The Word Kept and Carried

This is the second of two parts. The Word Given answered the first question: why these books. This part answers the second: why this copy. The short form of both, seventeen questions with plain answers, is Seventeen Questions About the Bible in Your Hand.

Part 1 answered the question of the books. The second set of questions is about the copy, and they come from the same places. The originals are lost. The copies disagree in four hundred thousand places. The Bible on your shelf has brackets around whole paragraphs and a note at the bottom of the page saying some manuscripts do not have this. Someone in the family says the King James is the only real Bible. Two Bibles at the same table read differently in the same verse. And if the church took centuries to settle the edges, how does anyone know the thing is finished?

I will answer for myself first, as before. I owned a Bible with those brackets in it for many years, and I was somewhere near twenty-eight before I asked what they were. I defended the word “inerrant” without knowing what it was being claimed for, or of what. There are men who use those brackets for one purpose, to unsettle a young Christian, and a father who cannot say what the brackets are has left his children to them.

Part 1 ended in Psalm 78, where God establishes a testimony and commands fathers to teach it. Everything in this part hangs on one question that psalm raises and does not answer by itself: God gave the testimony, and God commanded that it be handed down, so what did God do to see that what reached the great-grandchildren was what He gave? The answer runs in four movements. What God promised. What God did. What the brackets mean. And what it means that the Word is complete.

What God promised

Look at what Scripture says about its own keeping, because you need to know exactly what is promised before you claim it.

“The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8 LSB).

Peter takes that sentence and applies it to the word preached in the churches: “But the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word which was proclaimed to you as good news” (1 Peter 1:25 LSB). Jesus says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” (Matthew 24:35 LSB), and, of the Law, that not “the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18 LSB). The psalmist says, “Forever, O Yahweh, Your word stands firm in heaven” (Psalm 119:89 LSB). And the Lord says of the Scripture that it “cannot be broken” (John 10:35 LSB).

Every one of those is a promise about God’s word: that it endures, that it accomplishes what He sent it to do, that it will not fail or pass or be broken, and that His people will not be left without it. Not one of them is a promise about a manuscript. God did not say that any copy would be perfect, or that any scribe would be kept from a slip of the pen, or that one printed edition would be His and the others not. The verse most often pressed into that service, Psalm 12:6-7, turns on whether the “them” God keeps in verse 7 means the words of verse 6 or the afflicted people of verse 5, and the Hebrew leans toward the people. A contested reading is never a prooftext on this site, so it does no work here.¹ What Scripture promises is that the Word of God stands, and that His people have it. Promise what Scripture promises and nothing more, because a promise beyond that gets found out.

That is the promise, and it is enough to stand on. The Westminster divines confessed what they took it to mean in one sentence: the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, “being immediately inspired by God, and, by his singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical.”² That is a confession, the church’s judgment on the promise, and the evidence for it is the next question. Providence works through means, and the means God used to keep His Word was a multitude of copies.

What God did

No original manuscript of any book of the Bible is known to survive.³ What survives is copies, and for the New Testament the copies are many, early, and overlapping, which is what lets the wording be tested in the open. The catalogue kept at Münster listed 6,123 Greek manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament on the day this was written. The number counts catalogue entries, many of them fragments or partial, and it changes as the catalogue is corrected, so it is a count of witnesses and not of complete Bibles.⁴ Beside the Greek stand the early translations into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, and the quotations in the church fathers.

Copies made by hand differ from one another. That is what the four hundred thousand is. It is a count of every place where any two of those thousands of witnesses differ, in spelling, in word order, in a dropped or doubled line, in a synonym, and it is large because the witnesses are many. A book copied twice has few variants, and a book copied six thousand times has hundreds of thousands, most of them the same handful of slips repeated. The man who made the number famous has said in print what it does and does not mean. Bart Ehrman, asked whether his book overturned the older view that the variants leave Christian doctrine untouched, answered that his position “does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.”⁵ Daniel Wallace, who sorts the variants by whether they change the meaning and whether they have a real claim to be original, puts those that are both at under one in a hundred, and none of that small set carries a doctrine on its own.⁶

The very thing that produces the large number is the thing that keeps the Word. Where one copyist erred, a hundred did not, and the error can be seen for what it is by laying the copies side by side. A single perfect manuscript, if God had given one, could have been lost in a fire or altered by one hand in one night. Six thousand Greek witnesses, with the versions in other languages beside them, spread across a thousand years and many lands, are beyond any one hand’s reach, and a corruption in one line of copies shows for what it is the moment it is laid beside the others. God kept His Word the way He keeps most things, by an abundance that no single failure can touch, and the abundance is open for anyone to examine. The skeptic and the man who insists on one edition share a premise here, that only a single flawless text could be the Word of God. Deny the premise once and both fall together. The Word lived in all the copies together, and it still does.

The Old Testament has the same shape with a longer memory. The Hebrew text your Bible translates comes down through the Masoretes, the Jewish scribes who preserved its consonants and supplied its vowels and accents with a care that counted the letters of every book. The great codices of that tradition, Aleppo and Leningrad, date from about 930 and 1008.⁷ Before Qumran, the Hebrew Bible a scholar could read whole was a medieval book, and a skeptic could ask what a thousand years of copying had done. Then the caves at Qumran gave up a scroll of Isaiah written about a century before Christ, all sixty-six chapters in the order you know them. It is recognizably the same book, with the differences a thousand years of copying would produce: spelling above all, and some real readings that scholars weigh.⁸ The scroll vindicated the Masoretes. It also showed, with other scrolls from the same caves, that the Hebrew text in the centuries before Christ existed in more than one form, and that the Greek translators of Jeremiah had before them a Hebrew Jeremiah shorter than the one the Masoretes kept, with the oracles against the nations in a different place.⁹

Hear that plainly, because a Catholic or an Orthodox friend, or a scholar, will tell you, and it is true. The book of Jeremiah exists in two ancient forms. The longer Hebrew form became the received Hebrew text, the one the Masoretes handed down and your Bible translates. The shorter form was translated into Greek and was widely read in the Greek-speaking churches. They differ in length and in the order of a section. They do not differ in a doctrine. The one passage of Jeremiah the New Testament quotes at length, the new covenant of chapter 31, stands in both forms, and no quotation of Jeremiah anywhere in the New Testament depends on wording that one form has and the other lacks.¹⁰

Three things get said about that, and they are three different kinds of claim. Know which is which. The Reformed churches confess that the Hebrew and Greek originals have been “kept pure in all ages” and are the court of final appeal, and Turretin, defending that doctrine a generation later, explained that faults in particular copies are corrected by comparing the witnesses, so that the authentic text is kept in the copies together.¹¹ That is a confessional judgment, and I hold it. The manuscripts show two forms of Jeremiah, and show that nothing in the faith turns on the difference. That is evidence. And the conclusion the two together support is the one Scripture’s own promises support: that God has kept His Word for His people through many witnesses, so that they have it, and have never been without it. How one form of Jeremiah became the received Hebrew text and the other the Greek churches’ book is something Scripture does not explain, and I will not explain it for Scripture. You can say all of that out loud and lose nothing, because God kept His Word through that history, and that is where your confidence sits.

The brackets in your Bible

The brackets, in full, because men contend with what is there.

Your Bible marks a handful of passages because the evidence for them is divided, and the church that printed it decided to tell you so. These are the ones you will meet.

The last twelve verses of Mark. The two earliest complete Greek manuscripts of Mark, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, end the Gospel at 16:8, with the women fleeing the tomb afraid. The familiar longer ending, in which the risen Lord appears and commissions the eleven, is old, and Irenaeus quoted it in the second century.¹² The Legacy Standard Bible prints it in square brackets, “[Now after He had risen early on the first day of the week, He first appeared to Mary Magdalene” (Mark 16:9 LSB), and prints a shorter ending after it in brackets of its own. Nothing taught in those verses is taught only there. The resurrection is in all four Gospels and every epistle. The one practical cost is that verses 17 and 18 have been used to justify handling snakes and drinking poison, and a passage of doubtful standing should never have been made to bear that.¹³

The woman taken in adultery. The earliest witnesses to John, the papyri and the two great codices, do not have John 7:53 to 8:11, and the manuscripts that do have it place it in several different spots, which is the mark of a story inserted into a book after it was written.¹⁴ The passage is bracketed. Christ’s mercy to the penitent and His refusal to excuse sin are taught throughout the Gospels, and the story teaches nothing that stands or falls with it.

The three witnesses in heaven. Older English Bibles read at 1 John 5:7 that “there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost.” That clause entered the Greek manuscripts very late, from the Latin, and your Bible reads simply, “For there are three that bear witness: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement” (1 John 5:7-8 LSB).¹⁵ The Trinity does not rest on that clause and never did. It rests on the whole witness of Scripture, on the baptism of Christ and the baptismal formula and the apostolic benedictions, and a doctrine that could be lost with one late Latin gloss was never the church’s doctrine.

The rest are smaller. The eunuch’s confession in Acts 8:37, the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13, and a few verses that a copyist carried over from a parallel passage (Matthew 17:21 and 18:11, Romans 16:24) are bracketed because the earliest witnesses lack them and the later ones supply them from elsewhere.¹⁶ One more is hard in the other direction. “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34 LSB) is missing from some early witnesses and present in others, and the judgment is close. Your Bible prints it, with a note that some early manuscripts leave it out, and the editors of the standard Greek text set it in double brackets, their sign for an ancient reading they judge was not in the earliest form of the text they can recover.¹⁷

Those brackets are the church telling you the truth. A Bible that hid the evidence would be easier to defend for a week and impossible to defend for a lifetime. You can put your finger on every bracket and say what it is, why it is there, and what does not depend on it. That is the confidence the Word gives, and it is the only kind worth having.

The Word in your hand

Most of us do not read Hebrew or Greek. We hold a translation, printed from an edited text, assembled from copies of copies. Know that chain, link by link, because every link is public and every link is a place where men did honest work under correction.

The prophet or apostle wrote. Scribes copied, in the first centuries on papyrus, then on parchment in the great codices, then in the running hand of the medieval minuscules, and churches gathered the copies into collections, Paul’s letters in one codex, the Gospels and Acts in another, by the middle of the third century.¹⁸ When printing came, Erasmus set a Greek New Testament from the handful of late manuscripts he could reach in Basel in 1516, and the editions of Stephanus and Beza that followed his became the text the King James translators worked from in 1611.¹⁹ Since then the church has recovered the papyri and the great codices, and the modern editions of the Greek text, the ones behind your Bible, draw on a documented body of witnesses far larger than Erasmus could reach and print the readings that compete, with the witnesses for each, in an apparatus at the foot of the page.²⁰ Committees of scholars who read the originals translate from those editions, publish their method in a preface, and are corrected in public by other scholars who read the originals too. Then a printer sets the pages.

That is why the King James question has to be answered gently and firmly. The men who made the King James Bible would not recognize the claim made in their name. Their preface defends “the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession” as something that “containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God,” and it defends putting alternative readings in the margin, because, they wrote, “diversity of signification and sense in the margin, where the text is not so clear, must needs do good.”²¹ They worked from the printed Greek editions of their day, and they worked well. God has since put into the church’s hands witnesses far older and far more numerous than those editions rested on. The Word was preserved in the multitude their edition was drawn from, and every faithful translation since has drawn from the same multitude with more of it in view.

In what sense, then, is your English Bible the Word of God? The Westminster divines answered that in the same paragraph that confessed the originals. Because the original tongues “are not known to all the people of God, who have right unto, and interest in the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come, that, the Word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner.”²² The Word of God dwells in the translation. The originals remain the court of final appeal, so that when two translations differ a man can ask which one says what the Hebrew says. A faithful translation carries the Word of God to the man who reads it, with real and derivative authority, answerable at every word to the text it renders.²³

Scripture itself established that. On the day of Pentecost the crowd asked, “how is it that we each hear them in our own language in which we were born?” (Acts 2:8 LSB), and the first sermon of the church was heard in the languages of every nation Luke lists. When Ezra read the law to the returned exiles, the Levites stood with him “explaining and giving insight, and they provided understanding of the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8 LSB). And the apostles themselves quoted a Greek Old Testament, and quoted it as Scripture, even where the Greek rendering differed from the Hebrew wording the Masoretes later kept. Hebrews reads the fortieth psalm as “a body You have prepared for Me” (Hebrews 10:5 LSB) where the Hebrew has “My ears You have opened” (Psalm 40:6 LSB), and builds its argument for the incarnation on the reading the great Greek codices of the psalm carry.²⁴ If the apostles could call a translation Scripture and argue from it, you can hand your children an English Bible and call it what the apostles called theirs. Notice also what that fact does to any claim that the Hebrew text sat unchanged in a single form from Moses to the Masoretes. The apostles’ own Bible shows otherwise, and the Reformed doctrine of the original tongues has always had to say what it means with that fact in view.

Which translation, then? Every translation makes judgments, and the judgments reveal a theology. My judgment, argued before on this site, is that a translation that keeps the words, the word order, and the repeated terms of the original as far as English allows places the reader under the text, and that a translation that smooths the text into what a modern reader expects places the text under the reader. I will not repeat the argument here.²⁵ This site quotes the Legacy Standard Bible by default because its translators state that aim in their foreword and because, verse by verse, it has usually proved the most accurate rendering I can check, and it uses another version wherever another version renders a particular verse more accurately, because accuracy to the original is the rule and no translation is the rule. The LSB is the work of men. So is every other. Each is fallible, each is correctable, and each is corrected, in public, by men who read the Hebrew and Greek, which is how God has seen to it that a man who reads neither can trust what he holds. Your test for a translation is the translators’ own stated aim, and the question to ask of any rendering is whether it says what the original says. The most reliable original text holds priority over every translation, including the one this site prefers.

Complete

The last question is whether the thing is finished. Two claims are made when a Christian says the Bible is complete, and they should be kept apart.

The first is that it is sufficient. Paul told Timothy that the sacred writings “are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus,” and that Scripture, God-breathed, leaves the man of God “equipped, having been thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:15, 17 LSB). Whatever God appointed His church to believe and do for those two ends is in the Book. The Westminster Confession says it in the sentence this site has quoted before: “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”²⁶ The Belgic Confession says the same from the other side: “since it is forbidden to add unto or take away any thing from the Word of God, it doth thereby evidently appear that the doctrine thereof is most perfect and complete in all respects.”²⁷

The second claim is that the deposit is closed. The reason is the one Part 1 gave. Look at how Hebrews opens.

“God, having spoken long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days spoke to us in His Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2 LSB).

God spoke in His Son. He appointed witnesses to His Son, and the foundation of the house is “the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone” (Ephesians 2:20 LSB). A foundation is laid once. The faith was “once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3 LSB). The deposit is finished because the redemptive work it witnesses to is finished and the witnesses Christ appointed to it have delivered their witness, and there are no more of them. The rule that guarded the first covenant document guards the last: “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2 LSB), and “Do not add to His words Lest He reprove you, and you be proved a liar” (Proverbs 30:6 LSB), and the closing warning of the last book, which speaks in the first place of “the words of the prophecy of this book” (Revelation 22:18 LSB) and speaks in the same voice as Moses.²⁸ Whatever the Spirit does among God’s people after the apostles, He does under the Word they left, and the Word tests it, as Paul required even of prophets in the Corinthian assembly. What that means for the gifts is a question for another day and its own study. It is not a question the canon waits on.

Complete does not mean exhaustive. John closes his Gospel by saying that if everything Jesus did were written, “even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25 LSB), and Moses had already said that “the secret things belong to Yahweh our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29 LSB). The Word tells you everything God appointed for you and your sons to know and do, and it tells you nothing false. It does not tell you everything. That is what complete means, and it is what you need it to mean.

The confidence

Put the two parts together and you have your answer. God gave the testimony, through Moses and the prophets to Israel and through the apostles to the church, and the people who feared Him knew His voice in it before any council spoke. God kept the testimony, through a multitude of witnesses that no one fire and no one forger could reach, so that His people have never been without it and can show any doubter the evidence. God carried the testimony into your own tongue, by the same providence and by the church’s honest labor, so that the Word of God dwells in the book on your shelf. And God finished the testimony in His Son, so that you are not waiting for a further word and need not fear one.

The brackets stay. The two Jeremiahs stay. The four hundred thousand stay, and the long story of copying and editing and translating stays, and you tell your children all of it, because every piece of it is true and none of it touches the ground you stand on. The ground was the faithfulness of God, who established a testimony in Jacob and commanded fathers to teach it, and who has kept His word to every generation since. The perfection of scribes, the unanimity of councils, and the merits of one edition were never the ground.

“That they should set their confidence in God.” Set yours there, and hand the Book on.