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In this episode Trent rebuts a viral video that casts doubt on the Bible because of variants in ancient manuscripts.
Narrator: Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. In today’s video, I’ll be addressing Trey the Explainer’s video 10 Changes Made to the Bible Part One. Before we get started though, if you want to help us create more rebuttals like this, then please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, let’s jump into this video. I’m definitely interested in looking at this, even though Trey himself is not an expert in this area, as you’ll see.
The video is highly viewed on YouTube. It’s got over a million views. When I look at different videos to rebut and engage, one of the things I really look for is, has an error reached a lot of people? And if it has, then I feel like there’s more of a motivation on my part to step in to do something about that. Let’s do that right now.
Trey the Explainer: When I was a kid in my non-denominational southern church, yes, I was brought up Christian, I was taught the doctrine of biblical inerrancy or the belief that the Bible is without error or fault in all of its teachings. I was taught that the Bible was the unchanged and preserved word of God. In essence, it means that the books, verses, and words of the Bible haven’t been changed or altered since they were written down around 2,000 years ago for the New Testament texts, such as the gospels, or even older for the Old Testament books, such as Genesis.
I always assumed because nobody told me otherwise that we had some old physical copies of the Bible written by Moses or Jesus’ disciples or someone of biblical importance in modern English, mind you, lying around somewhere that all our modern copies are completely without change or alteration when compared to these ancient original texts. The Holy Book has remained constant since the beginning of time. Every word, every comma, every period has remained the same with the help of God himself.
Trent Horn: While some Christians might believe this about the Bible, they’re incorrect. When it comes to error in scripture, the church teaches that, “Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of the scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.” The church teaches that scripture is free from error, but that protection only extends to the original manuscripts that were written by the Bible’s human authors.
Pope Leo III said in 1893, “It is true, no doubt, that copyists have made mistakes in the text of the Bible. This question when it arises should be carefully considered on its merits.” According to Catholic Bible scholar Brant Pitre, the Catholic doctrine of inerrancy does not mean that subsequent manuscripts of sacred scripture are somehow preserved from any textual errors, omissions, or alterations. The teaching that the Bible is without error only applies to what the authors of scripture asserted in their original writings.
Unfortunately, we don’t have those original writings anymore, but we do have copies, thousands of copies, that allow us to compare all these different copies in order to find out what the original said. I cover a lot of this in my other video, How the Bible Beats Every Other Ancient Book, so I’ll link to that below. But basically I show in that video that while we might have only a few dozen or even one ancient copy of a non-biblical work like the Annals of Tacitus, for example, we have thousands of copies of the New Testament and even more witnesses of the text from the writings of the Church Fathers who quoted ancient manuscripts that no longer exist, but the words in those manuscripts still exist in the writings of the fathers.
According to the Agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, “So extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the texts of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” The basic fact is that if we accept that the ancient books we read today like the Odyssey or Plato’s Republic are basically the same text that was written thousands of years ago, then we should have far more confidence in the textual transmission of the Bible because we have way more manuscripts for the Bible for scholars to compare in order to reconstruct the original text.
But it is true that some texts in scripture are unclear, but none of these unclear textual variants throw any doctrine of the faith into jeopardy. Instead, the variants that come up when the Bible was copied, they include things like this, like Jesus saying in Matthew 11:23 that Capernaum will be brought down to Hades. While in other manuscripts, Jesus says Capernaum will be driven down to Hades. In some manuscripts, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:4, “I thank God always for you.” And in other manuscripts he says, “I thank my God always for you.”
Nearly all these variants involve very minor issues, but it is true that a few variants, which we’ll discuss in this video and hopefully in part two, contain longer passages. But even these examples, they don’t threaten any doctrine that the church teaches. But I just wanted to make this point right now to acknowledge that yes, there are variants in biblical manuscripts, but that does not keep us from knowing essentially what the original text of scripture did say.
Trey the Explainer: It was only much later that I learned that in truth, what I was taught in church was somewhat misleading, if not wholly inaccurate, and the actual history of the Bible itself is far more complicated. Few Christians, besides those that go to seminary school, even get a chance to learn about the histories and intricacies surrounding the ancient texts that make up the most important book in human history. For instance, because I’m stupid, I guess, it took me until my teens to learn that the Bible was originally not written in English. Duh! I’m not alone though. Many a US congressman have made the same mistake.
Trent Horn: I haven’t found any evidence that a representative in Congress thought the Bible was originally written in English. In fact, I’ve only heard the claim that the Bible was written in English as a joke among the radical sect of the King James only community. These are people who say that the 1611 King James Bible isn’t just a good translation, they think that it was actually inspired by God and it’s the only form of the word of God that exists today. The only reference I found to a representative saying this is a claim is about former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and current Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of which PolitiFact labeled as false.
Regarding Greene, PolitiFact said the following. “We didn’t discover it in any of her public statements, in either of her Twitter feeds @RepMTG and @MtgGreenee or in ProPublica’s Politwoops database of deleted tweets by public officials.” Another version of this quote has been attributed to former Texas Governor Miriam Ma Ferguson. Some iteration has been around since 1881 when The New York Times reported that a preacher commenting on a new translation of the Bible told a joke that ended like this. What’s the matter with the good old King James version? The farmer replied, “That was good enough for St. Paul and it’s good enough for me.”
We rate this post false. I wanted to note this because right now the most popular comment under the original video says, “It’s very difficult, for me at least, that there are American congressmen who believe that the first Bible was written in English. That’s extreme ignorance.” What’s ironic, of course, is that it is the comment in Trey’s original video that actually displays immense ignorance about what typical Christians believe concerning the Bible.
Trey the Explainer: The original New Testament was written in Greek, which was then translated into Latin by The Vulgate and/or into English by the Tyndale Bible or King James Bible by later Christian scribes in the Middle Ages and later. This is made even more curious when one acknowledges that Jesus’ sayings would’ve been spoken in Aramaic, the common language in Judea at that time, not Greek, which means our modern Bible is at best a translation of a translation. And in some circumstances, a translation of a translation of a translation of what Jesus originally would’ve said, from Aramaic to Greek to Latin or English. I digress.
Trent Horn: First, the translation chain is oversimplified in this description because it forgets about things like the ancient Eastern translations of the Bible, like the Peshitta that translated the Bible into Syriac. It also makes it seem like modern scholars don’t work with the original Greek or Hebrew text, which, of course, they do. In fact, we have discovered new manuscripts that help us translate passages that weren’t translated as well in the King James version or even the Latin Vulgate. Second, Jesus may have preached in Greek especially when he visited Greek speaking Gentile regions of Israel such as the Decapolis or Galilee of the Gentiles.
Finally, translations of translations don’t automatically mean you have no idea what the original said. You could translate my video, this video, into a dozen different languages in a row and still understand nearly all of the ideas I was communicating. But in the case of the Bible, we’re not even doing that. Modern scholars work with the original languages of the biblical text. And even if those languages like Greek were translations of say Aramaic, that did not stop the authors from accurately rendering what Jesus said. In some cases, they simply include the Aramaic that Jesus spoke if they want extra clarity, such as when Jesus cried out an Aramaic on the cross.
Trey the Explainer: What if I told you that our modern Bible has been changed, and that the Bible of 2,000 years ago is different than the Bible that survives today? Would you believe me?
Trent Horn: Once again, the differences are minor, not major. None of them undermine the claim that certain Christian doctrines come from Jesus and the apostles. According to the New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, “Only about a 10th of 1% of textual variants are interesting enough to make their way into footnotes in most English translations. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that no orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording. There are always undisputed passages one can consult that teach the same truths.”
Tellingly, in the appendix to the paperback edition of Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman himself concedes that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. It is too bad that this admission appears in an appendix and comes only after repeated criticism.
Trey the Explainer: Well, you don’t have to because this is no secret. Even Christian and Jewish scholars will acknowledge this fact. Again, something you don’t typically learn in church is that unlike in my childhood dream, there is not some thousands of years old master copy of the Bible under lock and key in the Vatican or Library of Congress. In truth, the Bible and the books it contains today, the Gospel of Matthew or Exodus, are based on copies upon copies upon copies of more ancient texts, until you get to the now lost “originals.”
Trent Horn: Why do you need to say quote, unquote? They’re just the originals. What’s amazing is that I bet when Trey watches a documentary about Ancient Egypt or Ancient Greece, he doesn’t have this skeptical attitude when scholars talk about what those “original” sources said, even though the originals no longer exist. This is just an example of applying a different standard to the Bible than we do to other ancient documents.
Trey the Explainer: It may be best to illustrate this concept by example. This is a clear oversimplification of the truth, by the way. It’s not really a simple linear path of descent, but you get the idea. The Bible you might find placed in a dirty motel nightstand is a Gideon’s Bible, named after a Christian organization that tries to distribute as many copies of this Bible as possible across the world. Now, these bibles are often in the ESV or English Standard Version published in 2001. They have been rendered into modern English to best suit a 21st century audience.
The ESV is itself a translation of the Revised Standard Version of 1952, which is itself a revision of the American Standard Version of 1901, which is a translation of the English Revised Version of the late 1800s, which is finally a revision of the King James Version published in 1611. The King James version of the Bible is the granddaddy to pretty much all later English translations.
Trent Horn: This is incredibly bad. It makes it seem like when modern scholars translate the Bible, they only read other modern translations or even the King James Version and not the original texts. In fact, we have complete copies of the New Testament dating from the fourth century in the form of the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus. Here is a clip from a video showing the translators who worked on the ESV Bible debating how to translate a controversial word like slave.
Speaker 1: The question before us today is the translation of the word slave in the Bible.
Speaker 2: There’s three main Hebrew words to be considered. Eved is the most general broad term that’s typically rendered servant and sometimes slave. Then for women who are in servitude, typically shivka and ama are your standard terms and they don’t all have to be handled the same way.
Trent Horn: Notice that the translators don’t just read the RSV or the King James Bible to decide what the ESV should say. They go back to the original sources and use things like lexicons, which are special kinds of dictionaries, to find out what these words meant in their original context.
Trey the Explainer: You might be noticing that there is a huge gap between 1611 and 33 AD when Jesus supposedly died. Where exactly did the King James Bible come from? Well, the King James used several sources for its translation. For the Old Testament, it used a translation into English of the Greek Masoretic Text or MT, primarily copied, edited, and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. The oldest surviving copy of one of these texts dated to around the 9th century.
Trent Horn: Currently, the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible is the Codex Leningrad, a medieval bound copy of the Old Testament housed, as its name would suggest, in the city of Leningrad or what’s now called St. Petersburg in Russia. Now, it’s been dated to the early 11th century and it’s believed to come from a group of Jews called the Masoretes. These were Jews who really diligently copied and preserved Old Testament manuscripts between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. These scribes had a reputation for painstaking accuracy, but the opportunity to test their accuracy didn’t present itself until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the middle of the 20th century.
Here’s what happened. In 1946, three shepherd boys were throwing rocks into caves near the site of Qumran. This is an area near the Dead Sea in Southern Israel. They heard something shatter after they threw the rocks. The boys discovered these jars that contained writings, they didn’t know this, but they had writings from the 1st century BC. Scholars eventually determined that these writings include apocryphal works and also collections from the Hebrew Bible. Textual critics now had the opportunity to compare portions of the Hebrew Bible written 1,000 years before the Codex Leningrad with these medieval Jewish manuscripts from the Masoretes, the Masoretic Text.
The results were extraordinary, in that very little of the text had changed and what did change was minor. For example, of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, that’s the chapter of Isaiah that’s very important, it talks about Jesus being the suffering servant, the prophecy of the Messiah, only 17 characters in the modern manuscript differed from the Hebrew original written 1,000 years earlier in the first century. These differences only related to spelling and minor conventions that didn’t change the text’s meaning.
Now, Trey goes on to say there are all these different manuscript traditions as if to sow doubt. But I’m not going to go through all of that because he ends up saying things that undermines the very doubt that he’s trying to sell.
Trey the Explainer: For hundreds of years, archeologists have been uncovering older versions of the Bible buried in ancient houses or in caves dated all the way back to the 1st century AD and BC. For instance, we have the Codex Vaticanus or B written and Greek sometime around the 300 AD and kept in the Vatican Library since at least the 15th century. It is one of the oldest copies of the Bible in its recognizable form. Codex Sinaiticus, written around 330 to 360 AD, is held today in the British Library in London. We have fragmentary documents of Aquila of Sinope’s translation of the Bible written in the 2nd century. Even older copies of individual books as opposed to complete Bibles can be found even further back.
Papyrus 66 discovered in Egypt and dated to around 200 AD is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of ancient manuscripts, provided some of the oldest and extensive copies of the Old Testament. Although all these documents and manuscripts are mere copies of originals, they nonetheless are valuable to us. Scholars have uncovered literally hundreds of different copies of texts from the Bible, and what they have discovered about these texts is that when compared with one another, say Papyrus 75 with Codex Vaticanus or the MT with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the texts generally read the same, if not near exactly in most places. But in others, they vary.
They can be different in minor and even major ways. How do we know the Bible has been changed? These areas of alteration or change between biblical copies are called textual variants.
Trent Horn: Notice he mentions the existence of ancient manuscripts, which as I’ve said before in other videos, we have far more ancient manuscripts for the Bible than we do for any other work of antiquity. He says the texts read the same or are even identical. He then says there are differences, some of which are major. Okay, let’s see if he’s right.
Trey the Explainer: Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to cataloging the work of biblical scholars and identifying these points of variation. Almost every text we discover, there appears to be dozens of differences when it is compared with others. These changes likely occur during copying of older versions of the text tracing back to the originals. A monk or scribe would manually and painstakingly copy by hand every word from one document to the newer parchment. For texts as long as the Bible, this could take weeks, if not months, if not a year of dedication.
This was the world of publishing books prior to the printing press. Some changes made by scribes are accidental or a simple use of a different word to convey the same idea.
Trent Horn: True. And as I noted earlier, many of these changes have no effect on the text meaning. In some cases, it’s a minor spelling error, or in other cases, the order of the words change, which doesn’t matter in Greek because the subject of a sentence isn’t determined entirely by where you put it in a sentence, but on which word is used or what grammatical case is used. In some cases, you have Paul saying Jesus Christ, or in some manuscripts, Paul says Christ Jesus, but the meaning is the same.
Trey the Explainer: A clear example of this is the New Testament Book of Hebrews. According to most manuscripts, chapter one verse three reads like this, “Christ bears all things by the word of his power.” However, in Codex Vaticanus, the original scribe wrote a slightly different verse with a verb that sounded similar in Greek, “Christ manifests all things by the word of his power.” A minor difference, but a change nonetheless. A second scribe centuries later would read this verse in the newer replicated manuscript and decide to change the word manifests back to the more common reading bears, straight up erasing the word on the document and writing the new one in the blank space.
Even later, a third scribe would read the exact same verse on the manuscript, notice the alteration made by his predecessor, and erase bears and change it back to manifests. The scribe then proceeded to put a note written in Greek in the margin calling the altering scribe an idiot for changing the verse saying, “Fool and knave. Leave the old reading. Don’t change it,” or as a different translation puts it, “I kid you not, you look like a cuckoo.” You can still see this note in the margin to this day in one of the oldest copies of the Bible.
Trent Horn: It’s true that some scribes got cheeky in the notes they included in the manuscripts. Even modern people make mistakes when they copy documents in air conditioned, well-lit office buildings. Now, imagine a medieval scribe when he copied things under the light of an oil lantern without reading glasses and without adequate climate control. In some cases, the scribe’s ink wells would freeze along with the scribe’s fingers. And if a scribe made a mistake on a scroll, you would have to start all over again if he couldn’t correct the mistake in the margin. It’s no wonder that some scribes finish their manuscript with this line, “The end of the book. Thanks be to God.”
But what about Hebrews 1:3? In this case, the second scribe probably misheard the Greek word for manifest, pharone, and inserted the Greek word for reveals, which is phaneron. But with so many manuscripts and scribes working, these mistakes, as minor as they are, would be corrected sometimes in a rather huffy way. We should also keep in mind that it wasn’t just scribes who kept the Bible in check. The people who heard these words in church also had a say in their transmission.
According to the biblical scholar Paula Fredriksen, “When the bishop of Oea, modern Tripoli, introduced Jerome’s recent rendering of the Book of Jonah into his community service, Augustine worriedly related, the congregation nearly rioted. At issue, perhaps, was the identity of the vine under which the prophet Jonah had rested, a gourd so the traditional version or an ivy so Jerome.” The fact that people almost rioted over translating Jonah sitting under an ivy instead of a gourd shows these people probably had a lot of time on their hands. But more importantly, it shows there was a variety of safeguards in the ancient world for scribes to make sure the text was transmitted faithfully.
Multiple manuscripts and even the faithful themselves ensure that an accurate translation of the scriptures was passed down to future generations.
Trey the Explainer: And that was just one word. It illustrates that not only did copy and errors and changes exist, but they might have been abundant in the Bible’s early days when there were less qualified scribes to identify such errors. Another example of a scribal mistake can be seen in Luke 12:8-9 which typically reads, “Whoever confesses me before humans, the Son of man will confess before the angels of God, but whoever denies me before humans will deny before the angels of God.” However, in our oldest papyrus manuscript of this passage, all of verse nine is left off.
As biblical scholar Bart Ehrman says, “It is not difficult to see how the mistake was made. The scribe copied the words before the angels of God in verse eight. When his eye returned to the page, he picked up the same words in verse nine and assumed those were the words you just copied. And so he proceeded to copy verse 10, leaving out verse nine altogether.”
Trent Horn: Two common copyist errors were the dittography and the haplograph. A dittography occurs when a scribe accidentally duplicated what was already in the text. Hence, the word ditto, which is slang for again. A haplograph occurs when a scribe forgot to copy something. Luke 12:9 is a case of a scribe making haplograph, but it isn’t a big deal. I couldn’t find anyone else discussing this verse in journals about textual variants, because we have so much evidence for the verse being authentic in other sources.
There are always going to be cases of single scribes making mistakes, but the Bible never at any point depended on a single scribe getting things right, because divine revelation was transmitted through a wide community of believers in the church through written and unwritten means. Now, sometimes though, the absence of a verse or word can lead to some pretty wild readings of the text that nobody takes seriously, but it’s still very amusing. A famous example of this is a translation of Exodus 20:14 in Robert Barker and Martin Lucas’ 1631 printing of the King James Bible.
It said, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” This Bible is now called the Wicked Bible. Because most copies of it were destroyed after it was printed, only a few highly valuable specimens actually still exist today in museum collections.
Trey the Explainer: You can find hundreds of similar errors and mistakes like these throughout the text that survive to us today, but other changes as we will discuss in a second appear to have not been mere mistakes, but intentional and motivated alterations to the text. In some versions, verses, words, or entire passages have been added, subtracted, or changed beyond recognition. Scholars, both Christian, Jewish, agnostic, and atheist often agree and recognize the evidence for such intentional changes.
There are also other examples where the Greek text has said one thing, but later translators rendering the text into a different language have simply made their own versions of what the text should say to solve perceived contradictions. Other additions are just that, wholly new additions that weren’t part of the text at all. I will spend the rest of this video featuring a few of these reported changes in the histories and context associated with them.
Trent Horn: All right, let’s get down to the specific examples and see if they are as nefarious and problematic as Trey makes them out to be.
Trey the Explainer: Goliath’s height. The battle between the young King David and the giant Philistine Goliath and the Old Testament Book of Samuel is well-known and perhaps needs no introduction. The encounter is often depicted in cartoons in children’s books, a tiny boy up against a colossus. The giant as described in the English Bibles used in churches today in 1 Samuel 17:4 reads like this, “A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp, his height with six cubits and a span.” This height would by modern estimates be a little less than 10 feet tall, towering over the tallest recorded man ever, Robert Wadlow.
As stated before, this height originates in the Masoretic Text or MT written around the late first millennium AD. However, all the oldest copies of this book and verse such as the Septuagint and notably the Dead Sea Scrolls from the 1st century BC render Goliath height as a much shorter four cubits and a span or six feet nine inches, a more historically plausible and realistic height when compared to the other reading. This shorter Goliath is also confirmed by other historical non-biblical texts, such as the writings of the historian Josephus in the 1st century AD. It seems like the older four cubits and a span reading was the original text of Samuel as opposed to the six cubits and a span reading.
Christian scholar and professor J. Daniel Hayes agrees with this assessment and argues for reducing Goliath’s height in modern Bibles. The motivation for this change seems likely to have been that of a tall tale, literally in this case. Later scribes perhaps wanting to make David’s achievement of slaying a formidable opponent even more impressive, just as a fisherman is prone to exaggerate the length of his catch in retelling of his story. Over time, Goliath went from an abnormally, but yet plausible height to a monster out of mythology and legend.
Trent Horn: This is basically accurate, but once again, it’s about a minor detail in the story. It’s not about an important doctrine or even an important historical fact. I agree that Goliath was probably tall, but not a giant. This can even be seen in the biblical text, which does not use the word giant to describe Goliath. What’s interesting is that when Saul tells David he can’t fight Goliath, he doesn’t say the reason is because David is so small and Goliath is a giant. He says it’s because Goliath had been fighting since he was a youth, unlike David who hadn’t fought before. Earlier in the Book of Samuel, we find out that Saul was a tall and imposing warrior.
It says, “There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish. He had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward, he was taller than any of the people.” The text also implies that Saul was the only one who had armor that rivaled Goliath’s armor. The text in fact goes on and on not about Goliath’s size, but his powerful armor and weapons. Saul, however, had the height and the armor to go up against Goliath, but he chose not to, leaving David to be the one to do what God had prepared the king of Israel to do for his people, an act which revealed David’s true destiny to be the future king of Israel.
Trey the Explainer: Number nine, gospel titles and authors. The titles and authors given in the gospels of the New Testament read in most Bibles in large, bold texts, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of John. We as readers are led to assume, and some Bibles outright state, that these books were written by Jesus’ disciples and direct eyewitnesses to the events they described. Matthew being written by, well, Jesus’ disciple Matthew, the former tax collector. John written by John, son of Zebedee. And in the case of Mark, a man connected with Peter and Luke, named after a traveling companion mentioned by Paul in Colossians.
However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. As confirmed by early manuscripts of the documents themselves, originally these gospels were untitled and did not name any sort of author. They were written anonymously. The authors, whoever they might have been, never wrote their names, nor did they write in the first person or insert themselves into the narratives.
Trent Horn: It’s true that the texts of the gospels do not identify their author, but that’s also true of many ancient manuscripts. The works of the ancient Roman historian Tacitus, for example, don’t bear his name, but very few historians have ever questioned that Tacitus wrote the Annals of Ancient Roman history. We know Tacitus is the author of that work because other ancient writers identify him as the author. In fact, this practice goes all the way back to the 4th century where St. Augustine was demonstrating how the external confirmation of authors in the pagan world, people like Tacitus or Josephus, that process confirms the traditional authorship of the New Testament.
Augustine wrote the following reply against the heretic Faustus. He wrote, “How can we be sure of the authorship of any book if we doubt the apostolic origin of those books which are attributed to the apostles by the church which the apostles themselves founded? Anyone who denies their authorship is answered only by ridicule simply because there is a succession of testimonies to the books from the time of Hippocrates to the present day, which makes it unreasonable either now or hereafter to have any doubt on the subject.
How do we know the authorship of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, and other similar writers, but by the unbroken chain of evidence, so also with the numerous commentaries on the Ecclesiastical Books, which have no canonical authority, and yet show a desire of usefulness and a spirit of inquiry.” First, if someone wanted to write fictional literature about Jesus, we would expect him to attribute it to a famous source like St. Peter, which is exactly what happened with things like the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. But who are Mark and Luke? They’re nobody’s.
It seems more likely then that the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Luke bear these names simply because these men were the authors of those texts. Even the Gospel of Matthew seems unlikely to be a forgery, because although Matthew was an apostle, he’d been a tax collector, and so he would’ve been among the least of the apostles, certainly not one of the more famous ones. Now, the Gospel of John may seem like a good candidate for being a forgery because of John’s place among the apostles, but the fourth gospel does not explicitly say John the apostle wrote it.
If a forger was trying to gain attention for his false gospel by pretending that John the apostle wrote it, he actually did a pretty bad job of making that fact clear in the writing itself. Second, the assumption that the gospels are anonymous does not stand up to scrutiny when we compare the canonical gospels to actual anonymous Christian writings. Take for example the biblical letter to the Hebrews, which is strictly speaking anonymous. In the early church, this manuscript was speculatively attributed to a variety of authors. Origen of Alexandria even said only God knows who wrote Hebrews.
According to biblical scholar Brant Pitre, “That’s what you get with a truly anonymous book of the New Testament, actual anonymous manuscripts and actual ancient debates over who wrote it, but that’s precisely what you don’t find when it comes to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” Pitre shows in his book The Case for Jesus that unlike other anonymous works, every ancient copy of the gospel manuscripts attributes them to the same author. In his book, Pitre lists all the ancient manuscripts with their titles of the gospels and then says, “There is a striking absence of any anonymous gospel manuscripts.
That is because they don’t exist, not even one. When it comes to the titles of the gospels, not only the earliest and best manuscripts, but all of the ancient manuscripts without exception in every language attribute the four gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
Trey the Explainer: This was no secret or even something that interested early Christians. It was likely assumed at the time that these texts were not written by the disciples or by anyone who had significance in Jesus’ life. It’s actually quite obvious that the disciples hadn’t written these texts when one notes that they were written in Greek by educated Greek speakers likely outside of Israel, maybe from Greece, Asia Minor, or Egypt. Literacy in the ancient world was rare. By modern estimates at the best of times in antiquity, only about 10% or so of the population was able to read and most of these were concentrated in urban areas like cities and not in the type of areas where Jesus’ disciples might have been from.
Keep in mind, most of them were fishermen and hard laborers in the countryside. By all accounts, peasants. The ability to read is one thing. In the ancient world, it was another to be able to write and compose a literary work. Few people in the first and second centuries would’ve been able to produce something like the gospels. The few there were would’ve been from Eastern cities of the Roman Empire like Alexandria. Most scholars agree that none of the gospels were written by witnesses and more likely to have been written by urban Christians who were recording oral and written traditions, sayings, and stories about Jesus in his life passed down and compiling them in a unified text.
Trent Horn: First, Mark and Luke weren’t apostles. Luke’s gospel sounds like it was written by someone with technical training, like a physician, who Luke was, so that coheres with what we know about him. Mark’s gospel is rougher. It sounds like someone who transcribed notes and was literate, but maybe wasn’t an academic. Once again, if you were going to make up an author for your gospel, why would you pick a nobody like Mark or Luke? Finally, Matthew was a tax collector, so he was clearly able to read and write. John and the other apostles like Peter could have either hired secretaries to compose their works or they learned to write during the decades they spent preaching after they left their jobs as fishermen.
Trey the Explainer: The gospels themselves are not apologetic about this. The Gospel of Matthew is written completely in the third person using they to refer to the disciples and never we. The tax collector turned disciple Matthew was never referred to as me, but instead just him. There is zero indication in the actual text that we are supposed to be led to believe this man also wrote what we are currently reading, same thing with Luke and Mark.
Trent Horn: First, writing about one’s self and the first person when recounting an event is not universal in ancient biographies, so its absence in the gospels is not a deal breaker for the original authorship proposals for the gospels. Second, there is no one in Mark’s account for him to identify as himself. I don’t know what he’s getting at here, and the same is true of Luke. Now, Luke does use the first person we when he talks about sailing with Paul during his missionary journeys in the Acts of the Apostles, which is the sequel to Luke’s gospel. As for Matthew, other ancient authors also referred to themselves in the third person when they appear in a narrative they’re describing in their own text.
I’ll give you an example. This one comes from the Jewish historian Josephus. He was writing about how his life was spared from a group suicide pact after a failed battle against the Romans during the Jewish War. He writes, “He who had the first lot laid his neck bare to him that had the next, as supposing that the general would die among them immediately; for they thought death, if Josephus might but die with them, was sweeter than life; yet was he with another left to the last, whether we must say it happened so by chance, or whether by the providence of God.”
Trey the Explainer: The author of the Gospel of John clearly makes a distinction between himself and his informant, an unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved, who was the source of the stories and traditions he is writing down at the end of the gospel. The end of the Gospel of John reads like this. Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. This is the disciple who has testified to these things and has written them. We know that his testimony is true. Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
The anonymous author is simply stating he gathered this information for this text from an eyewitness of Jesus and that he had not met Jesus himself. The author dictated the gospel from this individual, whoever they might have been. It was only traditions made decades after the construction that tried to tie names to these untitled and anonymous texts, and the names just stuck even though there is no factual or textual basis for them and the texts themselves explicitly argue against it. To early Christians, it didn’t matter to them who the authors of these texts were.
Trent Horn: The question of the sources behind John’s gospel are complex, but there’s good evidence that it has an eyewitness connection, even if the John who wrote the gospel was not that original eyewitness. For example, there’s an ancient tradition that associates John’s gospel with a figure named John the Presbyter or John the Priest who is different from the Apostle John. Pope Benedict XVI wrote about this hypothesis saying of the Presbyter John the following, “He must have been closely connected with the apostle. Perhaps he had even been acquainted with Jesus himself. After the death of the apostle, he was identified wholly as the bearer of the latter’s heritage. And in the collective memory, the two figures were increasingly fused.”
At any rate, there seems to be grounds for scribing to Presbyter John an essential role in the definitive shaping of the gospel, though he must always have regarded himself as the trustee of the tradition he had received from the son of Zebedee. However, these recollections are not mere traditions made up decades after the fact, because archeological discoveries have confirmed many of the details in John’s gospel that come from this eyewitness testimony, things like the location of the Pool of Bethesda near the sheep gate in Jerusalem.
Modern works like Craig Blomberg’s book, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel, and Lydia McGrew’s book, The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage, also provide further evidence for John’s gospel accurately preserving an eyewitness account of Jesus’ life.
Trey the Explainer: However, later Christians wanted to bring more authenticity to the documents by making their authors direct eyewitnesses to the events they described. They would essentially take names that are mentioned in the New Testament and say, “Yeah, that guy wrote this with,” no corroborating evidence. The tradition in our modern Bibles of providing names and authors to the gospels is just not accurate to the original text. I will continue to refer to these as Mark, Luke, et cetera for the sake of brevity.
Trent Horn: This is true of later apocryphal gospels from the 2nd and 3rd centuries that are attributed to people like Peter and Philip or Mary Magdalene, but it’s not true of the canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Trey the Explainer: Number eight, women omitted. It may be a surprise to learn that one of the major divisions in early Christianity was that of the role of women in the church. We know from historical records and Christian writings that certain sects believed women should have a large involvement in the church, while other sects were more sexist, often limiting women’s rights and capabilities within the confines of the religion. For instance, preventing women to read or teach. Scribes belonging to these two sects clashed sometimes over the translations of certain verses. For example, in Roman 16, Paul lists several names and greetings to fellow Christians of the day.
In verse seven, he writes, “Salute, Andronicus and Junia, my kinsman and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles who also were in Christ before me.” Paul names Andronicus, a male name, and Junia, a female name, suggesting they are husband and wife to one another as foremost among the apostles. It is notable as it outright states women can become apostles and notably church leaders. This would support the pro women sects. Some later translators, however, rendered Junia as Junias, a masculine name, and Andronicus no longer as her husband, but as a traveling companion, just to brose supporting the sexist sects.
Whew! Try saying that a lot of times. This is strange, as although Junia was a very common name for a woman back in those days, there is absolutely no evidence in the ancient world for the name as Junias for a dude’s name. It is very clear Paul was referring to a woman in this text and acknowledging her as an apostle.
Trent Horn: Trey has conflated two things about this person. First, there is the question of whether Junia/Junias is a man or a woman. Second, there is the question of whether this person was considered an apostle. The early Church Fathers agreed Junia was a woman and didn’t have a problem identifying her as such. Attempts to render the name in a masculine form come from the Middle Ages. We have another case of a change to the Bible that is incredibly minor and well documented that we know doesn’t come from the ancient world or the Patristic Age. It’s not something believed to be part of the original text, even though the text can be read that way based on how names in the ancient world were contracted and written.
What is more disputed is the clause episēmoi en tois apostolois, which could mean Junia was well-known to the apostles but was not an apostle herself or was well-known among the apostles as an apostle. Even that reading isn’t sure because there are ancient texts that say things like Aphrodite was well-known among mortals, even though Aphrodite was a goddess, not a mortal. What’s more likely is that Junia was well-known among the group of apostles for the support she provided them because we don’t hear about her anywhere else in the New Testament, which would be odd if she were a well-known apostle herself.
But once again, this is a controversy about how to interpret this passage. The issues of about what the original text said are undisputed except for a few voices from the Middle Ages. This is not evidence that the Bible was changed as Trey had alleged at the beginning of the video.
Trey the Explainer: But still to this day, some Bibles continue to refer to Junia as a man rather than a woman. Some other manuscripts have tried to circumvent this possible pro-women leanings in other ways, rendering, “Salute, Andronicus and Junia, my kinsman and my fellow prisoners who are of note among the apostles who also were in Christ before me,” as, “Salute, Andronicus and Junia, my relatives and also greet my fellow prisoners who are foremost among the apostles.” In this version, a woman is, again, no longer an apostle, but merely a relative of Paul, changing the whole meaning of the text.
Trent Horn: The Greek word suggenes can mean a close relative or a kinsman like a fellow Jew. In this sense, it probably means kinsman, as Paul uses the word in that way four versus later. Even if Andronicus and Junia were relatives of Paul, that wouldn’t mean they weren’t apostles. This is just a minor translation issue. It has nothing to do with the question of a female apostle named Junia.
Trey the Explainer: There are dozens of other minor changes just like these that seem to have been made to reduce the role of women in the early Christian Church, prominent women become, in some versions, the wives of prominent men, instances where the wife was named before the husband were reversed in others, Priscilla and Aquila to Aquila and Priscilla. Minor and petty changes many of these may be, they reflect of movement by scribes to reduce or increase the role of women in the early church and illustrate a textual battle of sorts, and we can still see this in the early copies of the Bible that survived to us today.
Trent Horn: Trey is probably referencing this passage in Misquoting Jesus where Bart Ehrman says, “Not surprisingly, scribes occasionally took umbrage at this sequencing and reversed it so that the man was given his due by having his name mentioned first, Aquila and Priscilla rather than Priscilla and Aquila.” But without any specific examples, it’s hard to comment on this allegation. There may have been some scribes who did this, but concerning this particular example, we see that in four out of six occurrences in the New Testament when Aquila and his wife Priscilla or Prisca, as Paul calls her, when they’re mentioned, Priscilla is mentioned before her husband four times.
There is no conspiracy to try to minimize her presence in the New Testament text. Finally, the canonical gospels represent a much more positive attitude toward women than other apocryphal gospels. For example, the Gospel of Thomas, which does not have a historical connection to the Apostle Thomas, and so that’s one reason it was not accepted into the Canon of Scripture, it ends with this description of Peter and Jesus. It says this. Simon Peter said to him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males, for every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Far from being anti-woman, it was the canonical gospels that elevated the role of women in the life of the new covenant community. This sentiment was preserved by the scribes who copied the New Testament, some of whom were paid by wealthy women in the community to do this.
Trey the Explainer: Number seven, forgiveness on the cross. The Gospel of Luke recounts Jesus’ crucifixion in Jerusalem. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, the crucified have he him there, along with criminals on his right and another on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.” Jesus’ prayer, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing,” is often seen as an illustration of Jesus’ compassion and kindness towards those who are killing him, displaying forgiveness where most would seek vengeance. It’s a very nice quote and personally one of my favorites.
However, this line curiously is missing in some of the older manuscripts of Luke. The earliest Greek copy, papyrus P75, dated to about 200 AD, as well as a few other later texts completely lacks the prayer of forgiveness, reading like this. When they came to the place called The Skull, they crucified him there along with the criminals on his right, the other on his left. They divided up his clothes by casting lots. The people stood watching and the rulers even sneered at him. But the prayer exists in other copies such as the Codex Sinaiticus. This raises the question, was the prayer originally in the gospel and then removed in some versions, or was it not originally in the gospel and then added later in some versions?
Scholars are divided on this. The motivation surrounding the alteration of this verse appear very clear. In the prayer, Jesus would be formally wiping away the blame for those crucifying him, namely the Romans and Jews. Antisemitism was prevalent in certain sects of Christianity and there were some groups who blamed and persecuted the Jewish people for crucifying Jesus. These groups might have found it in their best interest to omit the line to justify their actions. Others suggest adding the line would allow the gospel to gain wider acceptance in ar Roman audience and under Roman government, who might be pleased with being explicitly absolved of Jesus’ execution.
To this day, we still don’t know and perhaps will never know which verse came first and why. Was the prayer of forgiveness originally there or not? All we know is that one of the variants is not the original and that the text has been altered at some point. Is our modern version wrong, or are the older versions incorrect? We don’t know.
Trent Horn: As much as this is a beautiful verse that demonstrates Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness, there is strong evidence it was not in the original text of Luke’s gospel. That’s why when you read this in the gospels, there is often a note that says something like ancient manuscripts omit this sentence. However, the verse is not removed from Bibles like 1 John 5:7, which we’ll get to shortly, because there’s also strong evidence in favor of it being in the original text. For example, it’s possible that some scribes removed it in order to harmonize Luke’s gospel with the other gospel reports of Jesus’ last words.
And as I noted earlier, it’s not just manuscripts that provide evidence for the New Testament. The Church Fathers also quoted ancient manuscripts, including ones that no longer exist. According to one scholar, “This passage was used by over a dozen patristic writers in the 100s, 200s and 300s.” In the 2nd century, St. Irenaeus wrote the following, “For, when inquisition shall be made for their blood, and they shall attain to glory, then all shall be confounded by Christ, who have cast a slur upon their martyrdom. And from this fact, that He exclaimed upon the cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'”
That’s coming from St. Irenaeus at the end of the 2nd century, possibly quoting a manuscript we no longer possess. The evidence can go both ways, but there are scholars, including Christian ones, who are skeptical of this verse. However, its absence from the text does not disprove Jesus’ teaching on the virtue of forgiving one’s enemies since he clearly taught that in the Sermon on the Mount. It just may be the case that this aspect of Jesus’ crucifixion was known through a different tradition in the church’s history that the Church Fathers were aware of and it was then included in future editions of Luke’s gospel.
Trey the Explainer: Number six, the Johannine Comma. The Trinity or the Christian Godhead is a central doctrine in most sects of Christianity today, which states God is one, but also three distinct beings at the same time, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. The concept is so commonplace in the religion now that some believers never learned that there was once in fact much heated and even violent and even deadly debate between Christians that believed in the Trinity and those that did not. If one reads carefully, the doctrine is never explicitly stated in the New Testament and was thus not solidified in the canon, nor believed by all Christians for centuries.
Trent Horn: What does he mean solidified in the canon? The canon is a list of what books are inspired. It isn’t a list of what doctrines are true. I have no idea what he means. Yes, there were Trinitarian controversies in the early church which necessitated the calling of ecumenical councils to resolve them, but it’s not the case that the church was evenly divided on the concept. There were many people who fell for things like the Arian heresy. But at the Council of Nicaea, 316 bishops voted in favor of the traditional view of Christ being equal in divinity with the Father and only two bishops abstained from the vote.
It’s true that the doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly described in the Bible, but the church authoritatively recognizes it is taught in scripture, which is evident in the biblical teaching that there is one God and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each distinct divine persons. When you apprehend those truths, the doctrine of the Trinity would follow. It would be entailed. That doctrine does not depend in any way on the part of 1 John 5:7 called the Johannine Comma that nearly all scholars agree was not a part of the original manuscript of 1 John.
Trey the Explainer: One of the few verses in the New Testament that outright state the doctrine of the Trinity appears in chapter five verse seven and eight of the First Epistle of John reading in the King James Bible as, “There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit in the water, in the blood, and these three agree in one.” That particular statement, “There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one,” has come under question by modern biblical scholars.
It does not appear in any of our oldest manuscripts of this text. All of these instead read like this, “For there are three that testify, the Spirit, and the water. And the blood, and the three are in agreement, or there are three witness bearers, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood.” Even early Christians that believed in the Trinity such as Clement of Alexandria when quoting this particular verse did not include the extra words the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost.
The extra words have been given the name the Johannine Comma by modern scholars and is overwhelmingly understood to be an addition to the original version of 1 John, first appearing in the Latin Vulgate after the 9th century and in Greek manuscripts in the 15th century. In all older manuscripts, the Comma is completely absent.
Trent Horn: A few minor points, but the earliest Greek version was in the 13th century in a Greek version of the Acts of the Fourth Lateran Council. The earliest reference in a Latin manuscript is from the 4th century Liber Apologeticus, but its absence from all other manuscripts does count seriously against the Comma being an original part of 1 John. What probably happened as we’ll get to shortly is that this comment was part of a marginal gloss or a note from a copyist to provide commentary on the text. Another copyist then mistakenly added it into the text.
But Catholics have connected this verse to the Trinity even before the introduction of the Comma or the extra part that was added later, probably from a marginal note. In the 3rd century, St. Cyprian may have referenced 1 John 5:7 when he says, “The Lord says I and the Father are one,” and again it is written, “Of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.”
Trey the Explainer: The Comma seems to have originated as a marginal note in some Latin manuscripts during the Middle Ages similar to the one we see in the Codex Vaticanus, that one scribe calling the other an idiot. However, over time, the marginal note was either accidentally or intentionally incorporated into the actual text of the Vulgate. These altered texts of the Vulgate were then translated back into Greek, which then served as the basis for the English King James Versions.
It is now widely recognized that the Johannine Comma, one of the only examples where the Trinity is explicitly stated in the Bible, was not a part of the original text of 1 John and since the late 1800s have perhaps correctly been omitted in future versions of the Bible. Check what your Bible says and see if it has kept the Johannine Comma or removed it.
Trent Horn: What’s interesting is that even during the late Middle Ages when the Comma was widely attested in biblical manuscripts, theologians didn’t consider it a solid proof text for the Trinity. In Galiza and Reeve’s study on the Johannine Comma, they write, “Take for example Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, who both had to infuse the passage with Trinitarian meaning even when the inclusion of the Comma was well attested in the biblical tradition of their time. On the other hand, Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza, who eventually accepted the Comma with reservations, gave different explanations than the Trinitarian reading of the scholastics.
The controversial issue was the meaning of oneness in the phrase ‘these three are one.’ While Aquinas and Lombard affirmed that the text referred to ontological unity between three persons, the aforementioned theologians of the Protestant Reformation interpreted the language of unity in this passage to mean one single testimony about Jesus. Thus, on their view, it did not articulate essential sameness of the three divine beings. Therefore, they used the Comma Christologically rather than in connection with the Trinity end.” Once again, if we’re making a case that the Bible was changed, that falls flat if we mean that something which was originally in the text was changed.
This verse was not accepted in the early church, but was added later during the Medieval period. It was then later removed once the science of textual criticism showed it was not an authentic part of the first letter of St. John. But throughout all of this, nothing threatened the doctrine of the Trinity, which is attested by many other Bible verses, as well as in sacred tradition and the teachings of the ecumenical councils. It’s true no single Bible verse teaches the doctrine of the Trinity, but the Trinity can be inferred by these sources of divine revelation, which teach there is one God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are also distinct divine persons.
This has been known for a long time. In fact, on June 2nd, 1927, the Holy Office of the Catholic Church declared that Catholic biblical scholars were free to conclude that the Johannine Comma is not authentic, which is why it usually does not appear in Catholic Bibles.
Trey the Explainer: Okay, so this video is long enough already, so I think I might split it into two parts. Stay tuned for the last six changes to the Bible on our next episode.
Trent Horn: Be sure to stay tuned to this channel. I hope to address part two of Trey the Explainer’s Top 10 Changes, allegedly, Made to the Bible sometime in the near future. But just to summarize what we covered, the church teaches there have been mistakes that occurred in the copying process of the New Testament manuscripts, but nearly all of the mistakes are incredibly minor, like spelling or syntax errors, and none of them threaten major doctrines of the faith. Thank you guys so much and I just hope you have a very blessed day.
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