Biblical Views: False and True

False Views of the Bible

In the book Sir Leigh Teabing. He says, ‘To fully understand the Grail, we must first understand the Bible … The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven … [it] is a product of man … not God … and it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History never had a definitive version of the book. … Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence … his life was recorded by thousands of followers … more than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament … Who chose which gospels to include? … The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine’ (p.231). The plethora of historical fallacies continues unabated but this one-page sample is sufficient to illustrate the point.

True Views of the Bible

The Bible testifies of itself that it is indeed ‘God-breathed’ (2 Timothy 3:16). Men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God (2 Peter 1:21), and Jesus said ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’ (Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33). Neither has its meaning been lost or corrupted through ‘countless translations.’ The original languages were Hebrew (OT, with a few sections in Aramaic) and Greek (NT). Modern English versions, for example, are based on meticulously prepared composites of ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, of which thousands are extant. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that copies of OT books from the first century BC were almost identical to the previously earliest Hebrew manuscripts from a thousand years later, so copying errors have not been a significant problem.

History certainly has had a ‘definitive version’. The Latin Vulgate remained the definitive version for over a thousand years, and the subsequent divergence between Protestant and Catholic versions was based primarily on theological principles, not manuscript problems. The content of the modern Protestant and Catholic Bibles, except for the few differences in the Old Testament, is all based on similar manuscript evidence. No major doctrine is in any way obscured by manuscript differences. Indeed, the very abundance of similar ancient manuscripts points unerringly to similar original sources.