Lecture 3: The Transmission of Scripture: From Their Pens to Our Hands

The lecture, section by section

1. The questions the church avoids

   How do we know the Bible is the same as when it was written? Did scribes ever make mistakes? Why do our Bibles carry footnotes saying that many manuscripts do not contain these verses, as at the end of Mark? The teachers observe that skeptics and seekers ask these questions constantly while churches rarely touch them, and the cost is real: students raised without the facts hear them for the first time in a secular classroom and abandon a faith that was resting on a picture no one had ever presented accurately. The teachers refuse that path. The evidence belongs to every Christian, not just to seminaries, and the session promises that anyone who follows it to the end will leave more confident in the Bible in their hands, not less.

2. The basic facts of transmission

   The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew, with portions of Daniel and Ezra in Aramaic, across roughly 1500 to 400 BC; the New Testament in Koine, the common Greek, in the first century. No original manuscript of any biblical book survives; the original writing is called the autograph, and none exist for either testament. Everything was copied by hand until the printing press, on stone, papyrus, and parchment, with the codex, the first form of the book, popularized between the second and fourth centuries, probably invented by Christians for the Scriptures themselves. Manuscripts wore out and survived best in dry climates like Egypt, and copying was brutal labor: transcribing the whole Bible could take a scribe a year of full-time work.

3. Textual criticism and the number that frightens people

   Textual criticism is the science of reconstructing the original text of the Scriptures from the available manuscript evidence, the same discipline applied to Plato and every other ancient author. And here is the number: across the six thousand or so Greek New Testament manuscripts discovered, over three hundred thousand variants, places where one manuscript differs from another, have been cataloged. The teachers put it on the screen deliberately, because the number sounds devastating only when no one explains it. Two questions must be kept separate: whether what John originally wrote was without error, a later session’s question, and whether what John wrote is what our Bibles contain, which is this session’s question. The King James Only position, which insists there must be one inerrant text to hold, is examined and set aside: every translation committee in history has worked from multiple manuscripts.

4. What the variants actually are

   Ninety-nine percent of the variants make no theological difference whatsoever: a movable nu, the Greek counterpart of an English a versus an, a dropped article, Jesus Christ for Christ Jesus. Each counts as a variant. And of the one percent that do bear on meaning, none affects any major doctrine: the deity of Christ does not rest on a variant, the second coming does not rest on a variant, nothing essential does. Ancient writing had no punctuation and no spaces between words, and language itself kept developing, so differences accumulated the way English readers would disagree over where the commas go.

5. Unintentional errors: the honest slips

   Scribes worked by flickering candlelight on bumpy papyrus and flawed animal skins, sometimes taking dictation in groups so one reading could yield six copies. The predictable slips have names. Mistaken letters: the Hebrew daleth and resh differ by one small stroke, the jot and tittle of Jesus’ saying, and the Greek theta and omicron by a single bar. Homophony: words that sound alike, as in Romans 5:1, where one letter decides between we have peace with God and let us have peace with God; the critics settle it from Paul’s own flow of thought, since Romans commands nothing until chapter 12, and every major Bible prints we have. Dittography writes a letter or word twice; fusion misdivides unspaced letters, as GODISNOWHERE splits either direction until context decides; homoioteleuton skips everything between two similar endings; metathesis reverses order. Most are easy to spot and easy to repair.

6. Three scribes: the intentional changes

   The more interesting variants were made on purpose, by scribes with different philosophies and no bad motives. The teachers cast the class: one scribe is meticulous, copying word for word and preserving every difficulty; another modernizes, rendering thought for thought in the idiom of his people; a third is the expert commentator who cannot resist an amen in the margin, whose handwriting literally grows larger as the story he loves approaches. All three loved the text; the copyist’s life bred an intimacy with Scripture that few readers today possess. But the textual critic prizes the meticulous copy, because the other two philosophies, however devout, layer the text with smoothing, updating, and comment that later generations must peel back.

7. Modernizations and harmonizations

   Some changes update language: Genesis 47 names the city of Rameses in a narrative set before that name existed, possibly a scribe supplying the current name of an old place, as a birth certificate can say Vancouver for a place once incorporated under another name; Joshua’s renamed Canaanite cities show the same habit. Others harmonize: the inscription over the cross reads differently in Luke 23 and John 19, and some scribes, uneasy with the difference, conformed one Gospel to the other. This yields a working rule: the harder reading is usually the best, because a faithful scribe smooths difficulties but does not create them. A second rule follows: the shorter reading is usually the best, because texts grew thicker with pious additions, not thinner.

8. Making the text more orthodox: 1 John 5 and the Lord’s Prayer

   Scribes in the middle of doctrinal battles sometimes sharpened the text’s clarity. The King James reads in 1 John 5 of three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, the clearest Trinity proof-text imaginable; the earlier manuscripts read simply of the Spirit, the water, and the blood. The fuller reading appears only late, so the critic must go with the earlier, less explicit text, even though the doctrine itself stands secure elsewhere. Liturgical habit worked the same way: the doxology closing the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, is absent from the earliest manuscripts and bracketed in most modern Bibles; a scribe whose church had always prayed it, whose father and grandfather had prayed it, could hardly believe it was not original. The addition teaches nothing false. It simply was not what Matthew wrote.

9. The ending of Mark

   The most significant variant in the New Testament, in the teachers’ judgment, is the long ending of Mark 16. The earliest manuscripts end at verse 8, with the women fleeing the tomb, saying nothing to anyone, because they were afraid; the familiar twelve further verses, with the snake-handling and poison-drinking promises, appear in none of the early copies, exist alongside several other rival endings, and are written in Greek that is decidedly not Mark’s style. A later scribe who knew how the story ended apparently could not bear the abrupt close and filled in the blanks from the other Gospels, adding along the way a line tying baptism to salvation that reflects his church’s practice more than the apostles’ teaching. Whole hill-country churches have been built on handling serpents from a passage that was never part of Mark. The teachers also note in passing that red letters are an interpretive device of modern printing, found in no manuscript: it is the text, not the ink color, that is inspired.

10. The rules, and how the text families formed

    The working principles gather up: prefer the shorter reading, prefer the harder reading, weigh a variant’s earliness, weigh its geographic spread, and count manuscripts only insofar as they are early and widespread. That last point explains the King James: it rests on the Textus Receptus, the Byzantine text type represented by the majority of manuscripts, most from around the ninth century, while the smaller number of earlier manuscripts, largely Alexandrian, read shorter. History made the families: after the fire of Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, believers and their books scattered, and copies in Egypt descended from Egypt’s exemplars while copies in the Byzantine east descended from others, the streams rarely mixing again. The critic’s work is tracing the streams back toward their common source.

11. The Old Testament: Leningrad and the Dead Sea

    For the Old Testament, the anchors are few and strong. The Masoretes, scribal families active from roughly 500 to 1000 AD, copied under famously meticulous rules: clean-animal parchment only, a fixed range of lines to the page, no word ever written from memory. Their Ben Asher manuscripts include the Cairo Codex, the Aleppo Codex, and above all the Leningrad Codex, the very text printed in the Hebrew Bible sold today. The Septuagint, the Greek translation made between about 300 and 150 BC for Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt, and the Targums, later Aramaic paraphrases, add secondary witness. Then came the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s: portions of every Old Testament book except Esther, including a complete Isaiah scroll from around 135 BC. Set beside the Leningrad Codex’s Isaiah, a thousand years younger, the two are virtually identical, word for word. One discovery pushed confidence in the Masoretic text back a millennium and showed how carefully the people of the one Book had kept it.

12. The New Testament: an embarrassment of riches

    For the New Testament the problem is the opposite of scarcity. Three streams of evidence converge: the Greek manuscripts themselves, headed by the John Rylands papyrus, P52, a fragment of John dated to about AD 125, within a generation of the writing, whose discovery burned up the dissertations claiming John was a late second-century work; the great codices, Sinaiticus, found at the foot of Mount Sinai and containing the whole New Testament, with Vaticanus and Alexandrinus beside it; the quotations of the early church fathers, so extensive that nearly the whole New Testament could be reconstructed from them alone; and the early translations. Altogether about twenty-five thousand handwritten copies survive. As the teachers put it, we have more Bible than was originally there, and criticism’s task is weeding down to the original, which is why the answer to do we have the inerrant text can be yes.

13. The verdict of comparison

    Set the New Testament beside the rest of antiquity and the case closes itself. Caesar’s Gallic Wars survives in ten copies with a thousand-year gap to the earliest; Pliny the Younger in seven copies across seven hundred fifty years; Plato, on whom much of Western thought rests, in seven manuscripts. The New Testament: some twenty-five thousand copies, with a gap of about twenty-five years to its earliest fragment. Informed critics of Christianity attack elsewhere; no serious scholar argues that we do not know what the biblical authors wrote, and Christians should never let themselves be backed into a corner on the ground where their evidence is strongest. One last move completes the circle: once the New Testament’s text is established, Christ’s own confidence in the Scriptures of his day carries the Old Testament with it.

1. The teachers argue that hiding the manuscript facts from believers sets them up for a fall, and that faith should rest on evidence honestly presented. Where has your own confidence in Scripture rested until now, and what changes when you can name the evidence yourself?

2. The scribes who added the doxology or the long ending of Mark were acting from love and long habit, not malice. What does their story teach about how tradition quietly grows, and how do you weigh reverence for what is familiar against fidelity to what is original?

3. The lecture claims we are more certain of what John wrote than of what Plato wrote, yet no university says so. How would you explain the twenty-five-year gap and the twenty-five thousand copies to a skeptical friend without overstating or understating the case?