Over a decade ago, when I was working for Giant Evil Globobank #1, I went out for a walk to a rooftop party with a colleague of mine who entertained me with stories about all of the hilariously stupid typos made by people dashing off emails in a hurry. Now, I’ve seen quite a few howlers in my day – I once saw an email from a colleague that said words to the effect that “market data snapshit saved”. And there have been more than a few cases of emails sent with salutations like, “Retards, BillyBob”, or whatever, due to the unfortunate and often hilarious proximity of the “T” and “G” keys on a standard QWERTY layout.
The story that stuck with me the most, of course, was the one where my colleague said that someone from the Product Control teams once wrote an email to the trading desk that contained the immortal words:
“Apologies for the incontinence“.
That one inevitably made its rounds throughout the entire business, and right out to all of the other business functions. I’m not sure the poor schmuck of an analyst who sent it out ever recovered from the blow to his reputation.
I bring all of this up because this story sent to me by our good friend, The Male Brain, about a rather notorious edition of the Good Book known as “The Wicked Bible”:
The Wicked Bible, also known as the Sinner’s Bible, originated in 1631. It was the product of the Royal Printers in London, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, who accidentally let a rather important typo slip by.
Unfortunately, it was in a rather popular part of the text — Exodus 20:14, otherwise known as the Ten Commandments.
Everything seems fine until you get up to commandment number six — thou shalt not commit adultery.
It seems that somehow the rather important “not” part of that sentence was missing. Instead, the commandment read — Thou shalt commit adultery.
I mean, if the Lord says so.
Only roughly a thousand of these copies were made and it took a year for the mistake to come to light. While most of the Wicked Bibles were rounded up and destroyed, 15 still remain.
Since I’m in a storytelling mood, let’s indulge in another old joke.
I first heard this one while listening to Biblical scholar, Dr. Daniel Wallace, when he discussed the accuracy of modern compilations of the Bible. The joke goes like this:
A novitiate monk walks into an abbey and the senior Abbott (or whatever he’s called) sees that the young man is serious, erudite, precise, and scholarly. He gives the young monk a project to compare the abbey’s manuscripts against the oldest available copies in the ancient and dusty archives. The young man dutifully goes down into the deep dark abyss of the catacombs and checks the archives. He comes back up to question a particular letter in Scripture against a manuscript that he has found, and asks if there is an older copy somewhere, because he is confused about that particular letter. The Abbott points him to an older manuscript. The novitiate reads it and comes back up and asks if there is an even older one. The Abbott points him to one. The monk does it again, and, rather annoyed by his persistent questioning, the Abbott tells him to go all the way down to the very deepest darkest parts of the archives to lookup a manuscript that dates back to 300 AD.
The novitiate is down there for only about 10 minutes, and then comes charging back up the stairs at about 100mph. The Abbott, shocked by this outburst of energy, asks the young man what is wrong.
Once he catches his breath, the young man shouts up at the sky, “THE WORD WAS CELEBRATE!!! WE’RE SUPPOSED TO CELEBRATE!!!!!!!“
(There’s a reason why I am not a comedian.)
The point of all of this is to illustrate the futility of pretending that Scripture has been “perfectly preserved” and passed down to us, unblemished and unaltered since the time that the Holy Spirit moved men to write down the revelations given to them by the Lord.
The notion of “perfect preservation” is the one to which the Izzlamics hold. And it is profoundly ridiculous. Their “Scripture” has been about as perfectly preserved as my belly-button lint has been. They constantly complain about how many Bibles we Christians and our Jewish friends have – and it is true, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different “variants” of the Bible. We do not have one single canonical Old Testament, and we do not have one single canonical Ur-text of the New Testament, either.
So how, then, can we be anywhere near reasonably confident that we have a really clear and accurate understanding of what the Old and New Testaments actually said?
It’s simple. We have truly gigantic amounts of actual textual evidence to examine. Watch these videos from Dr. Wallace to get an idea of what’s going on:
In case you want it all written out for you, read on.
Let’s leave aside the Old Testament, because not one of the original manuscripts from all the way back in 1,400 BC or thereabouts, back when Moses became the first man ever to download information directly from the cloud onto a tablet, survives to the present day. We have copies of copies of copies (of copies of – well, you get the idea) of what the original writers of the Old Testament put forth.
Instead, let’s take a look at what we have of the New Testament alone. And once you actually look at the textual evidence, you’ll quickly realise that we have so much information that it is actually genuinely staggering.
We have over 5,300 Greek New Testament manuscripts, over 10,000 Latin vulgates, at least 9,000 manuscripts written in other languages, and something approaching a MILLION recorded and written sayings of the early fathers of Christianity – at least 80,000 of which were written down before the 3rd Century AD.
If we wiped out all of the textual evidence from the manuscripts – which comes to well over 25,000 manuscripts’ worth of data – and ONLY went with the sayings of the Church fathers, we could reconstruct the entire New Testament, WORD FOR WORD, minus just ELEVEN VERSES.
It is at this point that atheists, Muslims, and other heretics attempt to point out that these tens of thousands of manuscripts have, between them, over 500,000 differences, or textual variants.
That’s more than 2 variants per word of the entire New Testament.
How, then, can we as Christians possibly consider our Scriptures to be reliable?
Well, that’s simple too. Of those 500,000 variants, literally 99% of them are nothing more than different ways of spelling the same word in koine Greek, or different word orders, or different particles, or uses of definite articles when perhaps it is not appropriate, or any one of about an hundred different reasons. NOT ONE of those 99% or so of “irrelevant” variants has any impact whatsoever on meaning, doctrine, or belief.
What about the less than 1% or so of differences that are indeed significant and material? The most (in)famous of these (that we know of so far) is the one about the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation.
Turns out that there is good reason to think that the Number of the Beast is in fact 616, not 666.
Sorry, ‘Arry, looks like that nightmare you had back when you were a wee lad might have been a bit off…
Does this difference have any impact whatsoever on our core beliefs as Christians?
Nope.
Think about it. When was the last time that you encountered a serious brother in the faith who said:
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
— Mangled version of the original Apostles Creed
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended into hell.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead,
and oh by the way the Number of the Beast is 616.
The very idea is idiotic. Whether the Number of the Beast is indeed 616 and not 666 IS a significant difference, for sure. But it doesn’t mean one single damned thing to us in terms of doctrine or belief.
As for the Old Testament, yes, there is considerable divergence between the Septuagint, the Masoretic Texts, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. And yet, we have enough evidence – more than enough – from historical sources to argue convincingly that what we have in the Old Testament is indeed what was revealed to the ancient prophets by the Holy Spirit.
We Christians can be confident that our Bible is accurate because an immense body of overlapping, supporting, and interwoven evidence points unceasingly to the truth of Jesus Christ.
Which brings us back to heretical editions of the Bible, like the Wicked Bible, which was quite obviously a corruption of the text – whether it was intentional or not, is still a subject of some debate, though.
If you spend enough time listening to Christians – which in most cases amounts to approximately 5 minutes of barely processing anything that they are saying – you will quickly realise that Christians are absolutely HOPELESS at agreeing on which Bible is “best”.
There are plenty of “King James Only” types who insist that anything other than the KJV is heretical and blasphemous, because later translations take serious liberties with the text. To this I respond: you do realise that the 6th Commandment says, “Thou shalt not murder“, right? The KJV translates it as “kill”, but that is because, back then, “kill” and “murder” were synonymous and the word in Hebrew was the same. In today’s world, the commandment not to “kill” makes little sense, since we know that there are times when killing a man is not only justified, it is absolutely necessary for the safety and security of a free people. That isn’t murder. It is self-defence, or national defence, depending on how it is done.
(As far as I’m concerned, shooting Communists on sight is a legitimate and necessary form of national defence – and ownership of tanks and heavy artillery pieces is indeed covered by the 2nd Amendment. But that’s just me, and people have been telling me for years that I’m a few tools short of a utility belt.)
That is but one example of an instance in which the KJV is not sufficient to capture the full power of Scripture. No translation is. Not even my preferred one, the English Standard Version, is good enough – it has problems of its own, most notably in the way that it uses gender-neutral pronouns in place of the originally gendered Hebrew ones.
If you’re looking for a good Bible, which one should you choose?
The answer is simple:
JUST. PICK. ONE.
Purists like me will prefer the ESV or NKJV. Those interested in serious study should get the NET. Those who just want a good easy text to read should get the NIV, NASB, or NLT. Catholics will want to stick to the CSB.
There are myriad translations of the Bible, and most are decent to excellent. The ones you really want to stay the hell AWAY from are the ones that attempt to add to Scripture or twist it in really ridiculous ways.
That is why translations like the Schofield Bible, the Passion Translation, and a few others, should be burned immediately. Stay away from those. But don’t concern yourself overly much with the “food fights” that Christians get into over what is the “correct” translation of Scripture
Get a Bible. Study it. Listen to Dr. Michael Heiser and Dr. Wallace and Dr. Frank Turek and Pastor John Macarthur. These men have made it their life’s mission to explain Scripture and unpack it in order to help us see through the mirror a little bit less darkly. So use their work to illuminate your own path.
In the meantime – yes, the Wicked Bible really did get it wrong, and no, you’re NOT allowed to stick it in your neighbour’s wife. Keep it in your pants, Buster.
6 Comments
…I lived alone…my mind was blank…
ESV is fine if you can only have one, but it’s like a modern American house in the suburbs today. No significant drawbacks, nothing notable to make it memorable, and you might just be here because everyone else is doing it.
NET Bible is an incredible resource, the translator notes are pithy and useful in many places while reading. Good modern English too. The wisdom literature suffers gravely from a lack of poetry and meter in it though.
The Passion and the Message…I guess interesting commentary but not reliable.
Is NASB not a common text outside of my bible belt texas evangelical background? I’m surprised its not on this list, it used to be MacArthurs bible.
One translation I’ve been using for personal study daily for 3 years: The Hebrew Bible by Robert Altar.
I got to Altar through the Bible Project (add these guys, podcasts and youtube videos alike, to that list of serious scholars to learn alongside). He wrote a book in the 80’s call The Art of Biblical Narrative. As a high-level literary professor, he approached the Old Testament looking for the narrative threads that tie together disparate stories within the writings. An example is trying to integrate the tragedy of Judah and Tamar in Genesis with the rest of the patriarchal narrative. It’s completely out of place and a jarring and disturbing story to the western mind…but to the audience, it was written in, it signals a conclusion to many storylines and flags what to highlight through the rest of the book in the Joseph story…culminating as Judah moves out of deadbeat creep-hole mode and grows into the leader of men and self submitting servant before Joseph in Egypt, to then mark the final prophecy of Jacob/Israel in the conclusion.
Take this same with the high-level literary criticism skills, also add in his university char level Hebrew linguistic skills, and have him translate the Masoretic text, informed by the Septuagint, into English prose. But not the English of the Victorians nor the schlock of the moderns, but the English that sounds and meters and patterns as close as possible to the oral rendering of the Hebrew text. It is masterful. Then add in brief translation notes to highlight patterns, clarify ambiguity, and indicate gaps in the source text.
My introduction to his work was in the book of Psalms. I was reading the psalms in a month (5 per day x 30 days) for the year. I’d worked through ESV twice, NET once, NASB once, and I was starting on the NLT when I wanted something different. I found Altar had a book of the Psalms and subsequently spent the rest of the year in his work, shifting gears to one psalm per day through the rest of the year because I moved my study from thin soup to meaty ribs.
In a very real sense, his translation work is the apex comparison of one man’s translation work vs translation by committee that all other moderns do. The passion and the heat and the ache come through more strongly with Altar then any other text I’ve spent time with.
I find the ESV to be significantly “cleaner” and better than the NIV, and much less colloquial. It has, in my view, the right balance between readability and linguistic accuracy – though it does not do the Scriptures full justice. No translation can.
I did mention it.
Interesting. That is not one that I have heard of, but that is not in the least surprising, since I have a very poor understanding of the various translations. But it looks like that is a rather good one to use.
I’d go with one of the study versions.
There’s a lot of context to scripture that helps understanding what is going on. The pastor at my last church was really good at explaining the historical and cultural context behind what was just read.
I’ve found some bible study groups to be nearly useless, since they lack the deep knowledge and often take passages out of context. Had a great argument with a Jehovah witness about the kingdom of God, and that if you read the passage before the one she was relying on, the context changed. Gotta read the whole chapter, not just one or two passages.
I’ve been reading some Seraphim Rose orthodox books, which I find fascinating. He ties a lot of concepts really well into scripture.
The one one new age/false religions was amazing. In a nutshell, he said of course these religions work. The demons enable you to do enough stuff until you’re hooked and renounce God. Which was what they wanted in the first place. The other concept was that demons could, and often do, quote the bible. They know it inside and out, having been around for most of it.
Reading that book you can absolutely see where demons would be foisting Islam on the world.
Correct. The Bible is not a short or easy book to read. But it is remarkably compact nonetheless. The sheer amount of material packed into just the first 10 chapters of Genesis, for instance, is astonishing. The destruction of all life through the Flood happens in the space of barely four pages. Without the context, it is difficult to understand why the Bible says what it does – like I explained the other day with respect to the story of how the Lord slew Onan, and why.
Oh it gets a lot worse than that..
Exactly. The daemonic influence in those religions is absolutely pervasive and deep-rooted. Demons love to mislead people. They can twist and change the meaning of Scripture extremely easily – which is why there are so many false “Christian” preachers out there in the world today.
As far as I can tell, the only thing more dangerous than a false “Christian” preacher, is a New Age type. Those people actually have a compelling message that provides all of the validation and elevation of the Christian message – without any of the moral responsibilities, the acknowledgement of sin, the need for contrition and repentance, and the acceptance of one’s own broken nature. It’s downright lethal to a man’s (or, more likely, woman’s) soul to believe in that crap. I can think of almost no faster way to allow daemons into one’s life than to engage in New Age practices, short of outright inviting in those creatures.
NIV (1984 version) and Douay Rheims for me. Well said about translations in general, by the way.