Atheist Question #4: How can you take the Bible literally when it’s been translated so many times?

A tangled mess of a question with a great answer.

This is Part 4 of our series on common objections to Christianity. You can find Part 3 here.

Sometimes, an atheist will ask a question about the Bible that sounds something like this: “How can you take the Bible literally when it’s been translated so many times?”

Now, in your daily life, if a skeptic or atheist ever asks you a question like this, the best immediate response is to answer with a question: “What do you mean by that?” I’ve chosen to take this question as-is from this MSN article listing common questions atheists have about Christianity because I think it’s representative of the muddled objections that atheists wrestle with.

However, when you really stop and think about the question, it’s a mess. It’s really a mashup of multiple other legitimate questions thrown together as some sort of objection. Let’s see if we can pull it apart and answer those legitimate questions.

Translation vs Transmission

First, we need to make sure we understand the words “translation” and “transmission.” Those are two very important concepts when it comes to understanding the Bible, but they are very different things.

Translation occurs when someone converts a document from one language to another. The goal of translation is to communicate the same concepts, ideas, and emotions as the original document did to its original readers to a new group of readers in a new language.

When Bibles are translated, the task of the translator is to convert from Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) into something like English, Spanish, or Hindi. Sometimes, other old translations are consulted to see how other translators rendered particular passages. For instance, the Septuagint is a third-century Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and is often consulted to help understand the Hebrew. The Vulgate is a fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible and is consulted for similar reasons. But all modern translations start with the Hebrew and Greek texts as the primary sources.

Thus, in general, one does not create a Spanish translation by looking at a French translation that was created by looking at a German translation that was created by looking at a Korean translation that was created from the Hebrew and Greek. That just isn’t done. The reason is that some concepts don’t translate with 100 percent fidelity simply because of linguistic and cultural differences. This is a fundamental problem with all translation, whether it’s translation for modern business language or translation of the Bible. Some words and idioms just don’t have a natural equivalent in the target language.

For instance, imagine you had the task of trying to translate an Inuit description of a snowy hunting experience into the language of a remote Brazilian Amazon tribe. Inuits have multiple words for snow that describe it in great detail. Even English does’t capture the nuance. We might have “snow” and “wet snow” and “dry snow,” and such, but that’s about it. The remote Amazon tribal language, however, probably has no word for snow at all because they have never experienced it. It’s going to take a lot of words to try to express the Inuit ideas in the Amazonian language.

Similar things happen in Biblical translation as well, so no translation between any two languages can ever be perfect. Rather than losing the fidelity of a translation by going through multiple intermediate languages, each with their own loss of fidelity, translators always try to go back to the original Hebrew and Greek that the Biblical authors used and translate from that into the target language.

So, the first issue we can deal with for our atheist friend is the issue of taking the Bible literally given that “it’s been translated so many times.” Now that you understand how translation works, the problem with the statement is probably obvious. Translating a work any number of times says nothing about how reliable the original work is, whether the translation is well done, or whether we should “take it literally.” If someone goes about making a German translation of the Bible, for instance, it doesn’t matter whether other people have made 1000 different translations of the Bible before. The German translator is going to go back to the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and converting those into German.

Now, let’s talk about “transmission.” Before the invention of the printing press, the Bible was copied by hand. Jewish scribes and Christian monks would spend a lifetime creating just a handful of copies of these works. This was necessary to spread the Bible to other areas and to give more synagogues and churches their own copy of the scriptures. Nobody had their own personal copies of the scriptures. They were too rare and valuable for that.

Later, after the invention of the printing press, Bibles could be mass produced (where “mass production” was still quite slow by modern standards, but lightning quick compared to hand copies). In fact, the first large work that Gutenberg reproduced on his printing press was the Latin Vulgate in the 1450s. There are 21 complete copies of that Gutenberg Bible that survive today, with 49 complete or substantially complete partial copies. If you want to see one, the US Library of Congress has a full copy on display. The New York Public Library has a partial copy.

As a result of this copying, there are several thousand copies of the scriptures that survive today. Some are complete texts while others are small fragments of larger works. They come from different time periods as the Bible was copied by scribes and monks. In fact, compared to other ancient works, we have far more copies of the Bible than anything else. The next runner up is Homer’s Iliad, but it’s a distant second.

As an aside, think how blessed you are today to have multiple Bibles using multiple modern translations on your shelf. That’s something that just wasn’t possible until the 20th century. In the 18th and 19th century, people might have a family Bible, but rarely would anybody have multiple copies. And at that time you would have been limited to just the King James Version. Now, you can access any Bible translation you want in multiple languages instantaneously using your smartphone. What a time to be alive!

So, now that we have those definitions for “translation” and “transmission” established, let’s answer some very reasonable questions that someone might want to know about the whole process of Biblical translation and transmission.

Has the transmission of the Bible through history been reliable?

When an atheist asks about the Bible being “translated so many times,” they are typically asking about copying, not translation. If you ask, “What do you mean by that?” the response will often be something like, “Well, you know all those scribes were copying the Bible over and over again. How do you know that they didn’t start adding and deleting pieces? Or maybe they just made mistakes.”

Aha! Now we know that the person is really talking about transmission, not translation.

A very legitimate question is, “How we do know that the Bible that we’re reading today is a faithful copy of the original, that it was transmitted faithfully from the original manuscript to what we have today?”

In grade school, you might have played the game of “Telephone,” where you take a line of children, whisper something into the ear of the first child in the line and tell them to pass it on to the next child and the next, and then everybody laughs when it comes out the other end of the line completely garbled. That’s a great example of poor transmission. How do we know that the Bible didn’t go through the same process? Maybe the Bible said something completely different hundreds or thousands of years ago, but it has been so corrupted that we have no idea if it’s really the same or not.

Well, the short answer is that unlike school children playing a game, the scribes and monks were a lot more careful. The Jewish rules for copying the Old Testament were extremely strict. You can see them here, reproduced below:

Jewish and Masoretic Rules for Copying the Scripture

According to Hebrew and Talmudic tradition

• Must be written on the skins of clean animals

• Must be prepared for synagogue use by a Jew only

• Must be fastened together with strings taken from clean animals.

• Each skin must contain an exact number of columns, which must be equal throughout the entire manuscript

• The length of each column must be between 48 and 60 lines.

• The breadth of each column must consist of 30 letters

• The whole copy must be first lined, if 3 words were written without a line it was considered worthless.

• The ink must be black only and prepared according to a special recipe that was used only for copying of scripture

• The original used to make the copy must be authentic and must not be deviated from the copyist and the scribe must say each word aloud as he wrote it.

• No word or letter could ever be written from memory, the scribe must always look first at the original before writing his copy.

• A space of a hair or thread must intervene between each consonant

• A space of the breadth of 9 consonants must come between each section

• No word must ever touch another

• A space of 3 lines must come between every book

• The 5th book of Moses (Deuteronomy) must end exactly with a line

• Before copying, the scribe must wash his whole body

• While copying, the scribe must only write the name of God with a pen newly dipped into the ink

• Each time the scribe came across the Hebrew word for God, he had to wipe his pen clean. And when he came across the name of God, Jehovah (YHWH), he had to wash his whole body before he could write it.

• Should a king address the scribe while writing that name he must take no notice of him

• If a sheet of parchment had one mistake on it, the sheet was condemned. If there were three mistakes found on any page, the whole manuscript was condemned.

• Each scroll had to be checked within thirty days of its writing, or it was considered unholy.

• Every word and every letter was counted. If a letter or word was omitted, the manuscript was condemned.

In particular, note that there were rules of reverence (washing, dipping the pen, ignoring the king while writing the name of God, etc.). This was serious business, not taken lightly. The goal was not to go fast and get it done. This was holy work, to be approached with reverence and done slowly and carefully. In particular, the Jewish scribes were not playing the children’s game of Telephone.

In addition to taking the task seriously, the scribes also built error detection mechanisms into the process. They would check certain characteristics of the text that would show whether any characters or words had been inserted or removed. If any mistakes were found, the errant pieces of the document or even the whole document would be destroyed. Can you imagine spending potentially years copying a long book and then having to destroy all of it because you made three mistakes on the last page? That would be heartbreaking.

Now, does this prove that no errors or changes could creep into the text? No, it doesn’t. But it does say that accuracy was valued and the process was designed to look for errors, catch them, and destroy copies with such errors so that they would not be repeated.

The next logical question is, “Did it work?” The short answer is yes.

You might have heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are Biblical manuscripts that were found in some caves near the Dead Sea in Israel by Arab shepherd boys in 1946. Additional manuscripts were found in other caves nearby over the next 10 years.

Once discovered, the Dead Sea Scrolls immediately caused an uproar in Biblical circles because they were the oldest manuscript copies of many books of the Bible that we had. The Dead Sea manuscripts dated back to between the third century BC to the first century BC (so, hundreds of years before Jesus, in some cases).

At the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the previously oldest existing copy of the Hebrew manuscripts (the Old Testament) was the Masoretic Text, dating to the 10th century AD. Thus, the Dead Sea Scrolls were more than 1000 years older than the Masoretic Text.

Immediately, scholars started to compare the two. So, how different were the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text? Was there a lot of drift over that 1000+ year difference?

In A General Introduction to the Bible (Geisler and Nix, Revised and Expanded, 1986), Geisler and Nix write (p. 382):

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have Hebrew manuscripts one thousand years earlier than the great Masoretic Text manuscripts, enabling them to check on the fidelity of the Hebrew text. The result of comparative studies reveals that there is a word-for-word identity in more than 95 percent of the cases, and the 5 percent variation consists mostly of slips of the pen and spelling. To be specific, the Isaiah scroll (1Q Isa) from Qumran led the Revised Standard Version translators to make only thirteen changes from the Masoretic Text; eight of those were known from ancient versions, and few of them were significant. More specifically, of the 166 Hebrew words in Isaiah 53 only seventeen Hebrew letters in 1Q Isb differ from the Masoretic Text. Ten letters are a matter of spelling, four are stylistic changes, and the other three compose the word for “light” (add in v.11), which does not affect the meaning greatly. Furthermore that word is also found in that verse in the LXX and 1Q Isa.

Note that “1Q Isa,” “1Q Isb,” and “LXX” are scholarly identifiers of specific ancient Hebrew texts. The LXX is the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, mentioned previously.

So, what is being said here is that while there were some differences, there weren’t that many and where they existed, they were largely inconsequential, being just spelling changes or obvious “typos.” Importantly, there were no major changes in doctrine. Many of the changes were already known from other fragments.

That means the Masoretic Texts drifted just slightly from the Dead Sea Scrolls over the span of more than 1000 years. Imagine a game of “telephone” with 1000 children and finding that the message relayed at the end by the 1000th child is 95 percent identical to that relayed by the first child, with the differences mostly being related to spelling. It’s an amazing accomplishment.

But it’s also the sort of accomplishment you would expect if the Bible is the Word of God.

In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls helped counter other Biblical criticisms. Prior to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, critics had argued that Isaiah 53 must have been written after Christ’s death because it was so accurate in terms of the prophesy being fulfilled by Jesus. There was no way, the critics charged, that it could have been written before the events described in the gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls proved that criticism completely wrong — the Messianic prophesies had been written hundreds of years before Jesus was born.

BTW, if the 5 percent differences still bother you, there are more recent examples of similar changes between ancient and modern documents. Take this particular transcription of the Declaration of Independence, for instance. The Declaration is one of the primary founding documents of the United States. That transcription at the National Archives faithfully transcribes the original document’s spelling and punctuation. While the way that we spell some words has changed over the last 250 years, you would have no trouble reading it.

In the second paragraph, for instance, it says,

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Note the “hath shewn.” Today, we would say “has shown.” Is there a difference between a modern version of the original Declaration of Independence and the original? Yes. Does it really matter? No. Languages just evolve over time and we spell things differently now than we did back then. The same thing happened with Hebrew as well.

Now, are all the changes between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text just spelling? No, there are some cases of text being added or deleted between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text, but they are not common and they are not particularly significant (they don’t change the fundamental doctrines or message of the Bible).

If you want to read more about the specific differences, here are some resources.

• Dead Sea Insights: Allows you to interactively explore all the verses with differences and see what those differences are.

• Are The Dead Sea Scrolls’ Biblical Texts Exactly Identical To The Hebrew Text Of The Old Testament? Shows a few examples of the various types of differences.

• The Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls has quite a large number of variations from the Masoretic text–as many as 2600. And that is just Isaiah. Does this not say the OT is poorly copied? This answers the question that is posed in the title.

• The Journey of the Bible’s Manuscripts: This is a comprehensive look at where the Bible came from and discusses many subjects beyond what we have covered here.

• A General Introduction to the Bible: This is a full book that describes all manner of Biblical topics in far greater detail than any other reference. This is highly recommended if one wants to go deep.

Now, having said all that, you might notice that most of what we’ve talked about here concerns the Old Testament. One question you might have is whether the New Testament has been similarly preserved. In fact, it has. We have a great number of New Testament manuscript copies, some from the early second century AD, within 100 years of the last books of the New Testament having been written. In the interest of time, I’ll skip going deep into those. You can read more the New Testament side of things in The Journey of the Bible’s Manuscripts and A General Introduction to the Bible, at the links above.

Which Biblical manuscripts do translators use?

One logical question you might have is that given we have multiple copies of various Biblical manuscripts, which ones are primarily used as the source for the various English translations that we have today?

The short answer is that most modern Bible translators use all the different copies that are available at the time that they do the translation, but that they generally choose a primary source manuscript based on their opinion of how close it is likely to be to the original, first manuscript, and that’s a bit of a judgement call on their part based on Biblical scholarship.

For instance, the King James Version (KJV) was translated mostly from the Masoretic Text for the Old Testament and a manuscript called the Textus Receptus (which means the “received text”) for the New Testament. The KJV was first translated in 1611 and has had updates since (the KJV you can purchase today was revised in 1769).

Thus, the KJV translators didn’t have access to modern Biblical archaeological finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1611 or 1769. The KJV translators had to make do with the best manuscripts that they had at the time.

Note: Many people love the KJV and I don’t want anybody to think I’m casting shade on it. The KJV was an amazing work of Biblical scholarship for its time and remains a solid translation to this day. Many people still use it daily and it serves them well. Personally, I choose other translations for two primary reasons. First, I’d like to get the benefit of the latest Biblical scholarship which the KJV translators just didn’t have access to. Second, I find the 17th century language of the KJV to be difficult to read and comprehend easily. It’s just a personal preference, however. If you love the KJV, that’s great; just keep reading it!

Now, I also said that a translator will generally pick a primary source manuscript based on their opinion of how close it is likely to be to the original, first manuscript. This brings us to the topic of “textual criticism.”

In short, textual criticism is the process of trying to deduce what an original manuscript said by trying to trace back lineages of copies using their differences and changes introduced in the text over time.

It’s a bit like determining a person’s ancestry based on looking at the mutations in the person’s DNA. Once a mutation is introduced, you would expect the descendants of that person to carry the same mutation. By looking at the times where certain mutations entered the gene pool, we can see when various people groups diverged in human history. Europeans will have one set of mutations, for instance, while Asians will have others.

Similarly, when scholars see a change get introduced into a manuscript, they expect later, downstream copies of that manuscript to carry the same change. In this way, they can try to reconstruct the tree of copies and work their way back to the trunk, which is probably the closest copy to the original manuscript (what is called an “autograph”).

Any good, modern translation (e.g., ESV, NASB, NLT, NIV, KJV, NKJV, etc.) will have an introductory section before the book of Genesis that describes the translation process and the original source manuscripts that were the primary manuscripts for the translation. Further, modern translations will include footnotes where textual differences occur.

For example, the Preface to the ESV has a section titled Textual Basis and Resources:

Textual Basis and Resources

The ESV is based on the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible as found in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (5th ed., 1997), and on the Greek text in the 2014 editions of the Greek New Testament (5th corrected ed.), published by the United Bible Societies (UBS), and Novum Testamentum Graece (28th ed., 2012), edited by Nestle and Aland. The currently renewed respect among Old Testament scholars for the Masoretic text is reflected in the ESV’s attempt, wherever possible, to translate difficult Hebrew passages as they stand in the Masoretic text rather than resorting to emendations or to finding an alternative reading in the ancient versions. In exceptional, difficult cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, and other sources were consulted to shed possible light on the text, or, if necessary, to support a divergence from the Masoretic text. Similarly, in a few difficult cases in the New Testament, the ESV has followed a Greek text different from the text given preference in the UBS/Nestle-Aland 28th edition. Throughout, the translation team has benefited greatly from the massive textual resources that have become readily available recently, from new insights into biblical laws and culture, and from current advances in Hebrew and Greek lexicography and grammatical understanding.

So, the ESV translators primary used the Masoretic Hebrew text and Greek New Testament published by the United Bible Societies and Novum Testamentum Graece from Nestle and Aland. But they also used “the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, and other sources.” Further, they have incorporated the latest scholarship on Biblical laws and culture, and even new scholarship around Hebrew and Greek lexicography and grammar.

The ESV Preface also has a section titled Textual Footnotes.

Textual Footnotes

The footnotes that are included in most editions of the ESV are therefore an integral part of the ESV translation, informing the reader of textual variations and difficulties and showing how these have been resolved by the ESV translation team. In addition to this, the footnotes indicate significant alternative readings and occasionally provide an explanation for technical terms or for a difficult reading in the text.

For example, take a look at the ending of the book of Mark, in chapter 16. Mark 16 has a few different variant endings. The ESV translators haven’t hidden this from the reader. They footnote it prominently and explain it:

Mark 16:9 Some manuscripts end the book with 16:8; others include verses 9–20 immediately after verse 8. At least one manuscript inserts additional material after verse 14; some manuscripts include after verse 8 the following: But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. These manuscripts then continue with verses 9–20

Another example is found at the end of John chapter 7 and the start of chapter 8. This section describes the story of Jesus being asked his opinion of the woman caught in adultery and him telling her accusers, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” The ESV translators include a footnote that says:

John 7:53 Some manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11; others add the passage here or after 7:36 or after 21:25 or after Luke 21:38, with variations in the text

Again, the translators aren’t hiding these differences from the reader. They are providing the reader with context about what they see in the set of manuscripts that they are using.

Other quality translations provide similar footnotes for variant readings, indicating differences.

At first, you might be worried about these larger changes. Clearly, there are multiple verses being added or deleted here. These are not simple typos or slips of the scribes pen; they are deliberate additions or changes to the text. But the question that we have to ask is whether they are doctrinally significant? In both cases, they aren’t.

The longer ending of Mark provides more information and ties up the story a bit better. People have speculated that Mark himself might have changed the ending of the book because the short ending felt a bit abrupt. He may have released what today might be called a “second edition” of the book. Or perhaps it was a later scribe who took it upon himself to smooth things out.

John’s story of the woman caught in adultery is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible (and one of my personal favorites). Even if it isn’t in some manuscripts, the story is totally in agreement with Jesus’s character as described throughout the gospels. So, did John add it later or was it another scribe? We simply don’t know. But as with Mark 16, the important question is do these differences change the fundamental message and doctrines of the gospels or the Bible? No, not at all. There are plenty of other examples of Jesus behaving in a way that is consistent with the story in John 8.

Conclusion

Whew! That was a lot of information and this post has grown quite long. This is an important subject, though, so I wanted to give it a solid discussion. And yet there is so much more that could have been said. If you are interested, I suggest you examine the resources I linked to, previously.

Okay, let’s wrap it up.

In A General Introduction to the Bible, page 382, Geisler and Nix quote Sir Frederic Kenyon as saying, “The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.”

That’s a huge claim, but as you can see that the evidence supports it.

The critics say that various unnamed scribes were making things up or that huge mistakes accumulated over the centuries, corrupting the Bible. “It’s just like the game of Telephone,” they say. “You have no idea what the original autographs said.”

But scholars know that the transmission of the Bible through the centuries has occurred with exceptionally high fidelity. While there are sometimes substantial differences between manuscript copies, most differences are changes in spelling and simple, obvious mistakes. Where substantial changes have occurred, modern Bible translations provide footnotes that explain what the different manuscripts say so that readers can make their own decisions about the variants.

In no cases are the differences in translations so substantial as to overturn a major Christian doctrine. As Kenyon said, you can have confidence that your Bible is a reliable copy of God’s Word.

---

If this article spoke to you, leave me a comment and let me know. Your feedback is always appreciated. Does somebody in your life need to read this? Share it with them (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.)! If this spoke to you, please subscribe to get future articles. And always like and “restack” this post in Substack to help others find it.