How Do You Know You Have the Right Bible?

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How Do You Know You Have the Right Bible?

April 14, 2025

Questions about the Catholic Bible versus the Protestant Bible, whether or not the original New Testament manuscripts exist somewhere and how we would know if we found one, and the implications of not having the original manuscripts of the Bible.

* How do you know you have the right version of Christianity? The Catholic Bible was assembled closer to the time of Jesus, and your church just took books out of that Bible. If an all-powerful God can’t maintain the truth over time, he probably isn’t real.

* Do you think the original New Testament manuscripts still exist somewhere, and if we ever found one, how would we know it was the original?

* What do we mean when we say we don’t have an original copy of the Bible? Which parts aren’t right, and how would we ever know?

Transcript

Welcome, dear listeners. We're so glad you're here for the hashtag SDRask Podcast. I'm Amy Hall, and great cokels here with me.

Hi, dear Amy. Just trying to mix it up for you, Greg. That's great.

I love it. Alright, let's start with a question from Johnny Stein. How do I respond to this? How do you know you have the right version of this? How do you know you have the right version of Christianity? The Catholic Bible was assembled much closer to the time of Jesus, and yet your church just took books out of the Bible that it liked.

If an all-powerful God can't maintain the truth over time, he probably isn't real. So, a few questions in there. Well, this kind of question really annoys me.

It first sounded like it was coming from a role in Catholic, but now it sounds like it's coming from a skeptic who is saying, look at you guys can't even agree about your own books. Therefore, what kind of God is that? Alright. Well, when you study the history of the canon, you find something entirely different than what was just described there.

In fact, I know this in recent memory because I wrote an article about it last year on Solid Ground that's available on our website. The title is New Testament, Canon, Witch Books, and Why? And they specifically deal with after I lay out the criterion that the New Testament, that the early Christians implicitly used or explicitly is actually to determine which books were God's books. The wording is important here because the canon is not an authoritative list of books.

Like some authorities said, here's the right books. But it's a list of authoritative books. In other words, the early church recognized which books had the inherent authority in them.

And that wasn't hard because before books were written, they understood that the guide and rule canon for the early church were the apostles that Jesus had personally trained and sent out to represent him. They were the canon. They were in charge.

Once they died, anything that they had written was in the category was at least in the running for the authority. So in a certain sense, the apostles, Jesus and the apostles have always been the authority. The question was, which things do we have now that have survived early church for a century that were written by apostles and carry that same authority with them? And so that was the main criterion.

And another criteria was a sense what they called catholicity. Now this is Catholic small c. In other words, it was commonly accepted by all of the players that particular books had vested in them certain authority. So if if a book was or an epistle or whatever was clearly Pauline, Paul or joining John or Petrine Peter, well, it was it was canon.

And that's why by the end of the first century, more than 20 of the books, at least 20 were already acknowledged by everybody to be authoritative canon. And the ones that were left versus second third John, Revelation, Book of Hebrews, a couple of others for second Peter, it's because they weren't entirely sure about the authorship. But once they hammered this out, they came to a conclusion based on common consensus.

That's catholicity. That's the third requirement for canon. And I detailed this all in the article.

And then then they had a clear list of everything that they all acknowledged. But what about these extra books by the Roman Catholics? Those books were not affirmed by the entire church. This is called the Apocrypha.

First of all, they're Jewish documents written between the time of Malachi and John the Baptist, the intertestamental period. And the Jews did not acknowledge these books as canon. These were not God-inspired in their mind.

Okay, first step. Secondly, when these books were discussed, you have Augustine in favor of them and Jerome against them. Now, these are two major leaders in the church.

And those are the ones that come immediately to mind, but the breakdown was 50-50. Different people on either side. In other words, there was not a consistent affirmation from the early church that the so-called Apocrypha was God-inspired.

In other words, it did not satisfy the test of catholicity, which is one of the vital tests of canon. All right? What's really curious, though, is when you get all the way to the 16th century and the Council of Trent when the Roman Catholic Church officially canonized the Apocrypha, one-third of all the priests who voted against it. One-third of all the priests voted against it.

So it was a two-thirds majority, but it ought to be significant that even in the Roman Catholic Church, there wasn't a unified voice. And that long amount later. Yeah, 1500 years later.

And so when I hear things like the Protestant took these books out of the Bible, this reflects a complete ignorance about how the process took place. And there was also the intimation that the Roman Catholic Church was the one who put the original list together. There was no Roman Catholic Church the first 400 years.

There just wasn't. There was no supremacy of Rome. At the Council of Nicaea, Rome had two.

That was 325. Rome had two representatives, just like every other region had two. And there were like 300 and some total representatives.

They had no special say. That bishop of Rome had no role at all in the most important early Council of the Church, the Council of Nicaea. Actually, if you go back to the First Council, which is the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, Peter's there.

He gives us say so, but so does Paul and so does Barnabas. And then the final conclusion regarding that was all done by James, the brother of Jesus. So James presided over that, not Peter.

So you don't have any real history like is intimated here in this passage. And a lot of Roman Catholics actually state this, but that isn't the way it worked out. It just isn't.

And I chronicle all of that in the piece, Solid Ground that I wrote last year, New Testament canon, which books and why. So what would you say to this last line here? If an all powerful God can't maintain the truth over time, he probably isn't real. Well, he did.

He did maintain the truth over time. It doesn't mean you don't have naysayers or people say false things. The truth of God is evident.

Here you got a skeptic that says there intimates there is no God. Okay, you're going to have human beings that go south. It doesn't mean God is incapable because God doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't cause everything to happen in a machine like way.

Oh, God's really powerful. So nobody's allowed to dissent. Nobody fallen human being can have a different view.

There can't be any debates about this. No, there are debates about it. The result, though, I think is the canon that God secured.

But there's a process that goes on. Why is that? Why is that a flaw of God's? Let's go to a question from MJ. Do you think the original New Testament manuscripts still exist somewhere? If more manuscripts are found someday, how would we know if they are the originals? That's a fair question.

And it reminds me of the Da Vinci code. If you saw the movie, you know that towards the end of the movie, there were all these manuscripts that were discovered in someplace called in someplace like Scotland or Ireland or some some abbey down in the basement. You know, water is dripping everywhere.

You know, we found these manuscripts. Manuscripts do not survive in water. The manuscripts we have come principally from Egypt because it's dry and that's what preserves the manuscripts, but manuscripts are fragile.

They were made out of papyrus. They were made out of vellum, which is skin. There's another type of skin that was used, parchment.

And papyrus, parchment, and vellum, I guess, but still they're fragile. And you look in your, if you have a library that's got books in it that are just 40 or 50 years old in your own house, you can see where the paper is starting to deteriorate, because these things are made out of material that disintegrate, then I have no expectation that any of the autographs, the originals, are still existing. The oldest one we have is a piece of the Gospel of John called P-52.

I think that's it. And that was found in Egypt. It is a small scrap, and that's the oldest one.

They date it by paleographical methods, writing style as maybe early second century 125 where they're about. So that's pretty amazing that you can have a piece that has survived 2000 years, but it's only in that unique environment, a very dry environment, that it was able to do that. What's amazing is that could have, the original could have still existed when that one was created.

Oh, yeah, that's true. That is true. And you think of the, if that one lasted almost 2000 years, the originals could have lasted hundreds of years easily.

And so when people are copying, they're copying from the autograph, you know, that certainly is possible. It could have lasted longer than that because people almost deified some of these objects, unfortunately. So that's certainly possible.

The originals aren't around, and there's no need for the originals because the question is, would we know it was an original, and I don't know how we would know that. I'm not sure. Now, there were some that Paul himself signed.

That's the only way we could know is if at the end, when it says, this is my handwriting, the handwriting changes. Yeah, it's distinctive, right, right. So that would be like suggestive, but there's a danger too.

What's better is to have copies of the original, and then copies of copies, then copies of copies of copies of copies, because that is a protective element. You lose the original, you lose the whole thing. When you have all of these copies, even when there are variations, and you made a superb point about this, Amy, at the reality conferences of this season, 24, 25, about the value of having the vast number of manuscripts, because even though there's thousands upon thousands of variations, because there's so many thousands and thousands and thousands of manuscripts, the comparison allows us to reconstruct the original quite reliably.

And so that's why there's an advantage. If we only had the original, no copies, then we, how do we know that that original is the original? You know, when you have all these copies, you can reconstruct the original. And secondly, if there's only one copy, it can be easily changed.

Whereas if you've got all of these widely copied manuscripts that have all these different lines of copying, you can see if somebody changes. It's very easy to tell that, but if we only had one copy, it's much easier to change it. And you mentioned this.

I think this is also a big reason why God didn't do it that way. You said people would deify things. Well, you see this in the Old Testament all the time.

I mean, even Gideon's Ephod or something, they were worshiping that. Moses made that bronze snake that people would look at. And then hundreds of years later, they're worshiping that.

We don't want people worshiping things. So God preserved his word, not in a physical object, but as information in many physical objects. That's right.

Excellent. All right, Greg, here is a question from Shelley. What do we mean when we say we don't have an original copy of the Bible? It would have been the true Word of God, which parts aren't right and how would we ever know? So we have the Constitution of the United States and Washington under glass protected.

If I copy every single word precisely as the original was, and by the way, many people have that, because there aren't variants of that, we have the original, is the copy that matches letter for letter the Constitution in the archive in Washington, D.C. Is that any less the Constitution? No, it's not. They are both equally the Constitution. No, the difference in the first one is, it's the original artifact, if you will.

But both are types. Okay, if I say, for God's all of the world, that he gave us only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him would not perish, but have everlasting life. My words are an accurate characterization, at least of the English translation, the American standard, of that verse.

But the verse in my Bible is written there. I just spoke that you have your Bible, it's written there too. That same verse shows up everywhere.

That is the token, okay, the representation of it. But in a certain sense, how can you have the same thing showing up in a bunch of places? That's called a universal, okay? There is a type behind that that is reflected in the tokens, in the letters, or the spoken verbal audible sounds that are different tokens, or you can do it in a different language. You can say theos, or you can say God.

It means the same thing, it's just a different language, different tokens for the same thing. So what we don't want to, that understanding, that relationship between a token and a type is helpful to answer this question. The original was the first token.

But what it tokened was a type that could be repeated in other places, could be repeated verbally, could be repeated in writing in the Greek language, or could be repeated in a translation. That was an accurate translation. And so that's the advantage.

All of these things are equally the word of God, just like an accurate copy of the Constitution is equally the Constitution. And there's tremendous advantage, as we were just discussing, of having being able to convey the same essential meanings in many different forms. When you have many tokens, it protects the type.

If you only have one token representing the type, and that token is changed, well then you don't have any other access to the original type. So can you say a little more about this last part of the question, which parts aren't right, and how would we ever know? Can you say a little more about how text occurs in some words? Sure, and here's where you might have something to say to in light of your contribution to the realities this year, this season. We have thousands and thousands of manuscripts of Greek, say the New Testament, or portions of sections of the Greek manuscripts.

You can take all these Greek manuscripts and pile them together. It's going to be a mile high. A lot of ways to characterize.

That's a lot. Okay, but they're not always the same. There are variants, variations.

So how do you know? Well, you compare. I can't go into a lot of detail about how the comparison is done. J Warner Wallace does a great thing on the screen, you know, with texting, you know, and how you can recapture the original, even though there's a lot of different variations.

You can make judgments that are very easy to do. One illustration that I give us, if you take a whole classroom and say second graders, and you give them up, you write on the board some text, maybe say 200 words, and you tell the second graders to copy all of these words down on paper, word for word, exactly. And your grade depends on how accurately you copy it.

Then they do the task. Once they've copied in all, say 40 students, you erase the board. Now the autograph is gone.

All you have is copies. And then you have the students hand the copies to their friends and have them do the same exercise copying from the copy. And so you now you've got 40 second generation, or maybe first you have the autograph, first generation.

Now you've got 40 second generation. You can do this again if you want, pass it around. I guarantee you, when you're done, you're going to have all of these copies, 40 times 40 plus 40 plus 40.

And now the question is, let's reconstruct what was on the board, but it's not there anymore. Can we do it? And you know what, there's going to be some knuckleheads that's going to get it wrong. But when you compare all of these things together, you're going to be able to see in a common sense kind of fashion where the mistakes are and what the original actually said.

And you're able to reconstruct the original. And that's the task of textual criticism. And now are there sometimes kind of tough judgment calls, occasionally, but almost never.

And the text that are in question, whether or not sure, and they matter, the differences matter, are minuscule and affect no doctrine of the church. And Bibles note that they note it when people aren't sure exactly which reading is original. It's very few places.

Yeah, that's right. Very few places. And when you say significant, you mean meaningful, and that doesn't mean that there's a doctrine that depends on that particular thing.

Well, there's two aspects of meaningful or significant. One could be meaningful with regards to the meaning. So here's a variant.

Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus. Sometimes in a verse it says, Jesus Christ should look at another man, just give us this Christ Jesus. Well, they just change the order.

Is that a variant? Yes. Is it meaningful? No, it doesn't change the meaning in any way, shape, or form. So there's a whole lot of variants that have absolutely no bearing on the meaning of the text like that.

You also have, or you'll have the Jesus, you have an article there, or maybe no article. That's a variant, but it's a consequential. Other times you'll have what's called singular readings.

In other words, you only have one or two examples of this variant. And all the other manuscripts don't have this. Well, this is obvious.

The mistake, that's the mistake. It isn't like thousands of manuscripts are wrong, and this one's right. Okay.

So that's another way they can make the decision. And there are another aspect of meaningful. One is whether you can recover the original sense of it, like Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus.

That's not a meaningful variant. And other ones where it's not possible to figure out, and it is meaningful in terms of the textual reconstruction, that doesn't mean it's meaningful in any theological sense. It doesn't affect anything.

It could be, there are five people there, and this one says there were 15 people there. Well, that's a meaningful distinction. It can't be both.

It doesn't mean the same in both cases, but it doesn't matter. In most cases, whether five or 15 to anything significant about the event. So once you weed out those kinds of variations and you're able to correct a lot of other things that are obvious, you're going to come up.

They have come up with a text that for all intents and purposes in every significant fashion reflects the original with a high degree of confidence. And it can get complicated. All of the things that they do.

What's the name of that book? It myths and mistakes and New Testament, textual Christmas. It might just be. I only remember the myths and mistakes.

Oh, yeah. I have that book. Right.

But they go into more detail about how all of this works, but there are different things you can compare. So for example, in the example that you gave of the kids in the classroom, you could see if there's four generations or have many generations. If it comes in in the third generation and it's not there before, well, then it's not likely that that's original.

So the earlier manuscript seems to supersede the later manuscript. Or let's say there was one line and then they had five people each time. You could see it go down in a certain area, but not in the other areas.

Right. So that's another way that you can rule out. You see the mistake in one generation that's repeated in multiple generations.

Those are called families of manuscripts when you have these characteristics that fit the whole family. And you know, they're in a sense genealogically related when you think of the development of the manuscript over time. And they know down to who was the scribe? What was the scribe's tendencies? What kind of mistakes did he make? And how does that? It gets so detailed.

So what I want to make sure everybody understands is this isn't some random process. We'll take a guess at it. This is a really it's a complicated and it's a complicated form of figuring out how these things how these mistakes came into the text and figuring out what what is original.

There's a lot of work that goes into this. It's a sophisticated process. And by the way, the Bible isn't the only ancient writings that are subjected to this.

All ancient writings are subjected to this that come down to us in manuscript form. And they just had to figure out even Shakespeare, you know, which one's the original? This we have this one. We got these two different variations trying to figure out which was the one that Shakespeare wrote.

Now that's much more recent in time, but there's not that many manuscripts to compare. With the ancient with the scriptures, even though they're ancient, we still have so many more manuscripts that it makes the job a lot easier. Well, thank you all for your questions.

We enjoy hearing from you. Send us your question on X with the hashtag SDR. Ask or go to our website at str.org and look for our hashtag SDR.

Ask podcast page. Thank you for listening. This is Amy Hall and Greg Cocle for a stand to reason.