What we discussed so far mainly concerned the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. So whatever the “inspiration of scripture” means, it does not mean that every one of the original words were inspired and preserved by God … because we simply don’t have the original words. I devoted a chapter to this subject in the book ‘ Desire Found Me’.ĭespite hundreds of years of debates between scholars no one knows what the original text is and it is unlikely that we ever will. The way in which these source documents were altered tells a story of itself. For instance the emergence of monotheism meant that many polytheistic (the belief in many gods) portions had to be changed. What was surprising was that they differed from the Masoretic text, yet had a greater alignment to the Septuagint translation. Rather important portions were changed in the Masoretic text to support later theological developments. The Hebrew fragments that were part of this discovery were older (between 150 BC and 70 AD) than any other. At first it was thought that the Greek translators were to blame, but then the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran in 1948. What is significant is that it differs from the Masoretic text in many instances. It is older than most Hebrew source documents we have and as such made use of more ancient (and therefore more original) Hebrew documents. The Septuagint is a greek translation of the Hebrew text that was produced in Alexandria between 300 and 130 BC. For a long time it was thought that these represented the most accurate version of the Hebrew scriptures … because it just had to be … it was all we had. The version we have today was only completed around the 9th century. The Masoretic text is a collection of Hebrew manuscripts. So what manuscripts do we have? Broadly categorized these are the main collections: 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.(2) And there are more differences between these source documents than what there are words in the New Testament!(1) Some differences are insignificant mistakes like a misspelled word, but other differences completely change the meaning of a passage having deliberately been adjusted by the scribes.Įven Origen, a third century church father, had this to say about the documents at his disposal: We have a great variety of different versions of copies of copies of copies. The problem with such statements is that it gives the impression that we have the original Greek and Hebrew texts. You must have heard ministers refer to the original Greek or Hebrew while correcting what they suspect is an error in translation. Some people maintain that any apparent errors in the text are due to translation – that the originals are flawless. The original biblical manuscripts have already been destroyed … now panic! But no need to panic – that is not about to happen. You can imagine the outcry such action would cause.
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