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From Eliyahu

Consider this:

The Bible is the source of light and truth in this world. We can thank God for the Bible, because when the Bible came into the hands of the common man (translated into his own language) by way of the printing press, freedom and truth rocked the world! This only happened about 500 years ago. Before that Christendom was stuck in a long period of ignorance and oppression we now call the "dark ages" - and indeed they were! As darkness is now descending over the world once again, we do well to turn more earnestly toward our Bibles as the source of light we need to get through these bizarre times.  

The Bible in its original languages is amazingly accurate and reliable. Consider, for example, the books of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanakh, often called the "Old Testament."  With the rise of the pseudo-science of Darwinism in the mid nineteenth century, critics of the Bible claimed the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, as they came down to us, could not possibly be accurate after so long a time. This created doubt in the minds of some.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in a cave in 1947 and dated as early as the third century B.C., have silenced such critics: 

Eleven caves were discovered containing nearly 1,100 ancient documents which included several scrolls and more than 100,000 fragments. Fragments from every Old Testament book except for the book of Esther were discovered. Indeed, these were the most ancient Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament ever found.. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935. After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text. Hebrew Scholar Millar Burrows writes, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.'”

The New Testament in our modern Bibles comes to us as translations from Greek manuscripts that were copied and recopied in the early centuries, to be shared with other believers throughout the Roman empire. So many copies were copied, recopied and shared, in fact, that the number of NT Greek manuscripts that have survived from antiquity far surpasses the numbers of manuscripts of any other ancient work. As we would expect, copyists sometimes made typical errors of hand-copying before the age of copy machines, word processors, and spell checks. However, this is not a big problem. The great numbers of manuscripts available, when compared to one another, make hand-copying errors, "typos" if you will, stand out.

In 1881 B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort sought to produce a more perfect Greek New Testament from comparison of New Testament manuscripts, by ferreting out copyist typos. They wrote a brief chapter at the very beginning of their two-volume work explaining that the manuscript differences they had discovered are not substantial. They said:

"We desire to make it clearly understood beforehand how much of the New Testament stands in no need of a textual critic’s labors." (vol. 1 p. 3)

As to the number of errors that remained, they said;

"The amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation, is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text [of the New Testament]." (vol. 1, p. 2)

Truly, the Bible is a miracle of Divine preservation, especially when we consider the determined efforts of the enemy throughout history to suppress and attempt to destroy that precious Word!

While the Bible in its ancient Hebrew and Greek languages is proven to be reliable, translations can be another matter. Here, biases of the translators can enter into their selection of English words used. Another problem is understanding of what is being said in the original. Take Paul, for an example. He was trained in the Pharisaical school of Gamaliel, making Paul a Torah expert. Almost everything Paul wrote is informed by Paul's deep and wide Torah education. In his own day the concepts Paul expounded were not well understood. Peter said some of Paul's writings were "hard to understand." Peter stated:

"Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you; as also in all of his letters, speaking in them of these things. In those, there are some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsettled twist, as they also do to the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." 2 Peter 3:15-16

If other Jews of Paul's day found Paul "hard to understand" how much more so Christian scholars who have little to no understanding of the Torah? Not surprisingly, this ignorance of Paul's Torah-based thinking often puts words into Paul's mouth that did not originate in Paul's brain!

Don't get me wrong. This is no reason to discard our Bible translations. People are much better off reading their translation of the Bible than not reading it, since the vast majority is true to the underlying text, conveying the Word of God. However, truth-seekers must realize that all English translations of Scripture require deeper study using Bible dictionaries, concordances, and other reference works to resolve the remaining imperfections of translation. 

We find some translation problems of this sort in our English translations of the book of Acts. This matters, because Christians universally see the origins of the "Church" in the book of Acts. Yet, as we get into our English versions of Acts, we encounter contradictory statements and behavior on the part of the apostles and early believers that seem confusing. Could this confusion be an indication of translation issues? For example, in the King James Version (and other English translations) we have the early believers "continuing daily with one accord in the temple" (indicating they are Jewish worshippers) while, in the same passage, we have new believers "added to the church daily" (indicating they are Christian worshippers). So which sort of worshippers are they? Yes, there are pat answers by "King James only" defenders, but not substantial answers for the truth-seeker. If you want the real answer, if you can handle the real answer, I'm going to be sharing that with our Tsiyon Partners at our live-streamed meeting tonight, at tsiyon.net, at 8 pm cst. You need to know what Acts, as it reads in the original Greek, actually says!