Just let it LOOSE!!
By: Navin (August 3rd, 2010)Dear Troy,
We got your mail yesterday evening and it was such a relief to know that you are settling in to the new surroundings of your engineering college. We missed you so much as this is the first time you have gone away from home for such a long time. Nice to know that you have been allotted a room in the college hostel and that you have a new friend who is also your room mate.
Mom is glad to know that you have been reading the Bible daily and praying. But it seems you have been having difficulty explaining to your friend why the Bible is a reliable piece of literary work. In your mail you raised three concerns which were also bothering your friend. It reminded me when I was a college student and I would raise the same questions to my friends. But I have had the privilege of spending a lifetime as a historian committed to the task of researching the authenticity of many literary works, not just the Bible. So allow your dad to put on his historians cap for a while as I try to address your concerns on the Bible.
Your friend’s first concern is that the Bible has so many translations, that it is biased and now says only what the church wants it to say. The different translations are pretty easy to explain. Let me take the example of the Gospel account of Mark to demonstrate all my points here because it is the earliest written of all the accounts of Jesus ministry and is also taken as the source for other accounts in the Bible. This book was originally written in Greek language. However the translations wrestle with two different aspects of the exercise, meaning and form. Some translations try and keep the form i.e. the grammatical construction as close as possible to the Greek language while some other translations despite changing the form or grammatical construction retain the meaning conveyed in the Greek document. Making it simple, meaning is ‘what we say’ while form is ‘how we say it’.
And that is why there are differences in the grammatical constructions but they all have the same meaning. You can take all the available translations of the Bible to a Greek scholar and he will tell you that they are all accurate translations.
Remember the first pocket money I gave you which you still hold in your purse. It was an old one rupee note and after taking it out year after year it has become crumbled and has almost fallen apart, hasn’t it? Just imagine then the condition of the original writing of Mark which was passed around from church to church and read for public knowledge. It was natural for that document to see normal wear and tear. Hence there was a need to make copies of the original document and there started a rich tradition of making copies of the Gospel of Mark and other books in the Bible, the fruits of which we are still enjoying in the form of thousands of manuscripts.
Are these manuscripts reliable? Well, it can be decided by the number of silent years or the duration between the original document and the first manuscripts and secondly by the number of manuscripts that we have of the document. For example, Thucydides History was written by Thucydides, an Athenian general who fought in and wrote a history of the Peloponnesian war, a series of wars between Athens and Sparta. This was written in 415 B.C. and the first manuscript was in 900 A.D. A period of 1300 years passed between them and only 8 manuscripts were written. Yet, historians of ancient Greek hold Thucydides History in high regard with respect to the faithfulness of the manuscripts in reproducing what Thucydides actually wrote. Similarly Tacitus Annals, a record of the Roman Imperial history was written in 100 A.D. and the first manuscript almost 1000 years later. Now, Mark wrote his gospel around 60 A.D. and the first manuscript was around 200 A.D., only 140 years between them and by the time Thucydides and Tacitus come up with their first manuscripts we already have thousands of copies of the Gospel of Mark. Looking at the brief period between the original Mark and the manuscript and the thousands of copies which shows the faithful manuscript tradition, if we cannot trust Mark just because we do not have the original then we will have throw out all the literary works of antiquity and shut down every Egyptian, Greek and Roman history department in every university across the world. I hope that answers your second concern about the Bible’s transmission.
And finally, can Mark’s testimony be trusted as he was not even there on the scene of Jesus ministry? To make this point I want to use the example of two other ancient literary works. First is Livy’s report of The Twelve Tables. Here he recorded an ancient story which dealt with a two class system in ancient Rome, where struggles between the Patricians (the elite) and the Plebeians (the workingclass) led to the first codification of the Roman law. It was the seed from which the Roman civil law grew and matured. According to Livy it was the fountain of all private and public law and was the body of the entire Roman law, comparable with the constitution of any country. Livy who died around 17A.D. was mentioning an event which happened 450 years before him. Roman historians assigned to Livy a lot of embellishment but they take the core story as fact – Livy is given the benefit of the doubt.
Plutarch was one of the few sources for the life of Alexander the great. He had conquered many nations and had great implications for the Biblical times. But again Plutarch was writing 400 years after the event but we still value his work. Now compare this with Mark who was writing not more than 25-30 years after the events and that too taking his details from a close witness of Jesus life. And we can expect that witness, Peter, to remember the incidents and hand it over correctly, because those times had a great oral tradition where people were expected to memorize much more than we are in the absence of any printing press or written material. Classical historians of Rome and Greece give their documents the benefit of the doubt; however scholars seem to suspect the Bible to be untrue unless otherwise proved. Do you think it is fair? May be not and that takes care of the final objection regarding testimony.
Hope this helps you but I want to tell you that this information alone might not help. My life changed because my friends chose to give me a copy of the Bible and let me decide if it was reliable. It is more than just another literary work rather it has got divine authority behind it and the Bible claims it for itself. Charles Spurgeon once said “The way you defend the Bible is way you defend the lion, you just let it loose”. So why not give a copy to your friend and let him decide in the light of the above information.
Dad.
Tags: Bible