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Podcast: How Can We Be Sure We Have the Right Bible? (John D. Meade & Peter J. Gurry)

October 17, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How We Got the Bible

In today's episode, Bible scholars John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry discuss the Bible—where we got it, what we know about the original manuscripts, and how the text was passed from generation to generation.

Scribes and Scripture

Scribes and Scripture

John D. Meade, Peter J. Gurry

In Scribes and Scripture, scholars John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry answer common questions about the writing, copying, canonizing, and translating of the Bible and give readers tools to interpret the evidence about God’s word.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:53 - What Do We Know about the Old Testament Original Manuscripts?

Matt Tully
John and Peter, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.

John D. Meade
Thanks for having us, Matt.

Peter J. Gurry
It’s great to be here.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the Bible—how we got it, what those original documents were like and what we understand about them, how we decided or how we came to understand what documents should be in the Bible. But before we get into some of that, I want to go all the way back to the very beginning. I wonder if you guys could speak a little bit about the original manuscripts of the Bible—the actual original documents that were created by the biblical writers themselves. Maybe we start with the Old Testament. What do we know about those original manuscripts?

John D. Meade
That’s a great question, Matt. The original manuscripts for what we Christians call the Old Testament and what Jews would call the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, were written in Hebrew and some in Aramaic. Portions of Ezra and Daniel were written in the language of Aramaic. What do we know? I would say before 1947, which is when what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, we didn’t know a lot, in some ways. Though it turns out the much later manuscripts from around 1000 AD—in tradition we call them the Masoretic Text. We described this in the book. There’s actually a wonderful article about it now on textandcanon.org on this Masoretic Text that undergirds almost all of our English translations. It turned out to be quite a rugged text. But after 1947, after some discoveries of scrolls and fragments of scrolls in the caves at Qumran, what we learned is that much of that Masoretic Text tradition can go way back. In fact, most of it can be confirmed for a book like Isaiah. But in the book we also talk about different kinds of copying. There were just over 200 fragments of scrolls discovered, and those fragments of scrolls show different kinds of copying—what we call in the book conservative copying, and then maybe free copying is one label applied to them. So, just a quick analogy here, and then we should talk about the New Testament. When we talk about our English translations, they’re on a spectrum of very conservative, literal translations, like your New American Standard Bible versus the old Precious Moments Bible, Matt, right?

Matt Tully
I don’t know about that

John D. Meade
There’s quite a spectrum here between the NASB and our Precious Moments Bible. So, one maybe could envision ancient copying on a similar kind of spectrum. There’s this letter for letter, very conservative copying that goes all the way back to those manuscripts before the time of Jesus’s birth. That is reflected in the later manuscripts as well. But then there was also a tendency to make the text readable and understandable, and maybe even illustrating it within its copying—its meaning within its copying. But yeah, it’s quite a history.

Matt Tully
Before we go on then to the New Testament, you mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls and the caves of Qumran. Maybe some of our listeners have heard those words. That sounds like something almost out of a Dan Brown novel or something like that, so I wonder if you could explain: What were the Dead Sea Scrolls? You said they were discovered in the mid 1940s. Why were they so significant?

John D. Meade
They were discovered in 1947 on the northwest corner of the Dead Sea in Israel. There are these caves at Qumran, and there were twelve caves that we’ve discovered so far, eleven of them containing manuscripts. But really, only three of them containing Hebrew biblical manuscripts—caves one, four, and eleven.

Matt Tully
What were the other manuscripts?

John D. Meade
There were other writings from the community at Qumran there—the Essenes, we would call them—and they had their own sectarian writing. They were Jewish groups, back just before the time of Jesus and up through we could say maybe 130 AD when the Romans came in and sort of kicked all the Jews out of the land. So, this was a Jewish group copying Jewish scriptures, and also composing their own writings. There were some 900 total manuscripts, but only about 200 of those were biblical. What it did is before that discovery, we had to rely on later manuscripts for what the original text of the Old Testament said. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we were able to go back in time over 1,000 years and look at the state of the text of books like the Psalter, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy firsthand. So that’s the significance of them.

Matt Tully
Peter, help us understand what these manuscripts actually look and feel like. I think we have in our mind maybe papyrus or some kind of parchment, or was it clay tablets? What’s the scope of the physical materials that were used to record the Scripture on?

Peter J. Gurry
Great question. In the ancient world they use a number of writing materials—everything from stone to occasionally wood (although it doesn’t survive, usually), clay tablets. Our biblical manuscripts, for the most part, are on one of three materials: either parchment made from animal skins; papyrus, which is made from the papyrus plant that grows natively in the Nile River in Egypt; and then eventually, much later obviously, but paper as we would know it. So those are three main materials that you have. Papyrus tends to survive very well in dry climates (like Egypt), whereas parchment can survive pretty well anywhere if it’s taken care of. Correct me on this if I’m wrong, but the Dead Sea Scrolls are actually on parchment for the most part. Is that right?

John D. Meade
That’s right.

Peter J. Gurry
Our earliest New Testament manuscripts are mostly on papyrus.

Matt Tully
That gets at the question of how these would’ve survived. If we think of paper, certainly, but even something maybe more durable like a parchment of some sort, it seems like you stick that in the ground, find that buried somewhere, then it’s going to disintegrate pretty quickly. When we dig these things up, what are they actually in?

Peter J. Gurry
The Dead Sea Scrolls, of course, were discovered in caves, and in some cases they were still in the clay jars. Is that right, John?

John D. Meade
Yes.

Peter J. Gurry
So, that’s one way. Another way is that a very large number of Old Testament manuscripts come from what we call the Cairo Geniza. Think of a geniza as a storage room in a synagogue where they would put older manuscripts as they were wearing out. So, you put them in there. and so that’s one place you could find them. When it comes to New Testament papyri, we find them in places like trash dumps. So, once they would wear out they would get thrown out. We found a number of them in large trash dumps in Egypt. Other times we don’t exactly know where they come from, so that’s always interesting. And then, later on when you get into the parchment manuscripts in particular, honestly, the best place to find them today is in old libraries where they’ve gotten lost in the shuffle of a lot of old books, frankly.

Matt Tully
So, in those cases it’s like they were viewed as precious Scripture, and so they were maintained in some library somewhere, and over the years they kind of were just passed along and we can still find them there.

Peter J. Gurry
That’s right. One of our most important biblical manuscripts is called Codex Sinaiticus, because it was discovered at the monastery at Mount Sinai in Egypt, and it was discovered by Western scholars. At least, if I can use the term “discovered” there a bit loosely. It was discovered in the 20th century, but it had been at the monastery for centuries, and that’s because it’s an incredibly well-stocked library. It’s been there for a long, long time. It’s probably the longest continuously running monastery in the world, and they have one of the best collections of Greek manuscripts outside of maybe the Vatican Library. So yeah, old libraries are a great place to find manuscripts.

Matt Tully
Give us a sense then, and maybe both of you could speak to this, where are all the oldest manuscripts that we have for maybe both the Old and New Testament? Where are these right now? Are they kind of spread out all over the world in lots of different museums and monasteries, or are there a limited number of places we could go and effectively find the best oldest manuscripts that we have?

John D. Meade
Man, they are from everywhere, Matt. Let’s see. A lot of these Dead Sea scrolls we’ve talked about are still in Israel, in Jerusalem, at the National Library and Museum there—but not all. Some have made their way across the Atlantic into different libraries like Princeton and elsewhere. Of course, you and your listeners are probably familiar with some of the forgeries that came across the Atlantic to places like the Museum of the Bible and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. So, getting back to that earlier point that Peter was making, sometimes we don’t know where they come from, the key word here is provenance. We need to, of course, be careful about tracing that history as to where they came from. Hebrew manuscripts are all over. A lot of the codices are in these university libraries, like in Cambridge and Oxford.

Matt Tully
You’ve said it a couple times, but you just said this word “codices” or “codex.”

John D. Meade
Codex is kind of like an early book form. It would look just like a book to us, but we call it a codex because it’s a primitive book form. The way in which pages were grouped together and sewn together is not quite how we create a modern book, but to most eyes it would look pretty similar.

10:53 - What about Forgeries?

Matt Tully .
You mentioned these forgeries, and there were some famous ones in the US a few years ago that were identified and kind of then dealt with. To a layperson, you can kind of wonder how prevalent is that? How often are people creating these forgeries? How does that actually happen? What does that say about how confident we can be, that we actually know what we have with some of these documents?

Peter J. Gurry
That’s a great question. That’s a podcast in itself right there. But let me take a stab at it. It’s more prevalent than we would like, and it’s maybe even in some ways more prevalent than you’d think. I mean, the short answer to Why do people do it? Sometimes they do it for fame, sometimes for the thrill of it, sometimes there’s maybe a more nefarious theological agenda. In the case of the recent Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, if your listeners have heard of that, from what we can tell the guy who created that had a bit of an ax to grind against the Catholic church. That’s probably putting it mildly. Other times it’s for money. If you can create a convincing forgery and it’s a forgery of something like a dead sea scroll, then you can potentially sell it for a whole lot of money to people. Those are some of the motives that might be behind why somebody would forge a manuscript. We’re not really worried about most of our manuscripts, if I can put it that way. It’s not like we’re doubtful about most of them. But scholars who study these things, anytime a new discovery is made, we try to look for any indications that it might be a forgery. That’s why it takes a really good trained eye to study these things because a good trained eye can often spot things that are odd or out of place or unusual about a forgery. So often it’s sort of the—I hate to call it the instinct—the instinct of the scholar who’s had a lot of experience with manuscripts can be even better in some cases than say, like modern scientific testing of things. With the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, it was the eyes of really good scholars who were the first to call it out as a forgery, and later testing in various ways. Some of it actually didn’t even confirm there was a forgery because it can’t. It’s not the kind of thing that can confirm it’s a forgery. It can tell you maybe the date of the papyrus, but that doesn’t tell you that it’s a forgery. It could just tell you that the forgery was able to buy old papyrus.

13:12 - The Process from Manuscript to Biblical Text

Matt Tully
The guy was using actual ancient papyrus and writing on that. You’ve already kind of spoken to this a little bit, John, but I wonder if you guys could now help us understand what happens next. We have access to all these different manuscripts, and many of them are fragmentary—not a whole book of the Bible, and certainly not even the whole Bible. How do scholars then take that and actually construct some complete picture of what Scripture says?

John D. Meade
Right. Well, I’ll start us here. Scripture is a translation of a Greek word graphe, which really just means writing. There’s no doubt that there were lots and lots of writings. For whatever reason, and I used to do this, too, before I started just reading on this topic, for some reason I kind of just thought that out of Jewish literature all you had was the Old Testament. Like, they only wrote thirty-nine books, and they only read those books, and copied those books, and they copied them pristinely. You just kind of had this sort of romanticized view of how it all came together, you know?
Matt Tully
My guess is that many people listening right now are like, Wait, what are you talking about “romanticized view?” That’s what I was taught in Sunday school.
John D. Meade
Right, right. It didn’t happen that way? What do you mean it didn’t happen that way? Yeah. It kind of goes back to even reading the Old Testament itself. I was just reviewing some of these references to these books. After say the narrator of Kings and Chronicles will finish going through the records of one king, they’ll say, Oh, and all the other works deeds that this king did was written in the book of the annals of Israel or Judah or whatever. And we don’t usually stop long enough to ponder, Where’s that book? Where is that book? And what we realize is that Kings and Chronicles are sort of digests of those original books that really were in royal annals of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah, stored perhaps in the temple archive. But when the temple was destroyed, maybe some of those works were already gone. But ancient Israelite historians had already accessed those annals and condensed them into the flowing narratives that we call Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.

Matt Tully
That’s fascinating. So we almost have like the CliffNotes version of the history, and that’s what we consider our Scripture today.

John D. Meade
Indeed, we actually have the narrative that incorporates the data points—the chronological points—that were in the annals, but they’re now also put in a framework that interprets the events and sayings for us. This is the beauty of narrative. It’s not just sort of a bare chronicle of events; it’s actually providing the interpretation, the historian’s evaluation, of a king’s deeds, of a prophet’s words, these sorts of things. So anyways, there are lots and lots of books that don’t wind up in our Old Testament. This now kind of comes to the question of what we call the canon of Scripture and how do we have the sixty six books in our Bible. I just wanna sort of shoot down one very popular misconception and myth before we get into just a brief answer to a long, long question. It’s not through a council. This is very popular amongst Christians, certainly people who want to take shots at Christianity. They talk about this Council of Nicaea, which we know as a council where Christians right around 325 AD hammered out the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.

Matt Tully
So it was a real council that actually did happen.

John D. Meade
Yes, and it hammered out very significant doctrinal matters like how we talk about one God—Father, Son, and Spirit. These are massive, massive doctrinal concepts, but to most people’s surprise, there’s actually no record of that council settling the canon of Scripture. That is, that that council did not decide on a list of books that belong in the Bible. There’s actually no record and no evidence that that council ever did that, despite the popular opinion infused into our culture by Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code. That’s where most people get that idea, even though they would say, Well, I’ve never read the book or watched the movie, they still have this notion that this council gave us a Bible. And you say no, it didn’t, because there’s no evidence for that. So, how did it happen? I’m just gonna make this really brief. Early Jews and early Christians kept copying these books. They copied the canonical books, and they also copied the books that wouldn’t be eventually in the canon. But they clearly kept using, reading, and eventually listing out books that they considered to be divinely inspired. Out of that large group, they only kept returning to a select number of books. And they kept returning to a select number of books that almost all, if not all, Jews and Christians agreed upon. We’ll just talk about the Christian context for a second. The Old Testament was mainly settled. The thirty-nine books in the Protestant Old Testament are basically the books of the Jewish canon. They’re in a different order, and we don’t need to talk about that here, but they’re the same books, interestingly. Roman Catholics have a different canon with seven extra books, but let’s just remove that for a second and just say the vast majority of the Old Testament, all Christians throughout all time have agreed upon. And it was no wonder that every Christian, when they started to list out which books that they thought and others thought were divinely inspired, they always came back to those books of the Hebrew canon. Let’s go to the New Testament, too, for just a second. Around 180 AD and forward, there doesn’t seem to be much dispute over four canonical Gospels. Christians like Origin noted, Heretics had lots of Gospels, but we’ve always only had four. It’s fascinating. Same thing with Paul’s letters. There was a little bit of debate about Hebrews, whether that should be included in that thirteen or fourteen letter collection of Paul. But basically we’re talking about a core canon of Old Testament, Gospels, Acts, Paul, Revelation—definitely firmly in, then kind of disputed, and then kind of out in some places. But then like 1 Peter and 1 John, the two key letters of the general epistles, received very early. So, what most scholars want to talk about is that there’s this core canon that all Christian groups seem to agree upon, with some fuzzy books at the edges. And eventually, in most Christian groups, books like 2 Peter wind up in the canon, but there’s still some dispute about them in the Syriac Church, for example. And so I think we just have to kind of come to terms with that history as Protestant Christians even, and just say, it looks like our Bible is a representative of the most general opinion about the canonical boundaries, but we can’t say that every Christian group has this same Bible. Does that make sense?

Matt Tully
That’s helpful. And it does probably paint a picture that is a little less clean, a little less tight than we might expect or wish was true. Peter, it sounds like if we’re saying that it’s not as simple as some council chose the books that were in the Bible, or even an emperor (Emperor Constantine) chose which books would be in the Bible. Couldn’t one critique of this view be that this is canon by democracy? It’s sort of like popular opinion, and that’s what we’re basing our faith on is what most Christians, or most Christians who were in positions of authority, were saying at the time. How can we be confident if that’s what we’re saying?

Peter J. Gurry
Well, I think a couple things. One is we could think more about how we, as Christians, identify a book that should be canonical and how we should be able to hear the voice of our Savior in that book. A verse that John and I like to quote a lot in this is when Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.” We, as Christians, should be able to read these books of the Bible and have a sense that, yeah, this really is inspired by God—sort of an immediate sense, if I can call it that. But I think beyond that there is some benefit to thinking through historically the way that it wasn’t just a decision of a single council, let’s say. And the benefit is that no single individual, no matter how charismatic or significant, was able to overturn those thousands (let’s call them thousands of decisions) made by Christians across time and place. So, when Luther comes along and is not a very big fan of the book of James and places it along with several other books at the end of his New Testament, it takes about a generation, if that, for the Lutheran tradition to say, No. And that’s pretty significant because their tradition is named after him. And yet they say to him, No, Luther, you’re wrong. This is not an epistle of straw, in fact. We just have to read it better and realize how it fits with everything else in the can of Scripture. So I think actually we can take comfort from the fact that it wasn’t a single council at a single time and at a single place that determined what our Bible looks like. But rather, it was Christians—and going back to the Old Testament, of course, Jews—across time and place recognizing these books. And personally, I find it a great comfort to see the three great branches of Christianity all agree completely on their New Testament. Where I think we find the most differences is actually the smaller and more regional a church gets, like the Syriac church or like the Ethiopic church, the more you find the differences in the canon. Now, obviously, you talk about the Apocrypha and the Old Testament, but at least in terms of the New Testament, the canon looks the exact same for those three big branches of Christianity.

23:11 - Can We Add Books to the Canon Today?

Matt Tully
Fascinating. I think one question that even the clarification around how the books were “decided”—that it was sort of the testimony of all Christians everywhere over time rather than one person or one council’s decision—that doesn’t necessarily then address the question of, Are there books that are missing from the canon that we just haven’t found or that were somehow lost? And so, the classic What if? scenario would be this: What if archeologists digging somewhere in Israel unearthed some manuscript that has never been seen before, something that was maybe claimed to be written by the apostle Paul or by Peter, and our best scholars looked at that and saw no, the writing, the type of writing, the word choice, the syntax, all of that seems to really fit with what we have from Peter or Paul in the New Testament already. How would you guys think about that? Is it possible that we would find a letter from the New Testament that we would consider to be Scripture?

John D. Meade
These are the good ones. These are the good ones. Want to take a stab, Peter?

Peter J. Gurry
Sure. Okay. I’ll answer it and then John can correct it because he probably won’t like my answer.

Matt Tully
Quick question: Is this a hard question to answer? Does it take a lot of nuance? How do you think about this kind of a question?

Peter J. Gurry
How do we think about it, John? It’s a hypothetical, so there’s no way to answer it correctly. Does that make sense? Like, how would we know? Well, we’d have to see what it is. We know that 1 Corinthians is not the first letter that Paul wrote to Corinth. So, if we manage to find another letter that claimed to be by Paul to the Corinthians and everything about it fit with what we know of Paul, now we have a really interesting question. But we’d have to see it first. So, to answer it sort of in the hypothetical—What would we do if . . . ?—part of this is lots of books have been claimed to be part of the Bible through history. There’s a letter to the Laodiceans that gets copied in Latin manuscripts in the Middle Ages. It’s very short, and some people accept it as authentic—not many. So it has been done, where people have claimed a book is by Paul, and it’s almost certainly not.

Matt Tully
I think the question gets at maybe the theological priors that go into this kind of conversation. Are we open, like we were at one point as the church, to discussing what books should be in or not? Or is there some date at which we’ve decided no more books can be added, and why would we say that? What justification would we have for saying that?

John D. Meade
I think why I sort of always cringe at that question. I get asked it a lot, too, and I always just have a slight cringe moment because it sort of puts two of the big criteria into slight tension. On the one hand, canon is a traditional conversation. It’s about what the vast swath of Jews and Christians have considered to be the places to go to hear God’s voice. I think that’s in some ways bedrock, but then, like Peter was saying earlier, there are these verses within the New Testament itself with Jesus saying, My sheep know my voice. They learn to listen to me. So, on the one hand, I kind of want to leave it theoretically possible that there’s another book out there in which we could hear the Shepherd’s voice, but I gotta say this though, Matt: all of this has been played out in history. So, these apocryphal books, not the Apocrypha, but the Apocryphal gospels, let’s say, early Christians constantly weighed the sayings in those gospels. Could this come from Jesus, even though it was something not found in the four Gospels? Could it be authentic? And I think even someone like Origin might say, Well, maybe there’s an authentic statement of Jesus in one of these gospels, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be included in the canon. Gregory the Great. Gregory actually thinks that the epistle to the Laodiceans is Pauline, that it goes back to Paul, but he knows in the tradition there’s only fourteen epistles of Paul. You cannot just change that tradition. You cannot add a book and just say, Oh, we have a new canon. So, I guess that’s how I’ve kind of come to answer the question. I want to sort of be theoretically sensitive to the possibility, but I also know that from church history there are lots of times and places where this has played out and most individuals just say, Well, I’m going to hold a private opinion about this. I’m going to say, just after I’ve looked at the epistle to the Laodiceans, it goes back to Paul. But that doesn’t mean I can add it to the Bible. Just like Martin Luther who has real questions about James, he knows, really, that he can’t just remove it from the Bible. He can have some private opinions, but even a personality like Luther can’t alter the Bible that’s been with the church for 1500 years. Like, it just doesn’t work.

28:23 - What about Inspiration and Inerrancy?

Matt Tully
Let’s take a big step back from. We’ve been talking a lot about history and the nuances of this, and we’ve maybe learned that the process of both copying and transmitting all of these ancient documents, and then even deciding, or coming to some clarity on which documents were Scripture and which aren’t, is maybe not as clean and clear cut as we would expect or were taught. How does this understanding of Scripture and the development of the canon come into contact with ideas like inspiration and inerrancy?

John D. Meade
I’ll start with the cannon. If canon in this conversation means anything, it means authority. It means which books can we confirm points of doctrine upon? That’s not a Protestant definition; that goes back to Jerome. And I do think it goes back even before him, but most clearly there. So, one of those stalwart pillars of our doctrine of Scripture is that it is our sufficient authority for faith and practice. What’s interesting is that canon is the word for that. So, it’s the list of books upon which we can base faith and practice. It’s our fundamental authority. It also gets at, as we’ve been kind of talking about it, it also is tied to the concept of divine inspiration, because those authoritative books were also recognized. Again, I don’t think the church is creating the canon. The church is recognizing, or confessing, which books are divinely inspired and therefore authoritative. Does that make sense? So, we’re not talking about in this process the church creating the canon. I just think the church fathers would’ve actually used different words to describe this process if that’s what they thought they were doing. Athanasius writes a list of books, but he doesn’t say he’s creating it. In fact, he’s doing something that’s not even novel because you look back through the record and Christians have already been confessing these books as divinely inspired by the time he sits down in 367 AD to write them out. So, I think as a Protestant, I can actually rest in God’s providence and how he’s orchestrated this process. It’s human to a degree, so of course it’s messy. But it’s no less guided, providentially speaking, by our Lord. So, as a Protestant, I look back through the record and as detailed as the sources will let me get, I actually can step back and go this canon process is about Christians from all over the globe without a centralized authority recognizing that divinely inspired Scriptures, where the authoritative voice of God can be found. Protestantism, I think, just latched onto that. They didn’t really have to make a great argument for it. They just latched onto what was going on.

Matt Tully
That speaks well to the issue of authority and even inspiration. But then how about inerrancy? Going back to the first half of our conversation and just the process by which these documents were preserved by individual people, scribes, and who else, how should we think about then how that would impact inerrancy—the belief that his document that we hold in our hands today is perfect and doesn’t have any errors in it?

Peter J. Gurry
I think a couple of things are important here. Traditionally, evangelicals have limited inerrancy to what we call the autographs, or the original documents. We don’t think that every translation is inerrant. We don’t think that every copy is inerrant either. Certainly, evangelicals have been well aware, and Protestants were well aware of this in the Reformation, that scribes made mistakes. They were aware, even with the invention of the printing press, that printers made mistakes as well. The printing press did not, as you as a publisher know full well, does not eliminate mistakes in books. It just makes it easier to see where they are maybe, and then know it’s in the same place and every single copy.

Matt Tully
Yeah, I was going to say it also can make mistakes more prevalent because they show up in all those thousands of copies of the book that you may be printing.

Peter J. Gurry
That’s it. A 50,000 run misprint is a misprint of 50,000 copies now. So, it’s always been, to some degree, limited in that way, but what we mean then when we say my Bible is inerrant is we mean to the degree that my Bible is a good translation that reflects the autograph, it’s inerrant as well. And the good news is because our manuscripts are, generally speaking, so good and we have such early ones, and the work of text criticism has been going on for so long, that by and large it’s safe to say that most of what you have in your English Bible is probably verbatim what’s in the autograph. Where it’s not—where we have some doubts about it—one of two things is true. One, it doesn’t really affect the meaning. Or, it’s not an issue of theological error. And that’s a distinction I always find helpful when I’m talking to students, especially about this. We talk about errors a lot when we’re studying the manuscripts, but we’re talking about scribal errors, and oftentimes a scribal error can still result in something that is not a theological error. So, there’s little difference between the word “and” and “but” in Greek. They overlap in meaning actually, so it’s not even as clear cut as that distinction would make it sound. But that’s an easy change to make for a scribe that almost never results in a theological error. So I might look at a manuscript and say it has scribal errors in it, and not necessarily conclude from that that it has theological errors. So I would personally like to tie the doctrine of inerrancy to the word level—yes, I believe in verbal, plenary inspiration, that God inspired every word. But you can change words in a sentence, and the sentence can still mean the same thing. And so to that degree, I could have two different sentences that are both inerrant at the sentence level. Now, as an evangelical Protestant, I still care about even the little details. And that’s where I’d bring inerrancy back in the conversation and say it’s precisely my belief in the doctrine of inerrancy that makes me so passionate about studying the manuscripts, because I do want to know what every word is, to the best of my ability. And then where some uncertainty remains, thankfully, it’s usually not in matters that affect interpretation.

34:56 - Can I Trust the Bible?

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. That’s such a good, helpful summary and distinction there where we kind of place that idea of inerrancy fundamentally. Maybe as a final question, I wonder if you could speak to the person listening who maybe their mind has kind of just been blown. It seems like it’s been blown wide open in terms of what is the real story of their Bibles. They’ve been helped by that, but if they were being honest, they would say they do feel maybe a newfound sense of unease and of uncertainty. If this is all true, all my confidence in this book, all the foundational ideas that I might have had about where we got this and how we got it, maybe don’t make quite as much sense. It’s harder than that. They feel a little bit nervous, like, How can I really be as confident or as sure as I once was? What would you say to that person, even kind of from a pastoral but also that scholarly angle? What advice would you give to that person right now?

John D. Meade
First, I don’t think we should abandon a robust doctrine of God’s sovereignty and providence, right? I want to think as a Christian on this, that providence has given us what we need. So that’s, I think, clear. And kind of just a quick piggyback to that, there’s different levels of certainty that Christians just need to think through. I’m pretty sure that all four of us on this call right now are certain on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Or, maybe I’ll just speak for myself. You guys are a little quiet. I’m actually far more certain about that than that we’ve settled every problem in the wording of the text history. I’m a text critic, and I think the results are good and probable and all that, but there are some problems that still linger there that don’t exist when I think about Jesus Christ being raised from the dead. I just think that’s a different level of certainty than I have on whether it’s a “but” or an “and” in this particular passage. The second thing that I have found helps in talking with lay Christians about these issues is one other item that’s often overlooked is that Christians through the millennia have known about these problems. We are not the first to discover them. We are not even close to the first to lay eyes on differences in our manuscripts, or issues about the canon of Scripture. Early Christians—throughout the Middle Ages, the Reformers themselves—Christians, in all generations it seems have been confronted with these issues, with these real problems, but they’ve approached them with a certain kind of mindset and philosophy of faith seeking understanding. They’re not going to forfeit the faith based on a problem in this manuscript. They’re going to continue to believe in Christ Jesus as their Lord and Savior, even while they look for solutions to these problems. And that’s, in many ways, I think what Dr. Gurry and I have been trying to do personally, also through the book Scribes and Scripture, and as well through the resource of textandcanon.org. Just trying to put faith seeking understanding on display. And that’s not to wipe away all the problems. It’s just to say that the problems should probably not cause us to forfeit our faith in Jesus.

Matt Tully
Peter, what would you add to that, especially in the light of the fact that people have forfeited their faith though because of some of these problems? Or at least they’ve cited these problems as reasons for questioning their faith and ultimately leaving their faith. So what would you say to the person who maybe fears that possibility?

Peter J. Gurry
I think I’d say, pastorally speaking, a big piece of my advice would be to just hit the pause button. Be willing to keep learning some more, because it may be that you’ve just heard something for the first time that you’ve never heard, and that in itself is really startling. And you just need to give it some more time. This is one podcast. You haven’t heard us say everything there is to say. Even if you pick up the book and read the book, that isn’t everything there is to say. And so, part of why we wrote the book, frankly, is so that we’d encourage people to read more and to study more. And so I just want to say sometimes I think we can make knee jerk reactions when we do feel that sense of, Oh no! Wait, that’s not what I was told before. I didn’t know that. What else don’t I know? And I would just say slow down. It’s a big world out there. Church history, as Dr. Meade was suggesting, is long. It’s at least 2000 years, and you’re not the first person who’s ever encountered the question that you have. So, I think if I just maybe could give that one piece of advice. Just hit the pause button. Be willing to learn more and keep reading. You might well have your question answered. I’ve had, certainly, questions linger sometimes for years in my own mind, and I’m really glad I let them linger because the answer I came to after a few years was much, much better than the knee jerk answer I was given by maybe checking Wikipedia or, in some cases, given by a well-meaning youth pastor or whatever. So, just be patient with yourself and keep seeking.

Matt Tully
That’s good advice. Thank you, John, thank you, Peter, for taking the time to talk with us today.

John D. Meade
Thanks, Matt.

Peter J. Gurry
Our pleasure.

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