Has The Bible Been Changed?
The questions and objections covered in these videos are :
- Can we trust the New Testament as a historical document?
- Hasn't the Bible been rewritten so many times that it can't be trusted?
- Wasn't the New Testament written hundreds of years after Christ?
- Was the Bible changed?
Can we trust the New Testament as a historical Document?
Scientifically speaking, if you cannot trust the Bible as a historical document then you cannot trust any ancient document. Because there are more copies and fragments of the New Testament than there are for any ancient document in the world.
Hasn't the Bible been rewritten so many times that it can't be trusted?
People make this claim because they're not aware of how the Bible was translated. Author Matt Slick from CARM.org said the following of this objection :
"This is a common misconception. Some people think that the Bible was written in one language, translated to another language, then translated into yet another and so on until it was finally translated into the English. The complaint is that since it was rewritten so many times in different languages throughout history, it must have become corrupted . The "telephone" analogy is often used as an illustration. It goes like this. One person tells another person a sentence who then tells another person, who tells yet another, and so on and so on until the last person hears a sentence that has little or nothing to do with the original one. The only problem with this analogy is that it doesn't fit the Bible at all." [1]
Wasn't the New Testament written hundreds of years after Christ?
This is actually a really important question that plays into the trustworthiness of the message in the New Testament. What most fail to understand is that the crucial gap is not the gap between the time of the evidence and today, the crucial gap is the gap between the evidence and the events described by that evidence. If the gap between the events and the evidence for those events is short, then how long it has been since the evidence and those events to the present day is just irrelevant. Good evidence doesn't become bad evidence simply because of the lapse of time.
And with regard to the New Testament when we look at the evidence, what we discover is that these records of the life of Jesus were written down within the first generation after those events, while the eyewitnesses were still alive, with people who had first hand contact with those who had accompanied Jesus within his lifetime. So that we actually have better sources for the life of Jesus of Nazareth than we do for most of the major figures of antiquity.
Was the Bible changed?
This is a claim that is made all of the time. Now again going back to our 5,600 copies of the Bible that are 99.5% in agreement with one another, they are also from vastly different time periods and were discovered in many different countries. If anyone had attempted to change any of them, it would be the most obvious thing to everybody.
All you would have to do to prove that the Bible had been changed is to find one copy that said one thing at an earlier time period and then find ones from a later time period that said a different thing. It would be the easiest thing ever to do. It would be impossible for a forger to change all of those 5,600 text without being noticed, most of which had not even been discovered yet. This is why people only make the claim that the Bible was changed and why you never find anyone offering proof that it was changed.
Transcribed from Christ White's video's linked above.
[1] Matt Slick : Hasn't the Bible been rewritten so many times that we can't trust it anymore?
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Great blog, God Bless, I hope you can join me on my page.
Regarding your first point, of course the Bible can be trusted as an "historical" document in the sense that it was in fact written at some point in history. But that's not the question. The question is whether or not it is a sufficiently reliable witness to history--that is, does it document actual history accurately.
Your chart includes references to other historical documents. But you would never insist that these other documents are perfectly actuate historical chronicles--that is, that the events described by Homer actually happened exactly as he described them. Rather, you would recognize that Homer had his own biases that distort the "actual" history and that, in some cases, he took great poetic license. Any fair reader must read the Bible in exactly the same way--as being an imperfect witness to history that contains biases, poetic license, severe editing and censoring over the centuries, etc.
I will specifically address your other points in a book that I'm publishing about the Bible here on Steemit. I hope to post the second chapter later today, though it won't be till I get to Part II of the book that I really begin to address your points in detail.
Infallibility is the output conclusion, not the input assumption.
The purpose of these videos is not to make any case for infallibility. They only make the case that we know with very high confidence exactly what the original authors were claiming.
That takes away the intervening 2000 years and lets us confront the Bible as a collection of eyewitness accounts whose credibility we must assess.
After reading those accounts, many people simply find the authors believable. Specifically, they conclude it likely that God really did take on a physical body and supernaturally prove beyond their own initial doubts that He was who He said He was.
It is only after you decide to believe those witnesses that you face the problem of how to treat an accurate rendition of the testimony they left behind. If you have already accepted that Jesus was capable of supernatural acts and that he instructed his disciples to pass on His teachings to their successors, then it is a relatively tiny leap to believe their claims that they had supernatural oversight in writing their documents.
If you somehow believe that Jesus rose from the dead, yet do not believe that He preserved an accurate account of His teachings, then you are still faced with the question of which of these two defense strategies you want to rely on at your Final Performance Review.
Hmmmm. Your call.
So, in practice believers wind up assuming infallibility because there is no one alive with the authority and credibility to countermand a teaching in a way that we trust to stand up in the Lord’s court.
I was just having this conversation about an hour ago with @bleepcoin!
I said that it always amazes me, that people realise that a story told across just 10 people, in the same timeframe will change drastically. Yet they expect one that's been told by tens of thousands of people, across a 1500 year timespan, to be the same.
I've seen eye witness experiments of people reporting things that were wildly inaccurate, from something they saw 15 minutes previously. Yet people will still talk about the bible as an eye witness account; very strange.
CG
If you watch the first video you will see that the argument that the scriptures have been corrupted via a serial process of retellings is utterly false. There are 5600 manuscripts, many dating to the first generation of contemporaries that have been collected from all over the Mediterranean area. By the time this first generation of witnesses died out, the documents were widely dispersed and beyond recall for mass editing.
These are corroborated with many other authors from that era who quoted them extensively. This was not done in a vacuum, because these Scriptures were in active use by hundreds of widely distributed churches hiding from the Roman government. There is simply no way that a deliberate or accidental change in one copy could be propagated to all copies in existence – especially since these copies were kept in hiding during the first three centuries of Christian persecution on penalty of death.
All this makes it possible to reconstruct the original Greek texts with 99.5% accuracy and virtual certainty with respect to the intended message. All mainstream editions of the Bible today were translated by separate teams of experts in the past several centuries from the original Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in a cave near Jerusalem in 1947 were over 2000 years old, yet matched today’s copies of the Old Testament exactly.
So there is zero chance of the kind of errors you are talking about being inserted without detection. It simply didn’t happen.
As for your eye witness accounts, there is a huge difference between eyewitnesses to a surprise event lasting several minutes and the accounts of a group of 11 understudies who followed the Master around for 3.5 years, heard him teach and saw his miracles repeated many time each day - and then continued on for decades traveling and teaching and writing about what they had learned. It's not hard at all to imagine that their accounts were accurate, especially since they were promised supernatural help in recalling all that Jesus had done and said. Not to even mention Paul, who studied under the legendary Rabbi Gamaliel and was the leading "Rhodes Scholar" of his generation.
So what is your point?
That the bible is the ultimate truth?
The Bible is everything that God wants us to know about Him at this time.
Agreed!
No it has not been changed because the author has not and will not change