revisions”? (DVC, p. 231)
This claim, made by Teabing, is a muddled statement unbefitting a real historian, which greatly
confuses the process by which the Bible came down to us. The three terms, “translations,
additions and revisions,” must first be unpacked. Let’s start with translations. The Old Testament
books were originally written in Hebrew (with a few sections in Aramaic), and the New Testament
books in Greek. English Bible translations (or “versions”) produced today are either revisions of
previous English Bibles or translations made directly from the Hebrew and Greek. For example,
the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV, 1990) is a revision of the Revised Standard Version
(RSV, 1952), while the New International Version (NIV, 1978, ‘84) – the most widely used English
Bible today – is a version translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek. It must be added,
however, that even those versions that are revisions were produced by biblical scholars working
with the original Hebrew and Greek texts. Indeed, the entire purpose of a revision is to update the
text to make sure it accurately represents the meaning of the original Hebrew or Greek.
The implication of Teabing’s statement that the Bible “evolved through countless translations” is
that each version is a translation of a translation of a translation, and so on, so that the result is
like the children’s game “telephone,” where the message gets more and more garbled along the
way. This is simply not the case. Bible versions today are produced using the earliest and most
reliable Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available.
So what about the claim of “countless additions and revisions”? The implication is that the Bible
has been changed again and again throughout history to meet the needs of the church. Here
again the statement is a gross misrepresentation. As noted above, Bible translations today utilize
the earliest Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available. Over the centuries before the invention of
the printing press, scribes meticulously copied the biblical texts by hand in order to preserve and
protect God’s Word. A hand-copied document is known as a manuscript. Inevitably, errors are
made in the process of hand-copying a document, and the biblical texts are no exception. The
methodology known as textual criticism has been developed by scholars to reconstruct as
accurately as possible the original text.
For the Old Testament, textual critics compare the Hebrew manuscript tradition known as the
Massoretic Text (MT) with the Greek versions of the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX), and now the
Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), which contained many biblical manuscripts. For the New Testament they
compare more than five thousand ancient Greek manuscripts containing parts or the whole of the
New Testament. Textual critics also examine ancient Greek lectionaries (Scripture passages
arranged for church reading), early versions of the New Testament translated into languages like
Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Slavonic, and the writings of the early church fathers, who
frequently quote Scripture.
Several summary points may be made about the reconstruction of the original text of Scripture:
(1) The vast majority of manuscript differences are minor issues of grammar or spelling that have
little impact on the meaning of the text.
(2) No point of Christian doctrine is in doubt because of manuscript variations.
(3) The Bible boasts better manuscript support than any other ancient work of literature. For
example, the first six books of the Annals of the famous Roman historian Tacitus are preserved in
only one manuscript, dating from the sixth century AD. Many of the greatest classical Greek works
exist in only a few manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages. Even the best preserved ancient
documents cannot compare to the New Testament. Homer’s Iliad, sometimes called the “bible” of
the ancient Greeks, is preserved in only about 650 manuscripts, most dating from the second and
third centuries – one thousand years after the Iliad was written. Compare this to the five thousand
New Testament manuscripts, some copied within decades of the original writings.
(4) The great majority of scholars agree that we have a highly reliable manuscript tradition,
something very close to what the original authors wrote. Figures of 95-97% accuracy beyond
reasonable doubt are often cited for the New Testament, and 90% or so for the Old Testament.
This is a remarkably reliable textual tradition, considering the age of these sources, and refutes
the claim of The Da Vinci Code that “History has never had a definitive version of the book” (DVC, p.
231).
(5) There is no “cover-up” related to the text of the Bible. The standard critical editions of the
Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament used by scholars of all religious and
philosophical viewpoints list variant readings in their margins. The standard Hebrew text is the
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (5th edition). The two standard critical Greek New Testaments are
the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (27th ed.) and the United Bible Societies’ The
Greek New Testament (4th ed.). Any student with Greek or Hebrew competence can see for
themselves the minor variations within the manuscript tradition.
Back to Main "Canon of Scripture" Page
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webpage is available
in more detail and with
supporting references
in Truth & Error in the
Da Vinci Code, by Mark
L. Strauss
