I’ve Heard It Said the Old Testament Is Full of Errors

This text is a part of the I’ve Heard It Said collection.

A Assortment of Proof

I’ve heard that Outdated Testomony manuscripts are stuffed with errors. Now, it’s true that there aren’t any authentic manuscripts of historic books, and the Outdated Testomony is included amongst that quantity. We’re dependent totally on the copies and the copies of copies that purportedly return to the unique. That’s how we’ve our Outdated Testomony within the first place.

John D. Meade,

Peter J. Gurry

In Scribes and Scripture, students John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry reply frequent questions concerning the writing, copying, canonizing, and translating of the Bible and provides readers instruments to interpret the proof about God’s phrase.

However these copies have all of the indicators of human fragility—of human error—inside them. So it is not a query about whether or not there are errors or not. There are. However the query is, Does that result in despair? Does that result in a pessimistic outlook which may conclude one thing like, “Subsequently, we don’t have the Bible”?

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And I’m blissful to say no, as a result of the Hebrew Bible—the Outdated Testomony—has a wealth of manuscripts, a ton of proof, and textual critics who can truly have a look at all these manuscripts, examine them, sift out what are easy copyist errors, and really restore the unique textual content based mostly on evaluating the entire proof. And subsequently, I stay optimistic that we will get again to the unique books of the Outdated Testomony.

John D. Meade is the coauthor with Peter J. Gurry of Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible.

John D. Meade

John D. Meade (PhD, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is professor of Outdated Testomony and codirector of the Textual content & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary. He’s the coauthor of The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Evaluation and the writer of A Important Version of the Hexaplaric Fragments of Job 22–42. He and his spouse, Annie, have 4 kids and are members at Camelback Bible Church.