we know that other scribes copied one or two words at a time, or more. Both methods reflected the desire for accuracy on the part of the scribe. While most of the people in the first century were illiterate, unable to read or write, there were enough literate people to produce the copies needed. Most were not professional scribes who were trying to create a work of art; rather, they were trying to make accurate copies of the manuscript.

Despite their best efforts, they made mistakes. Sometimes they made an unintentional mistake, such as skipping a word or transposing letters. Other times they made intentional changes, usually for good reasons, such as correcting misspellings or poor grammar. We also know that scribes added notes to the margins, perhaps explaining a word or adding background information they were aware of. We know this happened because we can look directly at these manuscripts and see marginal notes.

The differences between the texts are called “variants.” Sometimes we talk about a manuscript having a certain “reading.” A variant is any variation among the manuscripts. This includes differences in wording (additions, omissions, changes), word order, and spelling. It doesn’t matter if a variant occurs in one manuscript or a thousand, or if a variant occurs in the second century or the tenth—it’s still counted as one variant. There are about 400,000 variants in the approximately 5,600 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. To state it another way, we have so many variants because we have so many manuscripts.

Principles of Textual Criticism

With all these variations in the text, how do we decide which of the variant readings is most likely to be original, i.e., to reflect what the author wrote? In academic circles, this field of study is called “textual criticism,” and it is extremely complex. Most of our textual critics have devoted their entire careers to the discipline. It takes dedication and intelligence to get a handle on 5,600 manuscripts and a deep knowledge of Greek and three or four other ancient languages.

One criterion textual critics use to determine what is original is external evidence, which means they look at the manuscripts as a whole, including how old they are. A manuscript that was copied in the fifth century will, by default, be more trustworthy than a manuscript copied in the eleventh century. The fifth-century manuscript was copied less than five hundred years after the writing of the original, and the eleventh-century manuscript has had an entire millennium for errors to creep into the “copies of the copies of the copies.” Of course, the manuscript (the “exemplar”) copied by the eleventh-century manuscript may be more accurate than the exemplar copied by the fifth-century manuscript, in which case the eleventh-century manuscript may be more reliable than the fifth. Examining the external evidence can get quite complicated.

To make things even more complex, we don’t always know how many copies existed between the autograph and each of these manuscripts. The manuscript from AD 300 could be a copy, or a copy of a copy, of the original, but we are virtually guaranteed that an eleventh-century manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy. However, an eighth-century manuscript could be just a copy of a copy of the original. We now know that a manuscript could survive 150 to 200 years as a norm, so how many iterations of manuscripts there were between the autograph and the manuscript we possess is unknown. As I said, textual criticism can get complicated, and textual critics have to make a lot of judgment calls.

The other criterion is internal evidence. The basic rule here is that the reading that best explains the others is more likely to be original. This is called the “harder reading.” The corollary rule is that the shorter reading tends to be preferred. Consider Mark 9:29 as an example. The disciples are unable to drive out a demon, so Jesus performs the exorcism. In private, the disciples ask him why they were not able to do so, and Jesus responds, “This kind can come out only by prayer” (NIV). But in the KJV we read, “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting” (italics added). The add...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• The Historical Jesus
• Contradictions
• The Canon
• Textual Criticism
• Translations
• The Old Testament
• Conclusion: Why I Trust the Bible
• General Bibliography