You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re having an apologetic nightmare in which people throw objections at you that you know have simple answers, yet you can’t remember what they are.
As you walk down a darkened hallway, a Mormon missionary leans out of a doorway and says, “The Bible has been translated so many times. That has to lead to errors.”
At the next doorway, Shirley MacLaine wags a finger at you and says, “The doctrine of reincarnation was struck from the Bible in the sixth century.”
Then, at the very last doorway, a director of religious education springs out at you and says, “The Gospel of John reflects the values and theological interests of the ‘Johannine community’ that gave it birth.”
“Nooooooooo!” you scream as you sit bolt upright in bed, your eyes wildly searching the darkened room for your tormenters, perspiration beading on your brow, your heart pounding in your chest and in your ears.
Then, slowly, you realize it was just a dream. With a sigh, you sink back into your pillow, relieved. All the objections do have answers. Simple answers. Obvious answers. Dare I say it—Catholic answers. And you know what they are.
As your heart slows to a normal pace, you mentally review the errors made by your tormentors.
The Mormon’s claim is absurd on its face. When confronted with Bible verses that plainly contradict Mormon teaching, Mormon missionaries have often tried to undermine the authority of the Scripture by saying that it has been translated so many times, from one language to another, that errors must have been introduced in the process and that the verse you are pointing out to them must be one such instance.
Anyone who has read the introduction to any modern Bible translation knows that this argument is poppycock. Modern Bible translations are not made from one language into another into another. They are translated directly from the original languages in which Scripture was written—Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
There may have been a time in European history when knowledge of the original languages was so limited that it was easier to make translations based on translations, but that time is long past. Has been for centuries. And today knowledge of the originals is so easy to come by that anyone who wants to can study up on them. Heck, one stop at an online bookstore can get you original-language copies of Scripture and all the books and tapes that you could want for learning how to read them.
The Mormon argument is thus up the spout: The process of translation simply has not introduced errors into biblical manuscripts. An individual translation may go awry in rendering a verse, but that can be compensated for either by consulting other translations or by consulting the original languages. Messing up an individual translation does nothing to alter the original language texts on which other translations are based.
Translation is a somewhat risky process, due to the difficulty of exactly reproducing in one language the meaning and nuances a statement has in another. But that process isn’t relevant to the handing on of the original language texts. Copying, not translation, is the process relevant to the transmission of the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. And copying is a much lower-risk process than translation.
Copying is especially low-risk when it comes to religious texts, since people tend to be very particular to see that sacred texts are copied accurately and without variation. If a scribe produced an erroneous copy, it would be destroyed immediately and a new one made. People weren’t about to use or let into circulation copies with known errors in them. The sacred texts were far too important for that.
Copying is not a risk-free process, however. Scribes can and do make errors that may not be detected at the time the copy is made. Over time, as the copies are themselves copied, this can lead to different manuscript traditions. However, this never amounts to anything significant, for several reasons:
First, the changes tend to be small ones—a misspelled word, the accidental replacement of a word with one of its synonyms, the accidental dropping or duplication of a phrase. In all the New Testament there are only two passages of any length whose authenticity is in question (the last 12 verses of Mark and the story in John 8 of the woman caught in adultery are not found in some early manuscripts). Everything else tends to be on the level of a sentence or less.
Second, nobody is making any secret of these minor differences. The footnotes of standard English translations point them out, and the footnotes of standard Greek New Testaments give great detail on what variants are found in what ancient manuscripts and manuscript traditions. It’s kind of hard to charge anybody with error or with hiding the truth when they openly note the possible variants.
Third, the science of lower criticism is devoted to establishing what the original reading of each passage was. Even those small differences that do exist in different places are often resolvable by studying the relationships among the manuscript traditions. Lower criticism therefore cuts down on the number of unresolved minor discrepancies that exist in the manuscripts.
Fourth, if push ever really came to shove and there was a pressing need to establish which manuscript readings were authentic, the Church would be able to settle it via the charism of infallibility. The differences are so minor, however, that the Church has never had to do this.
(Note: Protestant apologists, not accepting the role of the Church in adjudicating issues such as this, often say at this point that none of the manuscript differences would lead to a difference in doctrine. I am highly skeptical of this claim. I understand why they need to say this from their perspective, but it seems to me that if one were deriving one’s theology inductively from Scripture alone that some of the manuscript differences would lead to doctrinal differences, especially if Old Testament manuscript differences were considered.)
Because of these considerations, as well as the fact that copying is such a low-risk process, it is difficult to attribute accidental error in any significant degree to the copying of Scripture. If you want to make the charge that there has been any significant problem in the transmission of the original language Scriptures via copying, you’d have to charge that the problem was deliberate.
Mormons do sometimes make this charge, alleging that “many plain and precious things” were removed from Scripture at some unspecified date by some unspecified persons—who also somehow managed to arrange for the disappearance of any manuscripts to the contrary. This nebulous charge is fraught with difficulties.
It is no less difficult when made in a more concrete form by New Agers in regard to one of their pet doctrines—reincarnation. In your dream, Shirley MacLaine gave one variant of the charge of deliberate excision, which is commonplace in New Age writings. In her book, Out on a Limb, Ms. MacLaine records being taught as a New Ager that “the theory of reincarnation is recorded in the Bible. But the proper interpretations were struck from it during an Ecumenical Council meeting of the Catholic Church in Constantinople sometime around 553 A.D. [sic], called the Council of Nicea” (234–5).
Not only was there not a Council of Nicea in 553, but the two ecumenical councils of Nicea (325 and 787) took place in the city of Nicea, not Constantinople (hence their names), and neither dealt with reincarnation. What did take place in 553 was the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. But an examination of its records—which are easily available on the Internet—shows it also did not deal with the subject of reincarnation (nor did other early councils).
Besides the absurd particulars concerning when the “change” in Scripture was supposedly made, there is also this general problem: It would have been utterly impossible to “strike out” any teaching of Scripture. And it would be doubly impossible without us knowing of it.
Christians at the time were making copies of Scripture right and left. There were thousands of copies in circulation. Even today those oppressive regimes that have tried it have had difficulty rounding up all copies of particular books. It would have been impossible for anyone to gather all the copies of the New Testament and its parts, edit them to remove a particular doctrine, and then return “sanitized” copies to circulation. People would not have cooperated with such an attempt, and some copies would be missed—sitting forgotten in monasteries or buried in the desert sands. Yet no pro-reincarnation version of the New Testament has ever been discovered.
Aside from the physical impossibility of carrying out such a project, it would be impossible to keep it a secret. The early copies of the New Testament aren’t the only works we have from the patristic period. We also have the writings of the Church Fathers, and eradicating a doctrine from their writings would be just as impossible as from the New Testament. Even if, for the sake of argument, someone had managed to excise the “proper interpetation” of reincarnation from the New Testament, the Church Fathers from before the project was carried out would still record the doctrine in their writings. And the Church Fathers living at the time 0of and just after the “great purge” would record it having happened. In other words, if any such project were even attempted, we would know about it.
One cannot claim rationally that the original New Testament documents differ in any significant degree from the ones we have today. The process of their transmission down through the centuries to us, if not wholly without difficulty, has succeeded with flying colors, allowing us to know the text of the original New Testament documents with greater confidence than that of any other ancient work.
If, therefore, you want to undermine the authority of the New Testament, you will have to do so on grounds other than the process by which it was transmitted to us. Since its authority can’t be undermined on grounds of translation or copying, you’d have to fault the process of composition itself.
It is here that the DRE’s objection comes in. Many liberals—not wanting to say that the authors of the New Testament were simply liars—nevertheless argue that the gospels are not accurate records of what Jesus did and taught. If eyewitnesses wrote them (as with Matthew, Mark, and Luke), then it would be difficult to say the gospels have been significantly embellished without also accusing the authors of lying. Thus there has been a drive to say that they were not written by the traditional authors but by much later, unknown persons from particular “communities” who freely reworked Christ’s words and deeds to suit that community’s interests.
These people will point out that none of the four gospels claim to have been written by anyone in particular, but this is only partly true. It may be that the superscriptions “The Gospel according to So-and-So” that we have on them now may not have been on the original manuscripts. However, the earliest recipients of the gospels knew who wrote them, and this can easily explain the authorship traditions that surround them.
In particular, it is difficult to imagine how the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke would become attached to the synoptic gospels if they were not the original authors. If, long after a work was penned, you wanted to apply a name to a gospel to give it authority, you wouldn’t have picked these three guys. Matthew had been one of the hated tax collectors, and putting his name on the one gospel meant most clearly for a Jewish audience would not have helped give it authority. He was also a minor apostle, known for little besides writing a gospel. Mark and Luke weren’t even apostles.
Only John had a big enough name to put on an anonymous gospel to give it authority. But when we read John’s Gospel, we find that it does indeed make authorship claims. In particular, it claims to have been written by “the beloved disciple,” when it tells us, “This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things” (21:24).
Process of elimination will let us establish who the beloved disciple must be. He is one of the disciples, but he isn’t Peter or Thomas or Andrew, etc. When all the clues are taken into account, there is hardly anyone except John the son of Zebedee who the beloved disciple could be.
This gospel clearly intends us to know who wrote it. It claims to have been written by a particular person, and process of elimination, as well as a very strong authorship tradition, makes it clear who that person is. Divine inspiration will prevent any document that makes authorship claims from lying to us about who wrote it.
Having reviewed the answers to the challenges of your dream, you fall peacefully asleep. Finding yourself in the same darkened dream hallway, you decide to pay your tormentors a little visit. You switch on the light and march toward the doors.