Really appreciate you sharing this info, Joel. Textual criticism is a fascinating (and essential) discipline. Looking at all the variants in the New Testament in its more than 5800 Greek manuscripts, we could easily doubt how we can have confidence at all in the Bible. But in the end, not one place in the New Testament does a doctrine of our faith stand or fall on a variant. In other words, even though we may be unsure about how to translate less than 1% of the New Testament, we can understand 100% of what God wants us to know about life and salvation.
I'm grateful you brought up translations, as they have amazing value (including 15,000 New Testament manuscripts in other ancient languages). I'm thinking particularly of St. Peter's epistles, where the majority of his Old Testament quotes come from the Septuagint (a translation!). This gives amazing credibility to the value of our modern translations as indeed representing the Word of God.
As an aside, Dr. Dan Wallace and his team at The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts are some of the many capable scholars we have to thank for preserving and defending the ancient manuscripts. You might also enjoy watching Dr. Wallace's talk, "Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then?" on YouTube.
Thanks for pointing out Dan Wallace’s work. And great points: Timothy Paul Jones’s book “Misquoting Truth” (he’s on Substack, by the way!) does a good job of demonstrating how the variants inadvertently validate the underlying textual unity. You can imagine all those thousands of manuscripts stacked atop each other like a massive Venn diagram; while there are many variants, they fall outside the common core clustered in the center.
Joel, I think the imagery of a massive Venn diagram is so useful in this case. Doubters of Scripture love to pick at those tiny spots where things don't line up exactly from the various ancient texts. But a better (and more amazing) exercise would be to look at all of these texts from different sources, different places, different languages etc. I think we would all be thunderstruck at not just the similarities, but perhaps even the near uniformity of so many of them.
Yes, exactly. There’s a tremendous amount of fidelity among all those copies—all the more remarkable because they were all copied by hand in wildly different settings.
This is really interesting. I have seven different versions of the Bible, and my favorite for everyday reading is the Common English Bible. I also use the Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson), because I like its commentary.
One of my favorite Babylon Bee headlines was "KJV-Only Pastor Admits He Is NIV-Positive."
As a teenager in a fundamentalist Swiss church I always wished to be Syriac orthodox, since I couldn’t for the life of me make sense of Revelations. It also scared me, I guess.
This is great. Thank you! As a Bible student and teacher, this is all fascinating. The Bible is the most incredible book in human history. It is THE holy book of holy books. The word of God. The "Holy Bible". I hope your article stirs up more people to read it and study it.
I love this! Textual criticism is something that can sound terrifying to Christians who don’t know anything about it, but the more I have learned about it, the more it has only increased my love for and trust in the Bible. I want this ancient Christians study Bible too!
Totally. As I mentioned to someone earlier, I love the variations because they all attest to the wonderful humanity of the faith—all those quirks are artifacts of the process of diligent writing, preservation, study, and all the rest. The Bible didn’t drop out of heaven. It was produced within a diverse community over a couple thousand years. I find that totally amazing!
What's also amazing (to me) is the Bible chronicles the doings of total nobodies:
a little group of people caught in the conflicts of a long-dead empire (OldT) and a small time healer and some humble workers in an obscure part of the Roman Empire (NewT)
And yet...
Also amazing is how centuries of criticism of the Bible have done nothing to destroy its influence.
The translators of the King James Bible used the Textual Receptis, but according to their introductory, they did consult the Syriac and other translations to which they had access. In the debate over the oldest Greek manuscripts, it is often forgotten that there are translations older than some of the extant Greek manuscripts.
For example, the Pericope adulterae, as the story of the woman taken in adultery is called, may not be in some of the earliest extant Greek manuscripts, but it is in some of the earliest Bible translations, such the Ge'ez translation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Armenian Bible, which were both first translated in the 4th century (300s).
But in debating over whether the Pericope is in the oldest manuscripts, what is often missed is that the story is entirely characteristic of Jesus Christ, who ate with publicans and sinners, and let the sinful woman wash his feet with her tears while he ate at Simon the Pharisee's house in the Gospel of Luke, and spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John.
Thanks for weighing in on the woman caught in adultery! And I agree it’s entirely in keeping with Jesus’s character—hence the reason even Critical Text adherents can’t seem to let it go. They shouldn’t!
This is a great essay with some excellent resources and book recommendations. I'm excited to see you talking about the ACSB - my sister is one of the editors!
We tend to forget that Christianity was a campfire religion and instead try to apply modernist reductionism and systems to it. Our fear for our eternal salvation causes us to become dogmatic and draws authoritarian leadership when it’s meant to be discussed and turned over ad infinitum around a campfire, on long journeys, and around the dinner table. The truth doesn’t come from the text but from the discussion.
A further note, the book itself is liturgical. Fr. Pat Reardon points this out in his excellent (and quite brief) commentary on it, published several years ago by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Yes! I know. And the context for that statement is during the liturgy—that is, an appointed reader in church (“the one reads it aloud”) and the congregation (“those who listen”).
Another interesting place to look is lectionary texts, which also oftentimes preserve older readings (this is a dangerous game to play, because they also occasionally skip around or rearrange). One particular point, related to the above, is the Gospel reading for Pentecost in the Orthodox Church, which bypasses entirely the story of the woman caught in adultery (Jn. 7:37–52, 8:12).
I would like a proper, ideally one-person translation of the Septuagint that's not Brenton's. The current offerings are 'computer-assisted'.
As a final note, David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament is probably the finest on offer right now (most translations I know, even putatively literal ones, take various traditional liberties with the text: Hart's translation says what the Greek says everywhere I have checked, with explanatory notes for difficult areas or contentious choices). Robert Alter's Hebrew Bible, if still available, is uneven but wonderful.
My favourite biblical sources are Neil Douglas-Klotz's translations from the Syriac Aramaic text still used by Aramaic Christians today, which he sometimes compares to Biblical Hebrew and Qur'Aranic Arabic. He presents interesting arguments that the Greek texts drew on earlier Aramaic ones. In any case, Aramaic was the language Jesus and everyone around him spoke, so the Greek texts were hopefully at least written by people with Aramaic ears. Douglas Klotz has a PhD in ancient semitic languages, also translates Arabic and Hebrew, but has been focusing on Jesus' words for about 40 years. I strongly recommend his recent (2022) book Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus.
Carl Jung recommended if we can to reconnect with our early childhood spirituality, and I have discovered mine was rooted not in the RC Church of my family upbringing, but a year of Waldorf pre-kindergarten. What a gift, adults who knew how to support children in play and epiphanic learning. In recalling this, I have rekindled my relationship from those young years with Jesus and the feel of this accords well with Douglas-Klotz's translations/midrashes. As a child I would recite the Our Father at night before bed. Now I explore this contemplative prayer in the Aramaic each night before bed and at other times. Imagine praying in the language Jesus spoke.
According to Douglas-Klotz, there are radical differences between the traditions rooted in Greek and Latin and the Aramaic, rooted in the ancient native wisdom traditions of West Asia. For example, the "I am" statements in John. In the Aramaic gospels, for example, in Thomas, he is not saying "I am" but "I I" (Ina'na). So that "I am the way, the truth and the life" could be rendered "I I is the illuminated path, sense of direction and life energy." (Douglas-Klotz, 2022, p. 166). This is based on the ancient semitic sense of our having inner and outer communities. Douglas-Klotz argues that Jesus' breakthrough was seeing that rather than having to kill what we might call the ego in order to enter ruha (wind, breath, soul, the larger I) in Alaha, we can resonate with our heart with the smaller selves with which we tend to fuse and this opens into the larger self, ruha participating in Alaha.
As a psychotherapist with a longtime exploration of meditation, I am not aware of another tradition that points so clearly to the inner parts/self aspects work that has emerged in recent years in different forms of psychotherapies. Of these, Internal Family Systems probably points most explicitly to how resonating with the self-parts within us open us into more participatory, spiritual ways of experiencing reality.
Thank God for the men who have loved The Word into eternity, including you, Joel. Your work is a blessing to all of us who love both the words and The Word.
I have presented some of these variations in classes at my evangelical church, also referencing the little bit that is available from the Dead Sea scrolls. I look forward to an English translation of the Septuagint--especially for Jeremiah and Old Testament quotes in the New Testament.
The NETS is a bit difficult to read because it retains all the Greek spellings of names, but it follows the style of the NRSV so it’s not terrible. The Lexham Septuagint is more readable, but the NETS is (I think) actually better. I’m really eager to see what this new translation will be like.
Really appreciate you sharing this info, Joel. Textual criticism is a fascinating (and essential) discipline. Looking at all the variants in the New Testament in its more than 5800 Greek manuscripts, we could easily doubt how we can have confidence at all in the Bible. But in the end, not one place in the New Testament does a doctrine of our faith stand or fall on a variant. In other words, even though we may be unsure about how to translate less than 1% of the New Testament, we can understand 100% of what God wants us to know about life and salvation.
I'm grateful you brought up translations, as they have amazing value (including 15,000 New Testament manuscripts in other ancient languages). I'm thinking particularly of St. Peter's epistles, where the majority of his Old Testament quotes come from the Septuagint (a translation!). This gives amazing credibility to the value of our modern translations as indeed representing the Word of God.
As an aside, Dr. Dan Wallace and his team at The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts are some of the many capable scholars we have to thank for preserving and defending the ancient manuscripts. You might also enjoy watching Dr. Wallace's talk, "Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then?" on YouTube.
Thanks for pointing out Dan Wallace’s work. And great points: Timothy Paul Jones’s book “Misquoting Truth” (he’s on Substack, by the way!) does a good job of demonstrating how the variants inadvertently validate the underlying textual unity. You can imagine all those thousands of manuscripts stacked atop each other like a massive Venn diagram; while there are many variants, they fall outside the common core clustered in the center.
Joel, I think the imagery of a massive Venn diagram is so useful in this case. Doubters of Scripture love to pick at those tiny spots where things don't line up exactly from the various ancient texts. But a better (and more amazing) exercise would be to look at all of these texts from different sources, different places, different languages etc. I think we would all be thunderstruck at not just the similarities, but perhaps even the near uniformity of so many of them.
Thanks for this post. So enlightening!
Yes, exactly. There’s a tremendous amount of fidelity among all those copies—all the more remarkable because they were all copied by hand in wildly different settings.
Almost as though Someone else had a hand in it! 😀
This is really interesting. I have seven different versions of the Bible, and my favorite for everyday reading is the Common English Bible. I also use the Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson), because I like its commentary.
One of my favorite Babylon Bee headlines was "KJV-Only Pastor Admits He Is NIV-Positive."
NIV-Positive! LOL. The Orthodox Study Bible is pretty great; Pentiuc was a general editor on that project.
As a teenager in a fundamentalist Swiss church I always wished to be Syriac orthodox, since I couldn’t for the life of me make sense of Revelations. It also scared me, I guess.
LOL. It’s a wild book, and the range of interpretations is even wilder.
This is great. Thank you! As a Bible student and teacher, this is all fascinating. The Bible is the most incredible book in human history. It is THE holy book of holy books. The word of God. The "Holy Bible". I hope your article stirs up more people to read it and study it.
I think pretty much anyone would benefit from dipping in!
I love this! Textual criticism is something that can sound terrifying to Christians who don’t know anything about it, but the more I have learned about it, the more it has only increased my love for and trust in the Bible. I want this ancient Christians study Bible too!
Totally. As I mentioned to someone earlier, I love the variations because they all attest to the wonderful humanity of the faith—all those quirks are artifacts of the process of diligent writing, preservation, study, and all the rest. The Bible didn’t drop out of heaven. It was produced within a diverse community over a couple thousand years. I find that totally amazing!
What's also amazing (to me) is the Bible chronicles the doings of total nobodies:
a little group of people caught in the conflicts of a long-dead empire (OldT) and a small time healer and some humble workers in an obscure part of the Roman Empire (NewT)
And yet...
Also amazing is how centuries of criticism of the Bible have done nothing to destroy its influence.
Yes! The Scriptures are a beautiful testament (pun INTENDED) to the way God chooses to work through His human imagers!
The translators of the King James Bible used the Textual Receptis, but according to their introductory, they did consult the Syriac and other translations to which they had access. In the debate over the oldest Greek manuscripts, it is often forgotten that there are translations older than some of the extant Greek manuscripts.
For example, the Pericope adulterae, as the story of the woman taken in adultery is called, may not be in some of the earliest extant Greek manuscripts, but it is in some of the earliest Bible translations, such the Ge'ez translation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Armenian Bible, which were both first translated in the 4th century (300s).
But in debating over whether the Pericope is in the oldest manuscripts, what is often missed is that the story is entirely characteristic of Jesus Christ, who ate with publicans and sinners, and let the sinful woman wash his feet with her tears while he ate at Simon the Pharisee's house in the Gospel of Luke, and spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John.
Thanks for weighing in on the woman caught in adultery! And I agree it’s entirely in keeping with Jesus’s character—hence the reason even Critical Text adherents can’t seem to let it go. They shouldn’t!
This is a great essay with some excellent resources and book recommendations. I'm excited to see you talking about the ACSB - my sister is one of the editors!
That’s amazing! How cool.
We tend to forget that Christianity was a campfire religion and instead try to apply modernist reductionism and systems to it. Our fear for our eternal salvation causes us to become dogmatic and draws authoritarian leadership when it’s meant to be discussed and turned over ad infinitum around a campfire, on long journeys, and around the dinner table. The truth doesn’t come from the text but from the discussion.
Christianity’s most radical claim is one of its most unsettling and difficult to deal with. Truth isn’t a book. It’s a person.
Christianity's most radical claim is that vulnerable people can be the change they need to see without resorting to violence.
Interesting fact about the book of Revelation--the one canonical book that blesses 'the one who reads it aloud and those who listen.' Just saying.
A further note, the book itself is liturgical. Fr. Pat Reardon points this out in his excellent (and quite brief) commentary on it, published several years ago by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
I envision it as a pageant that St. John is seeing for the first time, but is intended as a recurring commemoration.
Yes, exactly.
Yes! I know. And the context for that statement is during the liturgy—that is, an appointed reader in church (“the one reads it aloud”) and the congregation (“those who listen”).
I have never recovered from hearing the Bible described as The Goatherder’s Guide to the Galaxy (source unknown).
LOL!
Another interesting place to look is lectionary texts, which also oftentimes preserve older readings (this is a dangerous game to play, because they also occasionally skip around or rearrange). One particular point, related to the above, is the Gospel reading for Pentecost in the Orthodox Church, which bypasses entirely the story of the woman caught in adultery (Jn. 7:37–52, 8:12).
I would like a proper, ideally one-person translation of the Septuagint that's not Brenton's. The current offerings are 'computer-assisted'.
As a final note, David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament is probably the finest on offer right now (most translations I know, even putatively literal ones, take various traditional liberties with the text: Hart's translation says what the Greek says everywhere I have checked, with explanatory notes for difficult areas or contentious choices). Robert Alter's Hebrew Bible, if still available, is uneven but wonderful.
Yes, I love both DBH’s New Testament and Alter’s Hebrew Bible—especially his Psalms and 1–2 Samuel.
My favourite biblical sources are Neil Douglas-Klotz's translations from the Syriac Aramaic text still used by Aramaic Christians today, which he sometimes compares to Biblical Hebrew and Qur'Aranic Arabic. He presents interesting arguments that the Greek texts drew on earlier Aramaic ones. In any case, Aramaic was the language Jesus and everyone around him spoke, so the Greek texts were hopefully at least written by people with Aramaic ears. Douglas Klotz has a PhD in ancient semitic languages, also translates Arabic and Hebrew, but has been focusing on Jesus' words for about 40 years. I strongly recommend his recent (2022) book Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus.
Carl Jung recommended if we can to reconnect with our early childhood spirituality, and I have discovered mine was rooted not in the RC Church of my family upbringing, but a year of Waldorf pre-kindergarten. What a gift, adults who knew how to support children in play and epiphanic learning. In recalling this, I have rekindled my relationship from those young years with Jesus and the feel of this accords well with Douglas-Klotz's translations/midrashes. As a child I would recite the Our Father at night before bed. Now I explore this contemplative prayer in the Aramaic each night before bed and at other times. Imagine praying in the language Jesus spoke.
According to Douglas-Klotz, there are radical differences between the traditions rooted in Greek and Latin and the Aramaic, rooted in the ancient native wisdom traditions of West Asia. For example, the "I am" statements in John. In the Aramaic gospels, for example, in Thomas, he is not saying "I am" but "I I" (Ina'na). So that "I am the way, the truth and the life" could be rendered "I I is the illuminated path, sense of direction and life energy." (Douglas-Klotz, 2022, p. 166). This is based on the ancient semitic sense of our having inner and outer communities. Douglas-Klotz argues that Jesus' breakthrough was seeing that rather than having to kill what we might call the ego in order to enter ruha (wind, breath, soul, the larger I) in Alaha, we can resonate with our heart with the smaller selves with which we tend to fuse and this opens into the larger self, ruha participating in Alaha.
As a psychotherapist with a longtime exploration of meditation, I am not aware of another tradition that points so clearly to the inner parts/self aspects work that has emerged in recent years in different forms of psychotherapies. Of these, Internal Family Systems probably points most explicitly to how resonating with the self-parts within us open us into more participatory, spiritual ways of experiencing reality.
Thanks for sharing your story and about Douglas-Klotz’s work.
Check out the Word on Fire Bible. Not a new translation but full of apologetics and inspiring art!
I’ve seen those. They look beautiful!
Thank God for the men who have loved The Word into eternity, including you, Joel. Your work is a blessing to all of us who love both the words and The Word.
Thanks for reading! It’s a joy to work on these pieces.
This is all fascinating! I look forward to this new one! Thanks!
Yes! Me too. I was so surprised and delighted when I read that press release!
I have presented some of these variations in classes at my evangelical church, also referencing the little bit that is available from the Dead Sea scrolls. I look forward to an English translation of the Septuagint--especially for Jeremiah and Old Testament quotes in the New Testament.
The NETS is a bit difficult to read because it retains all the Greek spellings of names, but it follows the style of the NRSV so it’s not terrible. The Lexham Septuagint is more readable, but the NETS is (I think) actually better. I’m really eager to see what this new translation will be like.