The accuracy of modern translations of the New Testament

Most of this booklet will be concerned with the New Testament, as it is that which records the life of Jesus, though I will have a brief look at the Old Testament, which foretells his coming.

In considering this question of the reliability of the documents we possess today, it is helpful to compare the evidence supporting the accuracy of the New Testament with that supporting the accuracy of other ancient writings. There are two areas in which the New Testament is streets ahead of any other writings of antiquity. The first is in the number of manuscripts that have come down to us. The second is in the length of the time gap that exists between the death of the authors and the writing of the first manuscript copies that have survived to the present.

Numbers of surviving manuscripts of ancient writers

The following are some examples of the number of manuscripts of ancient writers that have survived. The plays of Aeschylus are preserved in perhaps 50 manuscripts, of which none is complete. Sophocles is represented by about 100 manuscripts, of which only 7 have any appreciable independent value. The Greek Anthology has survived in one solitary copy. The same is the case with a considerable part of Tacitus' Annals. Of the poems of Catullus there are only 3 independent manuscripts. Some of the classical authors, such as Euripides, Cicero, Ovid, and especially Virgil, are better served with the numbers rising into the hundreds.

The numbers of manuscripts of other writers are: for Caesar's Gallic War 10, Aristotle 49, Plato 7, Herodotus 8, Aristophanes 10. Apart from a few papyrus scraps only 8 manuscripts of Thucydides, considered by many to be one of the most accurate of ancient historians, have survived. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livy only 35 survive, represented in about 20 manuscripts. Homer's Iliad is the best represented of all ancient writings apart from the New Testament with something like 700 manuscripts. However, there are many more significant variations in the Iliad manuscripts than there are in those of the New Testament.

The wealth of New Testament manuscripts

When we come to the New Testament, however, we find a very different picture. Altogether we possess about 5,300 partial or complete Greek manuscripts. Early on the New Testament books were translated into other languages, which seldom happened with other Greek and Latin writers. That means that, in addition to Greek, we have something like 8,000 manuscripts in Latin and an additional 1,000 or so manuscripts in other languages such as Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Coptic, Gothic, Sahidic and Georgian. As these translations began to be made before the close of the second century they provide an excellent source for assessing the text of the New Testament writings from a very early date. On this latter point Charles H. Welch, in his book True from the Beginning, quotes from the third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannia:

This argument is so strong, that, if we deny the authenticity of the New Testament we may with a thousand times greater propriety reject all the other writings in the world.

A further source of valuable information is found in the numerous quotes from early Christian writers from the end of the first century onwards. As a result of recent research done at the British Museum, we are now able to document, in early Church writings, 89,000 allusions to passages in the New Testament. For instance, Polycarp, who was personally acquainted with the apostle John, quotes from the New Testament in his letter to the believers in Philippi. Ignatius does also in the seven letters he wrote while awaiting execution about 115 AD. Clement of Rome cites numerous passages in a letter to Corinth about 95 AD. 330 allusions have been documented from Justin Martyr, 1,819 from Irenaeus, 2,406 from Clement of Alexandria, 7,258 from Tertullian, 1,378 from Hippolytus and 17,922 from Origen. These are all from the 2nd and early 3rd centuries. Not all these are direct quotations. However, it would be almost possible to construct the whole of the New Testament from these writings alone, even if we had no other.

Finally, there is the evidence from the Lectionaries, the reading lessons used in early public Church services. More than 1800 of these reading lessons have been classified. Though they did not appear until the 6th century, the texts from which they quote may themselves be early and of high quality.

All this material gives scholars an excellent resource for comparing copies and determining where discrepancies or scribal comments may have crept into the text.

Sir Frederick Kenyon, a former Director of the British Museum and one of the greatest authorities on the subject, said in his book Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts:

The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, or early translations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.

The time gap to the earliest surviving manuscripts

When we consider the time that elapsed from the date of the writer's death to the writing of the earliest surviving manuscript, we find that there is often something like a 1,000 year gap.

To give some examples:

Time gap from date of author to date of earliest surviving manuscript

Tacitus 700 years

Livy 400 years

Caesar 900 years

Catullus 1,600 years

Aristotle 1,400 years

Plato 1,200 years

Aristophanes 1,200 years

Thucydides 1,200 years

Euripides 1,500 years

Sophocles 1,400 years

Herodotus 1,300 years

The first complete copy of the Odyssey we have is from 2,200 years after it was written! Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest manuscript of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals.

The date of New Testament manuscripts

Again the evidence is impressive. The best and most important New Testament manuscripts go back to somewhere about 350 AD, the two most important being the Codex Vaticanus, the chief treasure of the Vatican Library in Rome, and the well-known Codex Sinaiticus. This latter codex (a codex is book with leaves, as opposed to a scroll) was discovered by a Russian nobleman and scholar, Count Tischendorf, at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century. On Christmas Day, 1933, it was purchased from the Soviet Government by the British Government for 100,000 pounds and is now the chief treasure of the British Museum. The Chester Beatty Papyri, the existence of which was made public in 1931, contain most of the New Testament and are dated 200 - 250 AD. The Codex Alexandrinus, also in the British Museum was written in the fifth century, and the Codex Bezae, in Cambridge University Library, in the fifth or sixth century.

The earliest discovery of all is a fragment of a papyrus codex containing a part of John's Gospel, chapter 18, now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. This was acquired in Egypt in 1917, where it was probably written, and is dated on palaeographical grounds around 130 AD. This means that John’s Gospel was circulating in Egypt within a generation of having been written, though he wrote his gospel, according to tradition, at Ephesus in modern day Turkey.

It is because many of the significant manuscript discoveries have only been comparatively recent that a good modern translation of the Bible is considerably more accurate than the Authorised Version (otherwise called the King James Version) of 1611 AD. New tools and texts have opened up worlds of thought and life of which our predecessors a century ago were ignorant. We can also now say that the New Testament text is far better attested to than any other ancient writings, and this would include the Hindu Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Muslim Koran.

The cumulative effect of this wealth of evidence was summed up by F. J. A. Hort of Cambridge University, one of the greatest textual critics of the New Testament, in his book Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek. He said that, leaving aside the comparatively trivial variations between the manuscripts:

the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole...and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text.

To quote Sir Frederick Kenyon again, from The Bible and Theology:

The interval between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.

It is probably true to say that the New Testament Greek text, as we have it today, is about 98% pure, and this is a conservative estimate! One thing is certain—no variant readings are significant enough to call in question any of its doctrines.

Some examples of alternative readings

Three examples demonstrate how variant readings can occur in the Greek text:

In Romans 5:1 Paul says, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Some of the manuscripts have “we have peace with God”. However, others have “let us have peace with God.” In the Greek text it is merely the difference of one letter that changes the tense of the verb. At some early point a scribe who was copying the letter made a slip of the pen which gave a slight change of meaning. Both these readings are fairly equally attested to in the early manuscripts we possess. The only way to tell which Paul actually wrote is to look at the context in which it occurs, compare it with what he writes elsewhere, and have an educated guess. In this particular case either one makes good sense so it doesn't really matter much!

Modern translations omit John 5:4 (which is in the Authorised Version) as it is not in earliest and most reliable manuscripts. It is obvious that some early scribe felt it necessary to add an explanation as to why the locals believed that the waters of the pool of Bethesda had healing properties.

Mark's Gospel in the Authorised Version ends at verse 20 of chapter 16. However, modern translations end at verse 8 with the report of the young man (angel?) that Jesus had risen and the effect of this message on the women who had come to visit the tomb. The reason for this is that verses 9 - 20 do not occur in the two most reliable manuscripts and are obviously later additions.

It seems odd that Mark should not have included some of the resurrection appearances of Jesus as he would certainly have been familiar with them, if not actually present on some of those occasions. He was a young man in Jerusalem at the time and a member of the early Christian community. However, it may well be that his original ending has been lost and someone copying the manuscript felt it necessary to round off the story by adding a summary of those appearances that appear in the other gospel stories. It certainly reads like such a summary. Indeed, several other endings to Mark's gospel have turned up where other scribes have also done this.

If such variations are important to you then it is best to get a good modern translation which has notes at the bottom of the page which tell where such variant readings occur in the early manuscripts. The New International Version and the New American Standard Version are two very good translations.