When I was young, I believed many things that I was taught in church. Perhaps I believed everything I was taught. I had no reason not to. But as I got older, I learned that other churches believed different things. Well, of course they were wrong... Or were they? So by about the end of High School, I had learned some new things and was starting to change what I believed. Some years later I became involved in another church and learned a great deal more.
Now one of the things I learned as a young person was that the Bible is the "Inerrant Word of God." I now understand that this "doctrine" fully stated is that in the original "autographs" of the authors of the books of the Bible, they were without error. And I also now understand that that is somewhat of a moot point, because apparently no one has any of the original "autographs." They were worn out and/or lost centuries ago. So what we have today is not "inerrant." It has errors... many of them.
This is a very "uncomfortable" position to be in, for us who believe in the Bible. We want to "witness with confidence." No one likes to talk about their personal problems in public. We all try to put on a good face. And this tendency extends to every area of life and work.
I have been very aware in these last few years of a great many "scientific studies" that have skewed or falsified the reporting of the data in order to publish a "finding" that supports something. This is regrettably all to common in the Pharmaceutical industry. And as a result many people have died from "side effects" that were either hidden or minimized in the published "studies."
This is dishonest, disgusting and destructive. But are we "Christians" any better? We teach that what we have in the Bible is absolutely true, and must be believed our way.
We are afraid to let our children go to the university because we know there is a danger of them "losing their faith." We drill into their head the doctrines like the absolute perfect reliability of the Bible, in hopes that that will keep them in the faith, while in the world. And we give them a good dose of fear of hell fire so they won't stray too far.
First, have we really even checked for ourselves?
Back to my experience in this new church that I started attending after college, I learn much there. One thing I learned is that the King James Bible had quite a few places where the translation could be improved. So, I became interested in learning a bit of Greek for myself. I bought my first Greek-English Interlinear New Testament. And I started to see just how many differences there were among the manuscripts. There are many thousands of Greek manuscripts and manuscript fragments that have been found. My Interlinear New Testament had an "apparatus" at the bottom of the pages, a kind of special note system that showed what the differences were in the various manuscripts. I saw that there were differences on virtually every page. Most, it is true, were minor spelling or word order differences, or a different word with the same meaning. They didn't make any difference as to what the Bible was telling us. That was true of most of them, but not all. There were some very significant and larger differences that were quite unsettling.
This really got my interest and bothered me a lot over the years. I just could not understand how God could allow His Word to get so full of differences, errors, contradictions and questions.
Only recently has a big part of this overall question been answered for me. And a great deal of the problem is now completely logical. And yet there still remain a large number of problems that I have no answer for.
Before I tell you what I learned about these many differences and discrepancies in the Greek New Testament, I want to appeal to your honesty. If I had never been honest enough to look deeply into the problems for years, I never would have found any answers.
As long as we as a "Christian community" hide our face from the problems and pretend they are not there, we will remain in darkness. But it is my belief that the more we are brutally honest within ourselves and completely open with each other, the more we will come into a glorious light.
I have, in the last two decades, had opportunity to be in a small Greek class and to study some Hebrew under a couple of Jewish Rabbis. The teacher of the Greek class would sometimes go into used bookstores and buy a small pile of books to give away to his students. One book that he gave me turned out to give me an insight that would prove most enlightening in the following years. The book is "The Byzantine Text-Type & New Testament Textual Criticism" by Harry A. Sturz.
In this book, the author describes, by way of introduction and background, that there are four "text-types" among the many manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. What that means is that if you take all the many thousands of Greek manuscripts and fragments of the NT and spread them out and compare them for similarities and differences, it becomes evident that they can be grouped into four text-types. These four types are called different things by different scholars, but Sturz refers to them by the names: Western, Antiochan (Byzantine), "Caesarean" and Alexandrian. The most numerous of the four is the Antiochan (or Byzantine). The King James Version was translated mostly from manuscripts of this text-type. These manuscripts were the most plentiful and available to the translators of that time, over 400 years ago. Modern scholars, on the other hand, have many more manuscripts available for comparison.
As a result of the early translation of the King James Bible and the later scholarship with more manuscripts available, and the differences between them, there have been many more translations with significant differences from the King James Version. And this, understandably, has caused a great deal of debate and the division of the Christian community into two camps. There are the "King James Only" people, versus those who consider the "New International Version" or the many like it to be from better and more complete scholarship. Many of the modern scholars consider that the many Byzantine manuscripts are not as old as some of the others and are therefore not as reliable. They are, after all, trying to determine what the oldest, that is the original, Greek was. So the older, the better. Right?
But the defenders of the King James said that the reason there are more of the Byzantine and that they are not as old, is because they were the ones most recognized in the largest Christian communities and thus they wore out from use and so only copies that are not as old are still in existence. And furthermore, the oldest ones seem to still be here for the very reason that they were not used as much and therefore didn't get worn out. Which is also the reason there are not as many of them; perhaps they were not copied as much because they were not much used.
And so the debate continues, decade after decade. Sturz, in his book, explains these text-types, as background for the real subject of his book. The book is about the significance of the exceptions to the text-type grouping. What he shows from a very intense and detailed comparison between all these manuscripts is that there are a very large number of exceptions to the types. That is, for example, most any manuscript you may look at will mostly fit into a particular text-type group, but will have readings in verses here and there that do not match that text-type, but match word for word, in many cases, the bulk of another text-type. And not only so, many manuscripts from each of the four types have these "exceptions" from each of the other three. This is a very strange thing. It does not seem to me that he ever could determine why this could be the case or how it got that way. Rather the intent of his book as the title indicates, is to alert the modern scholarship community to not disregard the Byzantine manuscripts in their study.
Nearly half of his 300 page book is lists of these "exceptions". And that is only a sampling.
Here is a reason that I am making this call to honesty. Many pastors don't want their congregations to know this stuff. Their faith would be destroyed. They would leave the church and the pastor would be out of work. Or so it would seem, anyway.
This is the truth. We have a "mess" on our hands. This is the reason that many young men who have a desire to serve the Lord, go to seminary and come out with a career pastoring and teaching things that they no longer believe. There are certainly still many pastors who believe in God, Jesus, the gospel and the Bible. But there are also many, perhaps more who lose their faith, but must keep preaching it because that is now their way of keeping alive and having food to eat and a roof over their head. It's a job. And many actually do care about people, and want to help them.
So how did the Greek get to be in this state, and why?
About six years ago I decided to really try to dig deeper into the Bible and the manuscripts, in everything I could get my hands on. And thankfully the Internet came along to make possible, what would have otherwise been utterly impossible for a little guy like me. I searched and searched for all kinds of things on the Internet. I found the research of Jeff Benner into the ancient Hebrew Pictographic letters and got a couple of his books. I got a copy of a comparison of the "Samaritan Pentateuch" with the "Masoretic Pentateuch". I found and downloaded two versions of Aramaic-English Interlinears. I decided to try my hand at translating, and eventually translated most of the book of Genesis, relying heavily on Benner's books. I even wrote some programs to automate some of the translation process.
One of the most interesting things that I found was that the Aramaic Peshitta New Testament had a word in Matthew that had several different meanings and that it could mean something different from the word there in all the Greek manuscripts. Understanding this word in its other possible meanings in Aramaic solved several very perplexing problems that have stumped scholars completely. I learned of this word and its meanings from Paul Younan and Glenn David Bauscher. They have each produced an interlinear Aramaic-English translation of the New Testament. Please follow the link at the end of this article to get a very full explanation of it. It is most fascinating!
So now years later, it finally became clear to me why the Greek is in the state it is in, and it completely makes sense. It is exactly what would happen as the Gospel spread wildly into all the known world after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the birth of an unimaginably active and powerful early church! It is a great testimony to the reality of that explosion!
"How?" You say.
The four Greek text-types are the result of four Greek translations of the Original Aramaic New Testament. And the "exceptions" that Sturz focuses on are the result of a great deal of traveling between all the missionaries and apostles back and forth, and comparing each other's translations and making improvements to their own, while all along the way leaving Greek copies everywhere they went. Just read Paul's letters in the New Testament, and notice how many greetings there are: "Greet so-and-so, and the church in his house, and greet ..." There was a lot of communication, travel and connection between all the churches all over the known world in those first decades.
Jesus and the whole southern kingdom of Judah spoke Aramaic at that time and had been speaking, not primarily Hebrew, but Aramaic for about 700 years, ever since the Babylonian captivity. They certainly also knew Hebrew, but that was the language of their scriptures, not the common language of every day life. Their common language was certainly not Greek. For them to speak Aramaic in every day life and Hebrew in the Temple and scripture reading and studies, was very normal. This is not at all unlike when I was young, and we all used only the King James Bible. My mom didn't say to me in the morning, "What dost thou want for breakfast? And what art thou going to wear today? Hast thou perfected thy homework for thine instruction in school?" But when we read the Bible, that is the way we talked, it was quite normal for us. We didn't even think of it as a "different language" because it wasn't. The kind of changes from King James English to modern English are very similar to the changes from Hebrew to the common Aramaic of Jesus day. Most words are quite understandable, and those that were different were mostly different in the word endings, just as in modern English as compared to KJ English.
It is perfectly understandable that Hebrew and Aramaic are very close because Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans where the language spoken was Chaldean, and Chaldean is today called Aramaic. And in their captivity in Babylon, they were returning closer to the area where their language originated. This is quite clear from the fact that several parts of the Old Testament written during the captivity in Babylon, like part of Daniel, are written in Aramaic. So even to read all parts of their scriptures required them to read both Hebrew and Aramaic. Older Biblical study reference books call the language of Daniel Chaldean, but the newer books call it Aramaic.
And as to the Greek language, the testimony of the well known Jewish historian, Josephus, says:
I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate those books into the Greek tongue, which I formerly composed in the language of our country, and sent to the Upper Barbarians:
So Greek was not "the language of our country." So if Josephus, who lived after this, wrote first in the language of his country, Judea, and afterwards translated his own writings into Greek; Do you really think the disciples skipped their own language completely? Absurd! Can you imagine the writer of the book of Hebrews writing to the Hebrews originally in Greek? That would have been very strange!
The following quote from https://www.mountlebanon.org/aramaiclanguage.html (broken link), further expresses the widespread use of Aramaic.
[Note: The above link is now broken. As of 2023, this same text can be found at www.learnassyrian.com/aramaic/history.html]
Use of the Aramaic language had become common by the period of the Chaldean Empire (626-539 B.C.). It became the official language of the Imperial government in Mesopotamia and enjoyed general use until the spread of Greek (331 B.C.). Although Greek had spread throughout these Eastern lands, Aramaic remained dominant and the linqua franca of the Semitic peoples. This continued to be so until Aramaic was superseded by a sister Semitic tongue, Arabic, about the 13th century A.D. to the 14th century A.D., when Arabic supplanted Aramaic after the Arab conquest in the 7th Century. However, the Christians of Mesopotamia (Iraq), Iran, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon kept the Aramaic language alive domestically, scholastically and liturgically. In spite of the pressure of the ruling Arabs to speak Arabic, Aramaic is still spoken today in its many dialects, especially among the Chaldeans and Assyrians.
Before concluding, one more vital aspect of the Aramaic language needs to be mentioned and that is its use as the major Semitic tongue for the birth and spread of spiritual and intellectual ideas in and all over the Near East. According to the research and opinion of an outstanding Aramaic and Arabic scholar, Professor Franz Rosenthal, who in the Journal of Near Eastern studies, states: "in my view, the history of Aramaic represents the purest triumph of the human spirit as embodied in language (which is the mind's most direct form of physical expression) over the crude display of material power. . . Great empires were conquered by the Aramaic language, and when they disappeared and were submerged in the flow of history, that language persisted and continued to live a life of its own ... The language continued to be powerfully active in the promulgation of spiritual matters. It was the main instrument for the formulation of religious ideas in the Near East, which then spread in all directions all over the world ... The monotheistic groups continue to live on today with a religious heritage, much of which found first expression in Aramaic."
[Note: More recently (in 2023) I have learned that there is a reasonable debate and some interesting evidence that the language of the early church and the Judeans may have been more Hebrew than mainstream scholarship has assumed. So in the rest of this article, let the "Hebrew" be understood as possibly the original, or both Aramaic and Hebrew, to varying degrees.]
So if the Aramaic was the original that went throughout the world and was translated into Greek by at least four different translators, then where did the Aramaic originals go and why?
Well, as you might expect, Satan did everything he could to destroy this greatest news ever published. Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70. That was the primary center where the apostles stayed, went out from and returned to. It is very reasonable that many copies of the Aramaic were destroyed there. The Greek translations went everywhere, they were much harder to "round-up" for destruction. Then there was the burning of the largest library in the world at that time in Alexandria, Egypt. This was another, well known center of Christian activity. So the original Aramaic from which the Alexandrian Greek text-type was translated would very likely have been destroyed even though it was in a "safe place" in the library, which was a center of scribal work, copying, studying and translating. Then there is Rome, another center of the young Christian church until the sport of feeding them to the lions in their arenas became popular. And the rest of us have no idea what may be hidden away in the "Vatican" library in Rome. And no doubt wherever there was a center of scribal copying work, it was destroyed. That only leaves one place to look for the original Aramaic. Among the Aramaic speaking people where the original Aramaic was not kept safe in a translation center, but rather was in the hands of all the common people who didn't need a translation. And that is exactly where and how God in His sovereignty kept it safe all these centuries up to the present. And today you can download it on your computer anywhere in the world.
It is now my firm conviction that the New Testament was originally written in Aramaic [or Hebrew], the common language of Jesus, His disciples and all of Judea, and was then very quickly translated into Greek as the apostles spread the greatest news into the other areas of the world which primarily spoke Greek. Just as Jesus had commissioned them:
"But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth." (Acts 1:8)
And as Paul says:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. (Romans 1:16)
tribulation and anguish, on every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek; but glory, honor, and peace to everyone who works what is good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. (Romans 2:9-10)
Greek was the language of the Roman Empire, which covered much of the known world. So the gospels and letters were first written to the Aramaic [or Hebrew] speaking Jews and then translated into Greek almost immediately in the different areas as they went, probably translating each letter as soon as it arrived from the apostles in Jerusalem or where ever Paul was when he sent each letter.
Today, the Aramaic Peshitta is the most likely candidate [or a very valuable second witness] for the original New Testament. Even if it is not "perfect" it should definitely be considered as a most valuable source, and all four of the Greek text-types should be studied as their variations will surely shed light on our understanding of the original Aramaic [or Hebrew]. The four Greek text-types are then to be understood as four very good witnesses to the original, rather than being looked upon as a very poorly copied and corrupted transmission of one single long lost Greek original. This makes way more sense!
Please read about how one word from the Aramaic Peshitta brings a complete resolution to several contradictions related to the Genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. [And note here again: I have learned that there are two manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew that present even more clear evidence for this same change.]