I often read, for example, that the Bible has been “written, translated, edited multiple times”, with the implication that it’s not really reliable. Because the question comes up fairly often, I thought I’d elaborate briefly on what the Text of Scripture is, that we use today.
The Bible really hasn’t been “written, translated, edited multiple times”. Modern bible translations are based on some 5000 or so ancient manuscripts that still exist, not on translations of translations. Some of these manuscripts (the Dead Sea Scrolls) go back to a little before the time of Christ, and by careful comparison, scholars can pretty much tell which of those that were written even many centuries later are reliable. News flash: All of them, although the differences are occasionally interesting.
Our earliest NT manuscripts go back to about the year 300, but we have no reason to think the texts were changed between their writing (between 50 and 100 AD) and the 300s; and certainly they remained stable after that. The church fathers who quote the New Testament earlier than 300, didn’t quote anything different, even though, obviously they were quoting from manuscripts earlier than those we still possess
Everybody agrees on the core canon of the Old Testament, which is known as the “Masoretic Text” (“MT”) or the Hebrew canon. The word “masoretic” is based on the Hebrew word for “tradition”— it’s the traditional (Hebrew) text. The “critical edition” currently in use— i.e., the carefully vetted Text used today by all scholars for study and translation— is based on one manuscript that was produced in the 900s, the Leningrad Codex. If you look around on the internet, I think you can find photographs of the original online.
One other complete manuscript exists which is a few years older and almost indistinguishable from the Leningrad Codex. This is the Aleppo Codex, and it is currently being published but every “jot and tittle” has to be checked and compared with all other manuscripts that exist, differences noted and compiled, and so forth, and this will take some more years to complete. When done, the differences will be of interest only to specialists, but of course specialists do exist, so this is important.
You should be aware, though, that traditionally, the Christian Church never used the Hebrew Bible, but rather the Greek Septuagint— a translation of the Hebrew into Greek made by the Jews of Alexandria about 200 years before Christ. (It’s often referred to as the “LXX”, because it was supposedly translated by 70 experts; “septuaginta” is Latin for “seventy”, and the abbreviation is of course the Roman numeral, LXX, “70”.
The LXX contains a number of books that are not included in the MT; as well as other differences, some rather major. It appears that by the time of Christ, there were at least two versions of the Old Testament in circulation, one used especially in Alexandria, which became the Septuagint, and the other used in Palestine and Babylon, which became the the MT we use today. You remember that Alexandria was associated with the prophet Jeremiah, and Babylon with the prophet Ezekiel. They were aware of each other and in communication, but apparently had different manuscript traditions, which nobody seems to have been too worried about. Examples of both traditions are found (in Hebrew) among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
On the basis of a comment somewhere in Josephus, there’s reason to believe that the number of books in the canon was meant to match the number of letters in the alphabet; since the Greek alphabet has more letters than the Hebrew alphabet does, there are more books in the Greek canon than in the Hebrew. You reach the right numbers if you count the Twelve Minor Prophets as one “book” (for they were in fact written on one scroll), 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings as one book each, and so forth.
For the most part, the LXX is what the NT writers used when they quoted or alluded to the OT, because they were writing in Greek. Thus, the Christian Church everywhere used the LXX as its Old Testament, and the LXX is still used directly (not in translation) by the Greek Orthodox Church.
Early on, there was an “Old Latin” translation of the OT from the LXX, but later St Jerome retranslated it, and his translation, the “Latin Vulgate”, became standard in the West. Interestingly, he chose to translate the Masoretic Text, although of course the Vulgate also includes the books that were in the LXX and not in the MT, because those had been in use since apostolic times in the Christian Church. Psalms also followed the Old Latin because it was used constantly in prayer and people were used to it.
It was Martin Luther who decided to eliminate the “extra” books, which are now known as the “deutero-canonical” or “apocryphal” books— those that are in the Greek LXX and not in the Hebrew MT— from the canon. He didn’t have any particular authority to do that, but he preferred “Hebrew truth” to anything he thought was “Greek”, and for that reason, Protestant bibles contain only the books that are found in the Hebrew MT, whereas the Catholics and the Orthodox continue to use the same Greek LXX canon that the Church has always been using. Most people don’t know that the KJV originally did contain the “apocrypha”, and you can still buy the “KJV Apocrypha” as a separate book from google.
As to the New Testament, everybody has always included the same 27 books, although the Ethiopians include a couple of others such as the Book of Enoch as well.
The NT was written in Greek, and most of our existing Greek Bible texts were understandably produced in what you might call “publishing houses” operated by the Greek-speaking Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. There was an effort to correct and standardize the Text, but of course every scribe is going to make little errors, so there are occasional differences between manuscripts, occasionally they’re interesting. But of course we also possess many manuscripts that do not belong to this “Byzantine text-form”, and they tell us many things.
Above is a picture of the first page of Matthew as it appears in the standard critical edition of the NT. You’ll see lots of gobbledy-gook in the footnotes. That’s a highly compressed presentation of the differences between all manuscripts and an accounting of why the editors thought the reading given in the text above was more likely to be the original. Given that we have about 5000 hand-written manuscripts, you can see that there really aren’t very many differences. The text of the New Testament is quite well established. What you don’t see unless you’re an expert is that the differences tend to clump the manuscripts into “families”, so we can often tell the exact point at which a variant reading crept in. But as i said, most of the differences shown aren’t interesting to anyone but specialists— words in a different order (which you can often do in Greek without changing the meaning), spelling mistakes, etc.
There are a number of other books, the “pseudepigrapha” such as the Life of Adam and Eve and the Apocalypse of Isaiah, which were written between the two Testaments and after the New, but never became part of any canon (often for good reason). These are of interest, but they’re not part of any bible, except, as I said, for the Book of Enoch in Ethiopia and one or two others.
Scholars of every church are interested in the whole picture, including the MT, the LXX with its canonical and deuterocanonical / apocryphal books, as well as the pseudepigrapha.
All of it is valuable for knowing about our origins.
And of course, some modern translations are better than others, but you can rest assured that the underlying text, at least,of all bibles is reliable.
