What is textual criticism? Is the text of the Bible reliable? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 44

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Hello, and welcome to the Got Questions podcast. My name is Jeff. I am the administrator of BibleRef .com,

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and I'm joined today by Kevin, who is the managing editor of GotQuestions .org. What we're going to be talking about today is an issue that some people have concerns over because it gets to the very issue of how can we trust the text that we read in the

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Bible. And this is an issue that we refer to as textual criticism. Now, criticism in this case doesn't refer to being a complaint.

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This refers to how do we take a look at the text to see what did it really originally say?

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And there's a process that we use to go through that. And this also means that part of what we're talking about are passages that may or may not be included in certain translations of the

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Bible. And what we're going to find is that as we go through and look at these, there's a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, regardless of what a person thinks about the process of textual criticism, there isn't anything as important at stake as some people might think there are.

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All of the passages that we're going to discuss don't really have any impact on major Christian doctrines, not because they don't touch on them, but because if you were to remove those from Scripture, the doctrines that we believe are correct, according to the

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Bible, are still covered in other passages. In other words, if these particular passages were not original to Scripture, we're not talking about changes in what the

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Bible actually says or what the Bible actually means. The other thing that we have to keep in mind is that absolutely none of this is new information.

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If you go back to the very earliest church fathers, there are times when they talk to each other in the first, second, third century about how one particular manuscript used this word, whereas another manuscript used this very similar but slightly different word in the same place.

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So this is nothing that Christians haven't known about for a very, very long time. Somebody comes up and tries to say, oh, look, this is something

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Christians aren't telling you, or this is something that casts doubt on the Bible. All you have to do is look at copies of the

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Bible and you'll see brackets, footnotes, and so on and so forth. So nothing we're talking about today is something that's a disguise or that's hidden or that's been concealed in any way.

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And we'll get into some of the details and the process of how that works. But I think for starters, before we get into some of the details of how textual criticism actually works, let's take a look at some of these passages that we look at that sometimes come up as a conflict.

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Kevin, I know you've got a few that you wanted to bring up specifically today. Yes. And one of them is in John 5 with the healing of the man, the invalid man at the pool of Bethesda.

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And I also want to say too here right off the bat that back when

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I was early teenage years, I was given a King James Bible, and that's what

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I was using for my devotions and all of that, just using the King James. And then later on,

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I got a new King James Bible. So I started doing all my devotional work in my new

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King James, and I was surprised to see that there were some passages that were bracketed. And I said, well, what's this all about?

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Then you read the footnote, say that there are some manuscripts in the original languages that do not contain this particular verse or this particular passage or has a different wording.

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And that used to bother me quite a bit. Well, how do we know? I have since made peace with all of this because it's actually a very good thing that we know for sure that there are some passages that may not have been original.

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And we can trace that back, and we can find out, and we can have a fair amount of certainty that something was added, something kind of was slipped in.

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And this is good to know. I'd much rather know than not know. And one of these passages is

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John chapter five, which Jesus meets this lame man at the pool of Bethesda.

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And the passage reads like this, and I'm reading out of the new

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King James, it says, there was in Jerusalem at the sheep gate a pool, which in Hebrew is called

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Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water.

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For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water. Then whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well of whatever disease he had.

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Now, a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty -eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, he knew that he already had been in that condition a long time.

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And he said to him, do you want to be made well? The sick man answered him in verse seven, sir,

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I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up. But while I am coming, another steps down before me.

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Jesus then says, rise, take up your bed and walk. Immediately the man is healed and the passage goes on.

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But the disputed passage here is a portion of this is portion of verse three and then verse four talking about how the angel went down and stirred the water at certain season.

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And without that, it reads this way. In these porches lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed.

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Now, a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty -eight years and goes on with the healing.

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And so it flows very nicely without that portion in there.

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And what probably happened was, as a scribe is copying the text by hand from one manuscript to another manuscript, making the next generation of scriptural manuscripts, this scribe gets down to verse seven, where the sick man says, while I'm coming into the water, while I'm trying to get there, somebody beats me to it.

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You know, I can't get in there first. And so the scribe scratching his head and saying, well, we shouldn't mention that without some type of an explanation for what this man was thinking.

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And so he writes it in the margin. A little note there that at a certain time, it was believed that an angel would come down and stir the water.

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Well, years pass, that manuscript is copied with the little side note, the little marginal note, and it's copied again and copied again.

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And then finally, you know, could be centuries later, a scribe takes a look at that and says, well, somebody, one of the other scribes has left this verse out.

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They just kind of squeezed it into the margin there. I'm going to just go ahead and put it into the text. And he does.

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And so what ended up, what started out as an explanation, somebody's explanation of the superstition behind this man's thinking, ended up actually in the text of scripture.

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And then it was passed down. And how we know this is that that particular verse,

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John five, verse four, is not in the earliest Greek manuscripts.

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It only starts appearing later on in the history of the manuscripts. And so it's pretty easy to see that there was a time when it wasn't there.

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Now it is there. What happened? Probably a scribe trying to be helpful and inserted that.

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I think that's a good one to start with because it represents sort of a good summary or a snapshot of how textual criticism in general works.

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When you look at that, there's some level of importance to that because it's a question of why would

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God create a situation where it's a contest between people who are suffering from handicaps to get down into the water?

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But ultimately, it doesn't really have any major influence. And as you said, this is something that the way

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God preserved the scriptures allows us to detect and to see and to notice.

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We don't have a single copy of the Bible or a sudden moment when all the copies appeared and everything prior to that was destroyed, which is the case with some faiths and their holy texts.

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What we have is a situation where we can look back and say, OK, when we go back behind a certain point, we don't see this phrase there anymore.

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And a lot of these issues that we're going to talk about when it comes to textual criticism involve exactly what you said.

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Marginal notes, footnotes, side notes, reasonable attempts to harmonize passages.

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We're not going to discuss every single one of these examples, but we know that there are cases where in Matthew, Mark, Luke, you may see a particular phrase that's used in Matthew and it's used in Mark, but Luke didn't use it.

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And in some manuscripts, a well -meaning scribe might say, oh, well, in this story, Matthew said this,

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Mark said this. So we're going to make sure that it says that in Luke as well. And again, this is something we're able to notice.

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Exactly, exactly. Now, there are a couple of different techniques that are used when we look at this, and one of those is one that you were just talking about right now, and that's looking back at the age of the manuscripts.

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So when we do textual criticism, one of the primary ways is going back and looking at earlier copies of scripture to see if that particular phrase is contained there.

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It's not the only way that we look to see which reading is original, because there will be times where you'll still have some disagreements or some questions that are in there.

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That's where textual criticism comes down to things like where were those manuscripts located?

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What was the tradition behind the manuscripts? There's even some interesting techniques.

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I'm not going to attempt to pronounce the Latin names for these. I'm relatively sure that I can, but I don't need somebody doing textual criticism on my pronunciation.

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So in short, there's a few different words and terms that are used. One of them basically just means more difficult readings are preferred.

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One of the things that means is that when we're looking at scripture and trying to decide, okay, which word did they really use?

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As an example, we've been talking about how early church fathers sometimes looked at specific words and said, which is exactly the one that's used here?

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There's a decent principle that says that it's not likely that a scribe or a copyist is going to invent something that is harder to explain, or more controversial, or more bizarre, or that's never been said before when they're copying.

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It's much more likely that a scribe would make a mistake the other way, that they would assume that something was meant to be phrased in a more conventional way.

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That's one of them. The older one is also used. Sometimes it's complicated because we have verses where there are phrases that are not used anywhere else in scripture, and it's difficult to know exactly how to square those with the rest.

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Those are issues where the writer like Paul, for example, maybe in his entire body of writing only uses a particular word once.

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That makes it a little more difficult to know exactly how that fits or where that fits. However, when we see those, we have good reason to think that that's probably original because it's not the sort of thing that a scribe is likely to just invent or to drop in there.

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One of the other things that we see is something that is called nonce words. That's not nonsense words, just nonce words.

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That fits in that same category. A nonce word is something that's basically invented for the specific purpose of that passage.

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There again, it's more reasonable for a scribe to read a word that arguably never existed before that point and say, oh,

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I think that's a mistake and copy it over with something that's more conventional. These are the sort of techniques that textual criticism involves as they go back.

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Sometimes it comes down to specific words. Sometimes it comes down to passages. Sometimes it comes down to rather large passages.

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Kevin, I'm sure you're familiar with the longer ending of Mark. That is one of the subjects that sometimes gets brought up in this whole issue.

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What are your thoughts on those last verses in Mark? Yes, well, a lot of that in Mark goes back to what you were talking about with the wording and the diction of a certain passage.

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Okay. The Apostle Paul, he did coin a lot of words. He used a lot of those nonce words in his epistles.

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But then in the end of Mark, we have kind of the strange phenomenon of the very final verses there,

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Mark 16 verses 9 through 20, containing a lot of words that are not found anywhere else in the book of Mark.

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In fact, there are 13 different words that are used in Mark in that last portion of Mark that are found nowhere else in the whole gospel.

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So are we to believe that Mark all of a sudden started using these different words at the very tail end of his gospel?

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Also, one of those would be the title, The Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus is mentioned, that particular title for Christ in the end of Mark, but it's nowhere else in the gospel.

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Mark never refers to Christ as the Lord Jesus, except in that final disputed portion of Mark 16 verses 9 through 20.

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The reference to the signs, having

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Jesus say, my followers are going to handle snakes and all these things, and nothing's going to harm them, none of the other gospels contain anything like that.

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None of the epistles do either, any kind of a promise of physical protection post

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Christ's resurrection. Christ had sent out the 70 and he'd sent out the 12 with certain special powers during his ministry.

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But after the resurrection, we don't see anything like that, except in this last portion of the book of Mark.

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So when it comes to Mark 16 verses 9 through 20, I believe that it's an addition to what

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Mark actually wrote. I think the gospel actually ends in verse 8 with the statement of amazement, that the women were amazed.

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And this fits in beautifully with the rest of the book of Mark, which features a lot of people being amazed.

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I mean, we have amazement that is mentioned in Mark's gospel in chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, 9, chapter 10, 11, 12.

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And then at the very end of the book, chapter 16, verse 5, the women are astonished.

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They're amazed. And so it's kind of a thread that runs through the book of Mark. It'd be a perfect place for him to end with the astonishment of the women at the empty tomb and the things that they had seen there.

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And then starting with verse 9 of Mark 16, it just seems like there's an abrupt switch of style, of vocabulary, and of content.

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And it just doesn't seem to fit. Personally, I do not draw things out of Mark 16 verses 9 through 20.

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That's not where I go to for my theology. I just kind of avoid that section because to me, the gospel ends in verse 8.

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And I think it's worth bringing up that what you talked about in terms of things like vocabulary and tone and everything else like that, one way to think of it would be if you were reading a handwritten letter from somebody and the last paragraph had noticeably different handwriting and a different feel to it, you would at least wonder if maybe the person who wrote that did it later or did it at a different time or maybe somebody else wrote it.

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But even more importantly, with this particular passage, this is not just people saying, you know,

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I think there's some funny words and some funny tones at the end of Mark. We're also able to say, okay, let's go back and take a look at these different manuscripts.

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And when we look at these different manuscripts, we do see those verses are not there. So it's not just one thread that's being looked at.

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It's multiple threads that we see. Sometimes these different pieces of criticism come down to a lot of different issues.

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Sometimes they just come down to something that's simple, but there's usually more than one behind what we're looking for.

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Yes. What I was speaking of was internal evidence for Mark ending at chapter 16, verse 8.

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But then as you mentioned, there are also external evidences as we take a look at the critical texts and some of the statements of the early church fathers and their use of the book of Mark.

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So we have both internal and external reasons to cast some doubt on the authenticity of that addition to Mark.

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Right. Now, I think we need to make sure that people understand that there's always been sincerity behind the attempt to come up with the most accurate representation of the original.

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Sure. But there's also a sense in which learning is still something that happens. Most of the complaints over textual criticism involve supposed differences between essentially the

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King James Bible and other modern translations. And in a nutshell, that comes down to the issue of something called the

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Textus Receptus. And without going through a long history lesson, there was a point in time where a group of people were trying to get published a compilation of the

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Greek New Testament. And when I say competition, it was a competition. If you think publishing is a cutthroat industry now, imagine doing it when books were not as common.

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So getting your information out there more quickly made a difference. And the gentleman who is responsible for creating the text on which the

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King James Bible was produced used five, six, seven different Greek manuscripts that he had access to.

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And he also used Latin translations of manuscripts and other issues to produce what we now call the

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Textus Receptus. And again, in short, that's what the King James Bible was based on.

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Well, five or six manuscripts and some Latin translations is material. Now we are working with thousands of manuscripts.

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We're working for manuscripts that go back as far as the second, third, fourth century.

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And again, to reassure people who are concerned when they hear this, we are not coming up with catastrophic differences.

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We're not coming up with doctrinal changes. We're not coming up with something serious, but we are coming up with some changes.

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One of the ones that's particularly interesting to me is the story of the adulterous woman. And that's found in most

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Bibles at the tail end of John chapter seven into the early part of eight. Now, there again, if you were to read through that and stop at verse 52 and then go right to chapter eight, verse 12, there's a very smooth flow to everything that happens there.

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When you kind of step back and look at it, the story of the adulterous woman kind of feels like somebody just grabbed it from somewhere else and dropped it in there.

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What's interesting is that a lot of scholars believe that's exactly what happened, because in a lot of manuscripts, that exact story exists, but it's in different places.

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It's in different areas of John. In some manuscripts, it's actually in the gospel of Luke.

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So this is an example of textual criticism where we have something that we have much more reason to believe is authentic.

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This is a real thing that happened. This is a real account. So for example, Kevin, when you're speaking about not wanting to go to the ending of Mark, the longer ending of Mark, looking for theology, from my perspective,

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I'm more comfortable with the adulterous woman and drawing ideas out of that than I am with Mark.

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Now, you still want to be cautious about it, but there are differences in the level of discussion.

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These are not all exactly the same thing, and they're not all in exactly the same category. Right. And I have preached from Mark chapter eight, the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman.

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I make sure that we mention that there is some question, there is some dispute, but like you,

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I feel like it is much more reliable and trustworthy than the ending of Mark.

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So I have confidence in preaching through that. Right.

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Now, I know that another one of the topics that we talk about when it comes to these passages, anyway, is 1

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John 5 verses seven and eight. This is sometimes called the Comma Johannium. The short version of that is that it seems that somebody in a well -meaning sense tacked on a very clear explanation of the

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Trinity, which is nice, but we're pretty sure that that's not what was in there.

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And it's for these different reasons that we've seen before. I think you've got some information on that too. Uh, well,

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I was, you, you just triggered something else, another passage that I was thinking of, but if you want to continue with 1

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John, that's good. But yeah, I think that with, with 1 John, one of the things that we see is basically just that it looks like it was something that was added and it's the same kind of category that we talk about with these others, which is you look at older manuscripts and you don't see it.

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I would encourage a person who is listening to or watching this to look into our information on the

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Comma Johannium and the history of how that came into the Textus Receptus and the manuscripts.

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Interestingly enough, the man who came up with the Textus Receptus, the first few editions that he made, he didn't include those words and he didn't include them for a reason.

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And then you had some information on others. Yeah. One of, one of the passages that I really like is

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Acts chapter 8 in verse 37, where Philip is talking with the Ethiopian eunuch.

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The eunuch has been reading Isaiah. He sees that Jesus is the Christ and he says, well, here's some water.

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Can I get baptized? And then Textus Receptus has this verse where Philip said, if you believe with all your heart, you may.

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And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I love that passage because it has a nice little formula there for salvation and for what you believe.

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And probably even a formula for, you know, something good to say as you're being baptized. The problem is, it is not in the earlier manuscripts.

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It's probably in addition. And again, it was probably someone who was copying the text that was being helpful and says, you know what, we're going to, we're going to insert the, the baptismal formula here.

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This is what you say when you're baptized. You know, this is the way we do it in our church. This is our tradition. So if we need to add it to the text, so good intentions, but it probably doesn't belong in the text.

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And, and I, for one, am kind of disappointed with that because I really liked that verse.

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I wish it was genuine. And, and, and it should be said also that one of the reasons that you,

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Kevin, like that is because you have a sense of the overall message of the Bible and the statement of the

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Bible. And you see reflected in that something that is true. In other words, the sentiment that's in those words is true.

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And this gets back again to what we talk about with the critical text. We're not talking about verses that, that radically change theology or pulling them out changes theology.

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Most of these are things that are already repeated or brought up elsewhere in scripture. Yes. Yeah.

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The, the, the, the thought, the theology behind Acts 8, verse 37 is taught throughout the

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New Testament. You know, you can go anywhere and find it. It's just such a nice summary statement there in this, in this one verse.

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Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I know we've covered Acts. We've covered John, 1

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John, adulterous woman, Mark. There are others. Once again, we have some information on our website that talks about some of these different places where terms may have been changed.

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Words may have been altered from older translations of the Bible to what some people would consider the modern translations.

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But we do want to reiterate that when we discuss these, nothing that we are talking about involves any aspect of primary theology.

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Everything that we need to know about God and Christ is cleanly and clearly preserved.

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Yes. In his word. We also want to reemphasize that this is a question of textual criticism, not complaint and not editing.

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This is about scholars who sincerely want to know what God's original word said, going through and looking at it.

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And we should note with emphasis that even the, the hardened critics of the gospel message, people who do not accept that what the

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Bible says is necessarily true, but who also have firsthand knowledge of the manuscript tradition, they will agree that we're talking about a very, very small proportion of scripture.

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This is not something that gets into massive percentages of the Bible. It's just very small amounts.

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Correct. Correct. So Kevin, just as a quick wrap up for you as a pastor, what would you say to somebody who's concerned when they go through the same experience you did?

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They look at a new Bible, they see brackets, they see a footnote, and now they don't know what to think. I try to encourage them to just take a look at the research.

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They're probably at that point now that they need to take a look at some of the history of the text and see how we got our

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Bible, see how the process was. But also to reassure them that we're not talking about removing truth from the

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Bible. We're talking about getting to know exactly what was in the original manuscripts and having that confidence that the word of God is eternal and is unchanging.

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It has come through some human agents in the copying process that sometimes may have slipped up, and we can know that.

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And that gives us even more confidence in what God has said. I think that's well said that God's word is not called into question when it comes to preservation or accuracy because of this process of textual criticism.

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It's actually the opposite. We're seeing that God used, in a strange sense,

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He actually used these flaws and these human errors as a way of preserving the

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Bible because He gives us so many copies and so many references and so many resources that when a human makes a human error, we're able to see that and we're able to recognize that.

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And God did really, truly preserve His word, not just in spite of our efforts, but almost using our human flaws as a mechanism that makes it clear what

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His original word was supposed to say. So again, my name is Jeff, working with BibleRef .com.

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I'm joined again by Kevin, who is our managing editor at our primary website. We hope that this has been enlightening and encouraging to you.

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We strongly encourage, if you're having any questions or doubts about what the text of the Bible says, to look into information like we have on our site and that's available elsewhere.

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This is not something that should cause anybody to doubt the inerrancy or the preservation of the truth of the

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Bible. It really should do the opposite. We have incredible confidence that what

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Scripture says is exactly what it was intended to say when it was written down.

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So, as always, we hope this conversation has been helpful to you. Please check out our other resources. And as we always say, we are