Another example of seemingly uninspired content in the Bible are scribal additions that were made over time.[1] You might be tempted to think that such have all been corrected in the modern era, but let’s consider the evidence.
Textual criticism is the study and comparison of ancient manuscripts, and the differences between them. And there are many differences, or variants. As all ancient documents were hand-copied for a millennium and a half past the time Christ, there were naturally errors introduced. If you doubt it, you can try it, and discover just how difficult it is to copy a text by hand without introducing errors. We also find intentional alterations in the Bible. Apologists argue, with some justification, that most of the contents of the Bible have been remarkably well preserved. However, I believe that they are answering the wrong question. From the perspective of examining plenary idea of inspiration, it seems to me that the question to be asking is whether the Bible in your hand contains the unadulterated text of its original authors, without subtraction or addition. Or even more pointedly, what were the biblical documents available to various people groups down through history? Were they corrupt, or divinely protected from corruption?
New Testament Alterations
Let’s focus on the New Testament first. Although there are thousands of textual variants across the hundreds of the most ancient manuscripts,[2] most scribal errors are simple mistakes, and most of those are easily corrected. Just like when someone makes a typo today, we can generally tell what they meant to say. But there are some intentional alterations. Most of these can be eliminated by examining the earliest manuscripts, some of which go back to the 4th, 3rd and even 2nd century CE, depending on the book. The questions we should ask are 1) were some of the alterations made early enough that we don’t have enough textual evidence to correct them, and 2) were some of them left in the Bible? I will be making a few salient notes on textual criticism below, related to understanding the ancients’ understanding of the nature of inspiration, but it should be noted that this barely scratches the surface of textual criticism.
Among the significant variants, many are found in the gospels, and appear to be a scribe letting his memory of a parallel passage from another gospel affect his writing of the one that he is supposed to be copying, which is shorter. Let’s look at a couple of examples of this. Matthew 5:44 does not contain the expression “do good to those who hate you” or “spitefully use you”; however, Luke 6:27-28 does include these in a parallel account of this same teaching; but in some manuscripts the scribe wrote them into Matthew, most likely due to having memorized Luke’s version. Some manuscripts of Matthew 17:21 include Mark’s comment (9:29) that a particular type of demon was not cast out except with prayer and fasting, but it was not originally in Matthew. Some manuscripts of Matthew also have “For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost” inserted into 18:11,[3] which is originally from Luke 19:10 and not in Matthew. There are many more like this, but these three examples are enough to illustrate this type of error.
You may be wondering at this point how we know which is the spurious variant and which is the correct reading when comparing manuscripts. Textual criticism uses several methods, including considering the age of a manuscript; generally, older is better, but not always, because an older manuscript can of course contain an error that a later one does not. Another consideration is the overall quality of a manuscript: does it contain a large number of known spurious variants, or few? But, we don’t always know which variant is the “correct” one, and that is going to be part of my main point in this section. You may be thinking that simply “averaging” all existing manuscripts is a good idea; this has actually been done with what is called the “majority text”. However, the problem with is that most manuscripts are newer; naturally, very few of the most ancient ones have survived. By making an “averaged” collation, [4] you weight it toward the more numerous newer texts, which tend to contain the most variants. A more logical approach would be to give more weight to the most ancient manuscripts, and perhaps virtually no consideration at all to anything past, say, the 10th century.
There is an interesting phenomenon, though: almost always, when there is a meaningful scribal interpolation, the tendency is to add material. Almost never is something subtracted. Scholars note that the rare removal of material tends to occur when there is a doctrine at stake that may make some believers uncomfortable. One possible example of this is in 1 Corinthians 9:20, where I’ve placed the variant in italics: “and to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, though not being myself under the law that I might win those who are under the law.” It is of course possible that this line was lost in later manuscripts simply because an early scribe’s eye slipped and missed the line, especially since it contains several words in earlier lines; this is a frequent cause of scribal errors. But it’s also possible that it was dropped because some found the doctrine troubling. (We’ll consider more in later chapters whether Jews were still under law based on the New Testament writings.) Another possible loss of material is found where we’re told that even the Son did not know the day or the hour of the end of the age, or the destruction of the Temple, depending on which question you think Jesus was answering in Matthew 24:36.[5] A great many manuscripts omit “the Son”, but a few of the most ancient manuscripts contain it. After all, if Jesus is God, how could he not know? This passage would thus seem to fly in the face of later orthodoxy regarding the nature of the Trinity. However, it may be that this is an actual addition, not a subtraction: the original rendering may in fact be the one found in the majority of manuscripts, and the addition in the early manuscripts was simply a scribal slip that came from having memorized Mark 13:32, for which there is no doubt. So even if the book of Matthew didn’t say that Jesus did not know something, Mark did say it.
The Quality of Textual Criticism, Then and Now
We have evidence that ancient scribes knew about textual variants, and compared manuscripts at times to try to correct them.[6] However, textual criticism would not reach anywhere near the height it has today until the advent the printing press (16th century) made copying books cheaper, and the development of facsimile/photography technology in the first half of the 19th century, which increased the availability of accurate copies of ancient manuscripts. Not to mention that many of the most ancient manuscripts were not even discovered until the 19th and 20th centuries, or at least not available to the public until then, such as the famous Codex Vaticanus (ca. 4th century), which was only made available to the public in the 20th century.
For the last half a millennium, there have been tremendous leaps forward in textual criticism, but most have been much more recent. When the renowned scholar Erasmus (15th century CE) produced the Greek Bible that was the basis for the Textus Receptus[7]—one of the first “modern”, printed collations of the Greek Bible—he had access to and used only a few, late manuscripts, and he ignored older, better manuscripts.[8] Because it was based on so few and poor-quality manuscripts, the Textus Receptus was riddled with verifiably spurious variants. There was one variant that Erasmus was even pressured to include in the 3rd edition, even though the earliest Greek manuscript supporters could find that included it was written in the 16th century, because it bolstered the doctrine of the Trinity (I John 5:7b-8a, the so-called Johannine Comma); this variant was an obvious insertion motivated by the Bible’s frustrating lack of explicit teachings on the Trinity, such as how Jesus came from and talked to God, yet was also God, yet God was still one. This spurious variant can still be found in the King James Version and other older translations. Not only were men like William Tyndale murdered for translating the Bible during this period, but men who spent countless hours manually producing textual collations, with textual variants noted, would be attacked for the mere suggestion that their copy of the word of God contained errors; even as late as the 18th century, John Mills, who collated 82 Greek manuscripts, was vilified by those who claimed that the Textus Receptus was the error-free word of God. The high quality of the Greek collations today has only been fully possible for the last few decades, after centuries of the accumulation of scholarship, globalization and access to more manuscripts, computer technology that allows for much faster comparison of variants, and an ever-growing field of specialist scholars to work on the matter. And still, misinformation abounds, especially in translation debates.
The Persistent Love of Old Tradition
One would think that lovers of the Bible would be all about producing and following the best collations of the most ancient documents in the original languages of the Bible. What we actually find speaks more to human psychology, and our deep-seated need for the comfort of tradition, than to a more powerful interest in what the original biblical authors wrote. People want the Bible they grew up hearing; to change it to make it more accurate makes them very uncomfortable. We even find bald admissions from believing scholars regarding wanting to uphold the traditions of particular texts that were not produced by the authors of the Bible. A good example is one we’ve already noted, that the Textus Receptus was simply accepted—in spite of much evidence to the contrary—as the best possible collation, or even the error-free words of the originals.
The love of added textual traditions over the original texts can certainly be seen in the earliest English translations that continue to influence modern ones to this day. In their introduction to the 1611 King James translation, the translators defend their rationale for a new translation, which clearly had traditionalist critics. Ironically, as they argued against those who clung to textual traditions, they also pay homage to the traditions of translations that came before, and consider them a source for their own translation, in addition to the manuscripts in the original language. Read that last sentence again. And in fact, the translators were not free to create a new translation at all; the very first rule they were given (from the government, if any political conservatives are still reading this heretical book[9]) was that their translation must rely chiefly on the Anglican Bishop’s Bible, and be “as little altered as the truth of the Original will permit”! If this does not smack of putting later tradition above the love for the original contents of the biblical documents, I don’t know what would. The translators of the 1881 edition[10] testify that all English translations, include the King James, relied on one of the earliest English translations, by William Tyndale, whose popularity may have been due to the quality of his translation, but was probably bolstered by the tendency for time to establish tradition, and the fact that he was martyred for his efforts and “the cause”. Recall that translation was a favorite activity and rallying point of Protestantism, and revolutionary movements can make a thing, even if that thing is true or good, an outright fetish. The 1881 translators (or should we just call them “revisers”?) are so bold as to call Tyndale’s the “true primary Version”.
Even though flawed translations have been the only access to the Bible that most people throughout history have had, let’s return to the extant documents in the original languages, of which those translations can only be at least as flawed. For centuries, all most biblical linguists could have access to were flawed manuscripts which could usually not be collated with more than a few other copies. It was simply the nature of a world in which cheap international travel and photography did not exist. If you wanted to see a particular manuscript, you had to physically go to it, and hope that you could get access to it, which wasn’t always possible either. Some of the most flawed manuscripts were in the West, such as the Codex Bezae. The West’s favorite and only church-approved translation for more than a millennium was the Latin Vulgate (translated 4th century CE), which had many flaws, including spurious variants and mistranslations which would bolster several doctrines not particularly well supported by the rest of Scripture.[11] In fact, Erasmus’ Greek bible that became the Textus Receptus was not chiefly intended to be a Greek collation, although it is primarily viewed that way today; it was actually intended to be an improved Latin translation over the Vulgate, in which he included a Greek interlinear. In fact, it was originally written with a goal to harmonize the Greek to the Latin. Read that last sentence again, recalling that the New Testament’s original documents were written in Greek. Western theologians for hundreds of years believed that the Latin translation was superior to manuscripts that were actual copies of the original Greek![12]Even Erasmus, who was perhaps “liberal” for his time for wanting to clean up the Latin, explained away many of the beloved Vulgate’s errors by claiming that they were actually scribal errors that came in after Jerome. Again, we see yet another example of tradition that gave them the text that they grew up on and therefore loved and were fed by church officials, not the text of the first century that they claimed to believe came from God himself. Part of the reason for a reliance on the Latin was due to scholarship in the West experiencing a severe decline, first after the fall of Rome in the West, after which there was a severe decline in the ability to read Greek at all, and again later due to the Great Schism that split the West from the Greek-reading East. The decline of Greek scholarship also included the decline in the skill to read Koine Greek, as the West primarily maintained an ability to read only Classical Greek, the Greek of Homer; they were so ignorant of the differences of Koine Greek that some even proposed that they were peculiarities of the Holy Spirit’s style.[13] Ironically, the Vulgate was originally intended as the Bible of the masses, making the Bible more available; yet, ironically, as Latin died as a language, the tradition of using the Vulgate because a barrier to the common people understanding even that flawed lens to see the contents Bible, unless you think the priests did a better job of explaining it, as they had become the only conduit for most people to receive Scripture.
We should not lose perspective of just how far we’ve come in textual criticism, and that most theologians throughout history had access to much more limited manuscripts, which were typically of considerable lesser quality. And the vast majority of poor people throughout history had no access at all to the Bible, except what their priest or preacher delivered to them orally. And the overwhelmingly vast majority have always had that one persistent barrier to the original words: translation, which can never be a perfect rendering.
These caveats should be kept in mind for anyone attempting to make the argument that every word of God was inspired and preserved. Is the general story of Jesus from the New Testament pretty well known throughout most of the world, and pretty well depicted in any of the mainstream translations? Yes, absolutely. (Or, at least it was until the previous generation, who for the first time have very little knowledge of the Bible, and when they do use it often only rely on paraphrases masquerading as translations.) Is the majority of the wording and meaning of the most ancient manuscripts we have available in most modern translations?[14] Yes. But is 100 percent of the wording preserved, even if only in the Greek texts upon which the translations are based? Absolutely not. So let’s look at some of the most significant spurious variants which persist. Then let’s get personal. Let’s talk about your Bible.
There is another variant that, though short like the Johannine comma, has special significance for our purposes. In John 5:2-4, we see an account of sick, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. Why were they there? Scribes at some point, whether based on an actual account or invented whole cloth, inserted the story explaining why they were waiting for the moving of the water (v.3b), because an angel would come down to stir it, and the first person to get in after the moving of the water would be healed (v.4); this explanation is still found in the King James Version. The passage is lacking from the “oldest and best manuscripts”, as textual critics often express it. However, what I’d like to focus on is that this addition probably entered the text in two stages. Our earliest manuscripts that said that they were waiting for the moving of the water date back to the late 4th century, without the addition of verse 4’s extra details as to why;[15] however, such a comment would be even more ambiguous, for it begs the question “why were they waiting on the water to stir?” Before that addition, we were only left with wondering why there were so many invalids there, but with no need for supernatural explanation; for instance, maybe there was a group of people who cared for them there. Maybe it was simply a high traffic area where they could beg. But with the addition of the detail of them waiting for the stirring of the water, we are left to wonder what that is all about. It seems quite possible that a second scribe added the miraculous explanation of John 5:4; manuscripts that include both variants only go back to the ninth century.[16] After that, it became quite popular in medieval manuscripts of the West, as one would imagine why believers would want to include it, much as the Catholic church likes to have sites around the world where miracles have been confirmed.
Did Scribes Add Significant Parts of Your Bible?
So are there are any major spurious variants that persist in Bibles today? Just how strong are textual traditions that significantly alter the original text, and how has it outweighed professed love of the word of God? I’m going to make the argument that love of altered texts, of tradition, is stronger, and to prove it, we’ll turn to your Bible. Any Bible you choose, more than likely. I’ve already pointed out some major flaws in the “older” translations, such as the King James Version, that relied on the Textus Receptus. Since those are taken care of, let’s pick from modern translations. You pick any you like, and odds are, they’ll contain the following spurious variants.
I’m also going to discuss only the most significant ones from the New Testament for now, against which we have the best textual evidence, since my main purpose is to get the reader to see the best evidence against perfect preservation of the word of God (at least in terms of popular access and knowledge), even into modern times. And when I say most significant, I will gauge that by the length of the variant, since I am not making theological judgments here (mostly?). You may find more important variants based on your theology among the shorter ones that I’m not going to cover. And again, I am not arguing against divine inspiration of the Bible. I am merely showing that some modern ideas of what inspiration must look like (e.g., 100% verbatim preservation) cannot be defended.
Out of all the suspected spurious variants that persist even in modern translations, there are only a few that have any major length or significance.[17] Despite their inclusions, modern Bibles will often include marginal notes indicating lack of early manuscript evidence for them; sometimes the passages themselves will be entirely bracketed. Yet two of these variants are still left in virtually all modern Bibles!
The first variant is last 12 verses of Mark (9-20). However, although some scholars state conclusively that the end of Mark is proven to be spurious, and that “all scholars agree” about this, there are actually some scholars who argue that there is some textual evidence that the ending may have in fact been original. I’ve written on this topic in a previous book. So we will leave this one alone here.
The second variant of significant length tends to make believers very uncomfortable when they find out that it does not belong in their Bible. It is one of the most beloved, touching, and repeated stories of the New Testament, the account of the woman caught in adultery whom Jesus forgives (John 7:53-8:11). I can recall myriads of sermons that drew upon this account. However, the passage is not found in the most ancient manuscripts that we have of John, except in Codex Vaticanus, where it is marked as a known variant. There is also internal evidence that it was an insertion, as it breaks the narrative between John 7:52 to John 8:12. The church fathers quoted from and wrote extensive commentaries on the New Testament scripture, which are also excellent sources to know which books were considered canonical early on; however, no extra-biblical sources quote this passage as authentic before the 12th century, although there is evidence that it was known by the 2nd century.[18] In the 4th century, we see both Jerome and Augustine arguing for its inclusion; however, their argument itself shows that there was in fact some known textual evidence against it, and that there were those who opposed its inclusion. We should also note that the vast majority of parishioners from the time that the Vulgate was the dominant Bible of the West, even until today, were not and are not told about textual flaws. What they thought was Scripture, in at least some cases, was in fact scribal insertion. And as with many textual additions to the Bible that we’ll consider throughout this book, the story of the woman caught in adultery is very moving emotionally.
A third significant variant is the text of Luke 22:43-44, which mentions an angel appearing to strengthen Jesus right before the crucifixion, and his prayer “in agony”. This passage is omitted from codex Vaticanus (early 4th century), and Alexandrinus (5th century), and marked as a known variant in Sinaiticus (4th century), the “big three” of the most ancient complete (or nearly complete) Bibles that have been found.[19] Papyrus 75 (ca. 3rd century) also excludes it. The only manuscripts that include the passage are later, although Origen (3rd century) does know of it.
I’ve seen many believing scholars argue that the end of Mark, or even the Johannine comma, do not affect any essential doctrine, much less the passage about the woman caught in adultery. In fact, since the story of the adulterous woman was known by the second century, some believers argue that it could have actually happened, so it’s not a big deal that it was inserted, even if it was not inspired. Believers will also often argue that the textual evidence for the overwhelming majority of the rest of the New Testament is pretty firm, mostly going back to the 2nd through the 4th centuries. All well and good. My goal is not to make people question their faith. However, I do not believe one can hold these positions while simultaneously treating every verse of the Bible as if they are without a doubt God speaking it to us, which is the typical fundamentalist approach. When a preacher uses the account of the woman caught in adultery in a sermon, for instance, with no reference to its possible spurious nature, but only a reverence for it as the unadulterated word of God, what is really going on? Love of tradition, or divine revelation? The answer can also be found in the archaic translations that are often read, usually in the most conservative churches, which no one seems to be able to understand anymore.
I would like to emphasize this one main point related to the nature of inspiration: it cannot include a guarantee that the divine words were given and preserved for all time and for all peoples, without even considering those who have not had access to the books of the Bible, which could arguably be the vast majority of the entire human race for as long as the biblical documents have existed. And just one of the reasons, presented here, is simple: we have ample evidence that the words of the Bible were corrupted, at least in a few significant places. And so far, we’ve only looked at the New Testament, which is the newest part of the Bible. The situation is even worse with the much older Hebrew Bible. To read about that, make sure to check out my book here: When Humans Wrote Scripture.
[1] Though such alterations were not always considered uninspired, as we’ll see below.
[2] Most books on textual criticism will inform you that there are thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament documents. However, the vast majority are produced after the 10th century, and therefore not particularly relevant for investigating most variants; the hundreds we have before that time are quite sufficient in most cases.
[3] In case you’re wondering why most modern Bible translations are missing verses, such as Matthew 18:11, it’s simply because the textual evidence does not support it. The fact that they were included in earlier translations shows just how far textual criticism has come.
[4] A collation is a single text produced by comparing multiple manuscripts, usually with notes regarding significant variants. There are tremendous debates about whether the newer collations, used for modern translations, are better, or are motivated by liberal theologians. I’ll save that debate for later. But I will drop this here: Wescott and Hort’s overreliance on Alexandrian texts did not significantly influence the latest editions of the Nestle-Aland collation, nor can you find significant—much less systemic—evidence of theological bias there. You will, however, find quite a few examples of theological bias in many translations, especially in those older ones which relied on the Textus Receptus, which is full of errors, many of which are in fact due to theological bias. Most modern translations, so vilified by some traditionalists, are not based on Wescott-Hort, contrary to the popular dogma.
[5] I say this ironically, since there is a common teaching that he’s answering two questions. It’s quite obvious what event Jesus is referring to that he doesn’t know the hour of, which will be examined in chapter 8.
[6] Cours de Linguistique Générale. Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916.
[7] The Greek text that was the basis for most Bible translations until just the last century or so.
[8] Tyndale’s Testament, Gergely Juhász, Guido Latré, p. 28. Also, see the introduction to the 1881 revision that gave us the English Revised Version.
[9] For the benefit of any reader not familiar with the United States, note that political conservativism here usually goes hand in hand with biblical fundamentalism, at least in the South.
[10] Which gave us the English Revised Version.
[11] One is found in Hebrews 10:12, which, instead of saying that Jesus offered sacrifice for sin, states that he is “offering” sacrifice, which is still the rendering in the Douay-Rheims version. Hebrews 1:3 was similarly mistranslated. Thus it came to be taught that the eucharist continued the offering that cleansed sins, and Jesus’s sacrifice was just a preliminary act. One could see why the potential cheapening of the sacrifice of Christ might be an issue for many Christians, or how requiring the populace to come to the priest for that eucharist would tend to increase that institution’s power over them; and of course, to the Western anti-authoritarian mind, anything that wrongfully increases a particular group’s political power is almost always considered de facto an evil.
[12] Recall that the church in the West was at odds with the one in the East, and that what the “other” group uses has always been considered yucky/icky (to borrow an expression from Professor Shaye Cohen), so there was a strong opposition in the West to using Greek like “those heretics” in the East. Erasmus was quite the revolutionary for even wanting to learn it, and was criticized by his contemporaries for relying on philology for understanding variants rather than theology! The difference between Koine and Classical Greek was sort of like a modern English speaker trying to understand a Shakespearean play (16th century English). Scholars would carry this handicap well into the time of the popularity of the King James Bible, which would contain many laughable errors due to the lack of knowledge of both Hebrew and Greek, such as the presence of fantastical creatures like unicorns and satyrs (Numbers 23:22; 24:8; Deuteronomy 33:17, etc. Isaiah 13:21; 34:14).
[13] Such ignorance would be common among Western scholars until thousands of ancient Greek writings would be discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the advent of photocopying technology allowed their widespread use. So-called Holy Spirit Greek was espoused by theologians such as Richard Rothe as late as the 19th century (Zur Dogmatik, 1863).
[14] When I say “translations”, I am obviously excluding paraphrases; however, I would also exclude paraphrases that masquerade as translations.
[15] Codex W
[16] The textual evidence is actually more complicated than this. Old Latin copies including the full variant actually go back to the 4th century, suggesting it was a very early, but not widespread. Further complication comes from manuscripts which include verse 4, but not the longer version of verse 3, the oldest of which is 5th century, and steps on the toes of my theory that the longer version of verse 3 came first. It’s also possible that the first insertion was of the complete story, and textual critics only partially redacted it in subsequent copies, but in different ways (i.e., pulling out v.3b in some manuscripts, but not v. 4, and vice versa in other manuscripts).
[17] Of course, if most scholars who claim that more than half of the New Testament is pseudepigrapha are even partly correct, then there’s an even bigger elephant in the room. But right now, I’m only going to focus on how well the actual documents themselves were preserved.
[18] Eusebius writes that Papias (c. 110 CE) mentions it, but says it was in the “Gospel of Hebrews”, of which we only have fragments today. The Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum (3rd century) also knows of the account. But it is omitted from Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus (see next paragraph), and Papyri 66 (ca. 200 CE) and 75 (ca. 3rd century). Apart from Vaticanus, there are only a few ancient manuscripts that include it, the earliest of which is Codex Bezae (5th century) already mentioned, notorious for its poor quality and some intentional and significant variants unique only to it.
[19] Textual critics can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the length of the big three should mean they should be given any more weight than the fragments of manuscripts we have from the same time period.