Is your Bible missing scriptures?

As I mentioned in a previous post, some people are under the delusion that the Bible mystically appears in bookstores and aren't compiled and translated from a plethora of ancient manuscripts.  As I also mentioned at the start of this series, reading and writing in some of these dead languages was very difficult because some of them didn't have the language conventions that we are familar with, like spaces between words, punctuation marks, and upper and lower case letters.  So when we talk about the copies of copies of copies done by hand, errors happen.

If you haven't noticed already, I personally have an abiding affection when it comes to studying God's word.  I like learning the history and context of the events and symbols the Biblical authors write about.  So when I say that errors happen, I can't help but cringe just thinking about it.  But errors do happen 

The good news is that the modern Bible scholars figured this stuff out and have removed these errors. That's why modern translations of the Bible don't have verses like John 5:4, Acts 8:37, 1 John 5:7, and Mark 16:9-20; they weren't meant to be in the original text.

Before I go into why these verses are no longer in the newer translations of the Bible, can you find what these four passages of scripture have in common?  You don't have to look any of the passages up either; the clue to what they have in common is in their names.

Figured it out?  All of these deleted verses were from the NT.  Typically, the OT authors were VERY studious copying scriptures down; if it had more than a handful of errors, it would be relegated to "student study" use.  If the copies had anymore errors than that, they were burned.  The errors you'll find in the OT will be more along the lines of alternate spellings (which isn't an error really, I mean, think about the different ways to spell "Tsar", umm... "Tzar"? "Csar"?... You get the point), or numbers (like accidently adding a zero or switching the order of two numbers).  So why the deleted verses from from the NT?

Imagine hand-copying a novel in order to perserve it for future generations (because after twenty years, even the sturdious of books will wear out from constant use).  Now this hand-copying happens a few times until... well, how would you (a learned scholar), explain what a crinosole, or shellac, or a brazier is?  The obvious answer would be to add some explanatory notes.  Unfortunately, while we have modern means to add these notes in essays and dissertations (1), they didn't have this convention in ancient times.  A few generations later, someone comes along to make a new copy, and they add the notes to the manuscript, not realizing that they were not part of the original texts.

We get by this problem by adding this explanatory info at the botton of the page in our Bibles.  That's why in the 2011 NIV, Exodus 36:9 says "twenty-eight cubits long and four cubits wide", and marks at the bottom of the page that it was "about 42 feet long and 6 feet wide".

A second reason why extra passages entered into the textual lineage of the ancient manuscripts was because of oral tradition.  For the initial part of the early Church, people didn't think to write this stuff down, so the main way to pass the gospel around was by word of mouth.  Taking a familiar cue from how the Jews memorized long passages of scripture (like Psalm 119), the early Christians created oral traditions (like 1 Cor 15:3-8) to pass along their teaching (that's why in 1 Cor 15:5 says "to the Twelve" and not "to the apostles"; the term "apostle" hadn't been applied to "the Twelve" yet).

So if your spiritual cultivation included oral traditions, wouldn't it seem weird when while you are copying a gospel or epistle you find an instance where a teaching or event should have been, but clearly weren't added? To you, you'd think that you were "correcting" the error.

How do modern scholars tell the difference between additions and the original?  Well, we (mostly) owe that to the source documents the scholars translating the KJV used.  The original translators based their rendition from several codexes based off of the Masoretic texts (two out of the handful of texts that were available to them at the time).  Today, we have manuscripts that are much older than the Masoretic texts, and the older manuscripts simply don't have these added scriptures. 

The second reason why we know that some of the stuff was added in later is the same reason why you can read two different essays on the same topic and know that it was written by two different authors: it just sounds... different.  The way a person thinks reflects the way they express themselves, and when you read certain passages of scriptures (like Jeremiah), you can tell even through a translation that someone else picked up where the last author left off. 

Linguists and Biblical scholars have devoted their lives in the respectives fields, and have developed tools to pinpoint passages that may have been written by someone else.  Based on this information, they can make very educated guesses as to when someone added something, and when something was in the original texts.

Whew... this series is a bit dry.  I hope I'm not boring you!

Next week we'll take an in-depth look at the NIV translation, and how it was constructed.

See you there.

1: they're called footnotes :)