16-01-2006, 01:45 PM
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This is from an article Poppies linked to in the "Nature of Jesus" discussion:
Quote:
Many (hopefully, most) Christians acknowledge that the Bible is "inerrant", that is, it contains NO errors. The reason for this belief is obvious. If one accepts that God participated in the writing of the Bible, it is beyond possibility that He would either intentionally or unintentionally permit errors or misleading statements to have been included in it.
Most Christians make an incorrect assumption that modern English translations are therefore inerrant. They are not, even though their various translators make enormous efforts to try to make them inerrant.
There are several reasons for this. In both the case of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the contents of many of the Books were originally passed down from generation to generation VERBALLY. Most people of the time were illiterate, but books as we know them were extremely rare anyway. Virtually no one other than governments and wealthy people had any. Keep in mind that a "book" had to be created in a very difficult way. The papyrus or parchment had to first be created, along with the ink. Then a person had to copy an existing book, letter by letter, to create a new book. And a 'book' was not the convenient thing we imagine. It was generally a collection of rolls of papyrus or parchment which unrolled to strips that were many feet long. Given all this, it is pretty obvious why the great majority of people gained essentially ALL of their knowledge verbally.
By the time the words were actually committed to papyrus or parchment, therefore, a number of generations of verbal description, and human memories, were involved. Where the ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS were certainly inerrant, these written copies could possibly have contained some minor flaws.
Next, consider that writing materials have a limited lifetime before they fade or disintegrate. At regular intervals, it was necessary for scribes to copy the entire texts, letter by letter, to make a new copy. Of course, all the scribes were extremely careful, but keep in mind that our full Bible contains 773,746 words, or over three million individual characters! Scribes generally had to work from the most recent copy. The result is that by around 900 AD (the oldest common documents that still exist of the Bible), those texts are copies of copies of copies. If a single character of those three million was mis-copied by any scribe, all later scribes would unknowingly copy that flaw.
Another complication arose when the texts were translated from one language to another, and eventually to English. Most words in nearly every language have several possible meanings. A translator is faced, for nearly every single word, with selecting the "best" translation. Different translators make different choices, which has resulted in our variety of modern Bible translations, all of which generally agree (since they were all created from the same source texts) but which have minor differences due to the translating choices. How would you translate the English word 'shift'? As an action when driving a car? As a key on a computer keyboard? As an eight-hour work period? As what you do when you slightly move in a movie theater seat? See the problem? A translator needs to determine the context of the text, to determine just which translation is most correct. Therefore, individual human judgment is unavoidably involved in the translation process.
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Source: http://mb-soft.com/believe/txw/wordcros.htm
What first struck me upon reading this was the question, "Are there really people who believe that the English translation is inerrant? Why?"
I'm wondering if the assumption is that the translators were guided by G-d/the Holy Spirit as well? Anyone have any thoughts on this?
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