Hi Fred. Sorry it’s taken me a while to get to your question & I noticed you wrote more recently saying, 'I'm still waiting for answers.' So here goes. You wrote:
The Bible – Translated and interpreted so many times over the centuries. Surely to know the true meaning one must learn the original Greek & Hebrew & form one’s own judgement of the meaning and not someone else’s opinion. Look at all the books in the Christian bookstores, which are commentaries on the Bible, so many will tell you that the meaning of such & such a verse actually means something else if you go back to the original texts. Therefore the Bible as we know it cannot be trusted as ‘God’s guidebook’ since we don’t know how much of the text is true to the original.
You raise a valid point, in fact there are several points here, & it’s a complex subject. I’ll try to answer this question, even though I know I’ll raise a lot of new issues about ‘how much of the text is true to the original.’ Well, all I can say is doubt freely, but also be prepared to doubt your doubts. I think doubting, being skeptical & rationalizing are great things, contrary to what Berg taught & many Christians teach today. The Bible says, ‘Test everything. Hold on to the good’ (1Thess.5:21). It was asking questions & holding things up against the ruler of sanity that helped all of us think our way out of the cult.
Anyway, I hope I won’t bore you by giving you some background to what’s called ‘textual transmission’ but I feel it’s relevant, & you did ask. (I’ll deal with the Old Testament for starters.) In my opinion, while knowing ancient Hebrew & Aramaic would be an rewarding experience & I wish I knew them myself, knowing those alone wouldn’t help you discover the full meaning of the Old Testament texts, since modern translators not only must know those languages, but also consult other languages & texts & authoritative sources.
The Family insists on using the KJV, a very outdated translation, but if you own one you’ll notice that it reads in the front, Translated out of the original tongues & with previous translations diligently compared & revised. With the KJV, this meant (a.) translating the Old Testament from the original languages, Hebrew & Aramaic, (b.) comparing their translation to previous translations—which back then was the Latin Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint, & earlier English translations such as Tyndale’s, etc. (c.) & revising former translation errors, or confusion created by the English language changing over the centuries. The English KJV has been revised many times since 1611, though not substantially changed.
This whole process has gone on ever since in newer translations, & in fact, has been aided by two additional factors the KJV wasn’t able to take advantage of: (d.) the discovery of more ancient versions of the Hebrew text, such as the Dead Sea scrolls in 1948, & (e.) comparing difficult Hebrew words & passages to nearly identical words in sister-languages such as Ugaritic (Ugarit was discovered in 1929) & Eblaite (Ebla was discovered in 1975). I no longer read the KJV, but prefer modern translations like the NIV (New International Version) or the NKJV (New King James Version) since not only is their English modern but they have taken this principle of translating, comparing & revising much further.
You said, Look at all the books in the Christian bookstores, which are commentaries on the Bible, so many will tell you that the meaning of such & such a verse actually means something else if you go back to the original texts. Of course this is true & it reflects the ongoing search for the true meaning of the text, which I think is a very positive thing. This is especially true if you’re comparing the text of the KJV to original Hebrew. I simply can’t read the KJV any more because of its difficult English where ‘let your conversation be without covetousness’ actually means, ‘keep your lifestyle free from greed,’ since conversation now means ‘talking’ & not ‘lifestyle’ as it did back in 1611. Also, ‘forget not to communicate’ actually means ‘do not forget to share your material things,’ since the meaning of communicate has also changed in the last 400 years.
Even if you could read ancient Hebrew, in many cases you’d still have to consult different sources like translators do to discover the original meaning. The standard Hebrew text we have today is the Masoretic text & as you have probably heard, the Jewish scribes, beginning with the Talmudists (100–500 AD) were meticulously careful when copying out new scrolls, even going so far as to double-check the number of Hebrew letters on each page to ensure that not even a yod (the size of an apostrophe) was added or dropped. Nevertheless, the scribes were only human, & errors did creep in—especially before the Talmudist’s meticulous system was put in place. This why Bible scholars today don’t insist that the Bible has been preserved verbatim since the day it was first written down, but say that the text we now have was ‘accurate in the original autographs,’ meaning the original copies.
There have been scribal errors in the textual transmission, & while many of these are easily recognizable, there is an ongoing quest for the original text in some difficult passages. These usually do not involve major points, nor does this change any essential Christian doctrine, but there are differences. For example, 1Samuel 13:1. The Hebrew of the Masoretic text says that Saul reigned 2 years. Some Jews believe that this means that Saul’s reign itself lasted only 2 years. A Jewish friend of mine argues that. Many modern scholars believe a number dropped out while being copied, & that this should read ‘32’ or ‘42’ instead. (Very likely 42 since Acts 13:21 refers to Saul reigning 40 years.) The KJV translators resolved this by translating this phrase ‘and when he had reigned 2 years over Israel.’ Who’s right? In this instance, we simply don’t know. It’s part of the ongoing quest for the original text.
Another example of a digit dropping out—& I noticed this one when I was still in the Family—is the difference between 2Kings 24:8 & 2Chronicles 36:9. In the KJV, the first reference says that King Jehoiachin was 18 when he became king. The second reference says that Jehoiachin was 8 when he became king. Obviously one of these numbers is incorrect, & modern scholars pretty much agree that 18 is the correct figure.
On another issue, if you ever get a chance to read articles like ‘The Large Numbers of the Old Testament’ (by John Wenham, in Eerdmans’ Handbook to the Bible), you’ll find out that there is a simple explanation for the sometimes impossibly large numbers in the Hebrew text. For example, did the wall of Aphek really fall on 27,000 men killing them all at once? (1Kings 20:30) And how could 2 ˝ – 3 million Israelites have exited Egypt during the exodus, when the entire population of Egypt at that time was less than 4 million? As it turns out, this is probably a misunderstanding had based on the reading of a Hebrew word (’lp) which not only means ‘armed man’ but also means ‘thousands.’ Early Hebrew copyists misunderstood what was being referred to & gave us a Hebrew text which reads that there were a total of 603,550 Israelite warriors (Numbers 1:46). In actuality there were some 20,000 warriors, with a total population of some 80,000 Israelites. I’ll probably be hooted as a heretic for saying this, but I believe it’s true. The outstanding Christian apologist, K. Kitchen, comes to this same conclusion re: numbers in ‘The Reliability of the Old Testament’ pgs. 263-265.
So while the wall of Aphek fell on 27 ’lp, this should be translated as 27 armed warriors, not 27 thousand men.
Of course, I’m deliberately giving examples here where the text has errors; by far the vast majority of the Hebrew text is consistent. For example, the Masoretic text of Isaiah is almost identical to the Hebrew text in the ‘Isaiah scroll’ found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls were written before the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, yet these copies agree in almost all details with the much-recopied Masoretic text we have today. In areas of disagreement, the Dead Sea scrolls often clarify obscure or difficult Hebrew phrases found in the Masoretic text. Check out Josh McDowell’s ‘Evidence That Demands a Verdict,’ pgs. 53-59 for the reliability of the Old Testament text.
Another thing is, the Bible’s historical references & timelines are amazingly collaborated by archaeology. For e.g. the Mesha Stone, written by the Moabite king, Mesha, circa 860 B.C., commemorates his throwing off his Israelite overlords, an event described in the Bible in 2Kings 3 (see http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a019.html); Sennacherib’s inscriptions about besieging King Hezekiah of Judah on the Taylor Prism confirm the account in the Bible; in the ‘Israel Stele’ Pharaoh Merneptah (son of Ramesses II) mentions defeating the Israelites in Canaan circa 1200 B.C. In addition, many Bible references formerly denounced as mythological, have since been proved to be accurate. Sceptics once doubted that there ever had been a city called Nineveh or an empire called Assyria. Today the city of Nineveh has been excavated. Sceptics used to doubt that there was a people group called the Hittites—until their capitol city, Hattusha, was dug up & inscriptions were found in Egypt where Ramesses II signed a major peace treaty with them. In fact, they have dug up the Hittite version of the same treaty. Archeology, both in Egypt & the Levant, has resounding supported the accuracy of the Hebrew text.
Something else to consider is that Hebrew was originally written with consonants only—no vowels—and to make matters more challenging, was written without any spaces between words. Thus there are sometimes disagreements as to where the letters should be divided to create individual words. (Vowel dots were only added by the Masorites (500–900 AD) to make the text easier to read.) Most of the time, deciding on the meaning of the text was not a problem, since context made it easy. Also, Hebrew has a well-defined grammatical structure, so trying to wrestle a new meaning out of a phrase simply didn’t work if doing so made the grammar come out skewed.
There are other textual issues as well that modern scholars & translators—far from clouding with their interpretations—have helped resolved. The earliest portions of the Bible (such as the song of Miriam & the song of Deborah) are written in archaic, early Hebrew—older than the Hebrew spoken around King David’s day. This is also true of the book of Job. There are so many archaic Hebrew expressions in Job, for example, that it has presented special difficulties to translators. A large number of ‘orphan’ words appear only once in Job & nowhere else in the Bible, so KJV translators had to depend upon context to determine their most accurate meaning. This is not a major issue in the rest of the Bible, but it is a special problem for Job—as if the poor guy didn’t have problems enough. Again, modern translators have help that wasn’t available to the KJV translators—the discoveries of major cuneiform libraries in the cities of Ugarit & Ebla.
Hebrew itself does not come from southern Iraq (Ur of the Chaldees) but is known as a Northwest Semitic language, meaning that the languages most closely related to it are Canaanite, Ugaritic & Eblaite in Canaan & north Syria. (Think of it as the differences between English, German & Swedish.) Ugarit, modern-day Ras Shamra, was a port city on the coast of Syria in Joshua’s day, & Ebla was a city in north-central Syria, head of an empire about 1,000 years before Abraham was born. These discoveries have helped modern translators a great deal. For example, obscure Hebrew words were once translated a certain way in the KJV because translators back then did not have many other uses of the word to compare it to. But the discovery of cuneiform tablets in Ebla & Ugarit—whose languages contain almost identical words—have helped modern translators to more accurately define perplexing Hebrew phrases & words.
In my opinion, modern archaeologists, scholars & translators have done a tremendous job in bringing us closer to the original meaning of the text, & we are richer for their efforts. Old difficulties are resolved & the overall text is more settled. Of course, this raises unsettling questions for those who believe that the text was transmitted without any error whatsoever down through the last 4,000 years. I would say that the text is remarkably accurate, given the fact that it was entrusted to fallible copyists, but I wouldn’t say it was totally without difficulties, obscure meanings or scribal errors.