Also, through my years as a pastor, there have been multiple occasions where Bible translations have become a topic of conversation. People have asked me, “Why is this translation so different than another?” I’ve had children and adults who have struggled to understand the old English language passages in the King James Version. I’ve had people ask about paraphrases like “The Living Bible,” and wonder if it can even be called a Bible. I’ve had “King James only” people walk into my church, meet me for the first time in the hallway, not say hello or howdy, immediately ask me which version of Scripture I preach from, find out that it is not the King James, and turn around and walk out refusing to even discuss it.
By the way, at that time I was preaching from the New King James. But that wasn’t good enough. So, there is sufficient reason for me to address this issue.
So, that’s what I want to do here, for you and for myself. I want to answer the question “Which version is best?”
Now for most church people, when they ask that question, they just want to know which version is a faithful translation, but also one that is easy to understand. So, to approach that question we need to look at the history of how we got different translations. Here are some questions we need to answer in order to understand which translation is best.
So, let’s get started.
In what languages was the Bible originally written?
We need to start the process of deciding on a best translation by understanding where the Bible started. The Bible was originally written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the primary language of the ancient Israelites. There are small portions of the Old Testament which are written in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew that became widely used in the Near East during the later Old Testament period.
Now, the entire New Testament was written in Koine Greek, which was the common language of the eastern Roman Empire during the first century.
So, the important thing for us to remember is that every English Bible is either a translation from these three languages, or it is a translation from another language or another English version. Well, my immediate question after that first one was,
Do we have one original “Bible” written in these original languages?
So, just to clarify, some of you may wonder if there is some old book or scroll written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, in some vault in Israel, or somewhere, that is “the” original copy of the Bible.
Here’s the short answer. No.
No, we do not possess a single original manuscript of the Bible written by the original authors. Now, that would be nice if we had a single copy that could be studied by language scholars. It would make it so much easier to make translations into English or other languages because each and every Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic word would be settled. The only question would be; which English word should I use to translate this Greek word.
But alas, the original documents, often called the autographs, have been lost to history. Let me tell you the story.
The books of the Bible began as individual writings produced by prophets, apostles, and other inspired authors whom God used to record His revelation. They were written as individual works and sent to communities for edification and study. Over time, those inspired by God were preserved.
In the Old Testament period, these writings were carefully preserved by the Jewish community, copied by trained scribes who treated the text with great reverence and precision, often counting letters and words to guard against error. These scrolls were read publicly in synagogues and passed from generation to generation.
In the New Testament era, the apostles and their associates wrote letters and accounts of Jesus’ life that were circulated among the churches; and believers eagerly copied these writings and shared them with other congregations so that the teaching of Christ and the apostles could spread widely. Over time, some writings were deemed inspired and preserved.
And because what they had of the Old and New Testaments was considered “the Word of God,” copies were carefully made.
Because printing did not yet exist, every copy had to be made by hand, yet these documents were treasured as sacred Scripture and preserved with great care. But the copies were just of the original languages.
But, as you would expect, over hundreds of years the original works wore out and had to be discarded. But over time, thousands of manuscripts were produced in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and copies were made of copies when those wore out. But many of these handwritten copies have survived to the present day, allowing scholars to compare them and confirm with remarkable accuracy the text of the Bible we read today.
So, do we have the originals? No. We have copies of copies of copies.
Well, that leads me to the next question.
How many copies in the original languages do we have today? (and how old are they)
Well, today, because people have considered this a sacred test, we have thousands of ancient manuscripts in the original biblical languages. For the Old Testament, portions of the Hebrew Scriptures were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from about 250 B.C. to A.D. 70, making them more than 2,000 years old. In addition, the later Masoretic manuscripts from about A.D. 900–1000 preserve the complete Hebrew text that modern Old Testament translations largely follow.
For the New Testament, scholars currently have more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, ranging from small fragments to nearly complete copies of the New Testament. The earliest known fragment, called the Rylands Fragment (P52), is usually dated to around A.D. 125, only a few decades after the New Testament books were written. Together with thousands of early translations and quotations from early church writers, these manuscripts allow scholars to compare texts across centuries and confirm with a very high level of confidence the wording of the original Scriptures.
Below is a representative sampling of the categories scholars use to classify biblical manuscripts, especially for the New Testament, along with major witnesses for the Old Testament. These categories reflect how manuscripts are grouped by material, writing style, or textual tradition.
Category Approx. Number of Manuscripts Typical Size Language Date Range Papyri (New Testament) ~140 Usually small fragments or partial books written on papyrus Greek c. A.D. 125–700 Uncials / Majuscules (New Testament) ~320 Large, often substantial portions or entire books written in capital letters on parchment Greek c. A.D. 300–1000 Minuscules (New Testament) ~2,900 Usually complete books or entire New Testaments written in later cursive handwriting Greek c. A.D. 800–1500 Lectionaries (New Testament) ~2,400 Selected Scripture readings arranged for church worship services Greek c. A.D. 600–1500 Dead Sea Scrolls (Old Testament) ~200 biblical manuscripts Mostly fragments, some nearly complete books Hebrew (some Aramaic) c. 250 B.C.–A.D. 70 Masoretic Manuscripts (Old Testament) Several key complete copies Complete Hebrew Old Testament texts Hebrew c. A.D. 900–1000
So, those are the general categories of manuscripts that we have today. But let me remind you. None of these manuscripts are the originals. Just to give you a reference point, remember that the Old Testament spans history going back six thousand plus years, but the oldest manuscript for Old Testament Scripture only goes back to 250 B.C., about 2300 years ago. So, our oldest Old Testament manuscripts may be as much as 3700 years separated from when it was originally written.
The New Testament chronicles the life of Christ, and the early Church. Jesus was crucified somewhere between 30 to 33 A.D. and the last of His disciples died somewhere between 95-100 A.D. But notice that the oldest Greek fragments go back to A.D. 125. So, the New Testament manuscripts are separated by at least 100 years from when the events happened. But, in reality, most of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament date back to around 1000 A.D., give or take. That means that what we have are hand copies of copies, dating to over 900 years after the last apostle died.
So, how many copies in the original languages do we have today? Thousands, but no originals.
Well, that gets me to another question.
How are these manuscripts dated?
I mean, I just said to you that there are copies of the originals that were made from 125 to 700 A.D. How do they know that? How do they know when they were copied? Did some scribe put the date up in the corner of the page? “Translated by Billy on 12/6/0125?”
How are these manuscripts dated? Well, most ancient biblical manuscripts do not contain a written date. So how does some guy today figure out how old this scroll is? Well, there are a number of ways. Scholars determine their age using several historical and scientific methods. The most common method is paleography, the study of ancient handwriting, where experts compare the style and shape of letters with other documents whose dates are known to estimate when a manuscript was written.
Scholars also examine the materials and format, such as whether it was written on papyrus or parchment and whether it was a scroll or a codex (book form), since these changed over time.
Additional clues come from the kind of ink used, the abbreviations, the scribal habits, and occasional notes from the scribe, as well as the archaeological context where the manuscript was discovered.
In some cases, radiocarbon dating is also used to estimate the age of the writing material. By combining these methods, scholars can usually place a manuscript within a reasonably accurate historical time range.
Okay, so it appears that a lot of study goes into preserving and dating these manuscripts, but here’s a final question before we move on to questions about translating into other languages.
Are these old manuscripts reliable?
Okay, so I can see how you determine how old the manuscript is. But how do I know that these copies are the same as the original was? Since these are copies of copies of copies, how do I know that the copying person didn’t get sleepy and make an error in his copy? How do I know a copier didn’t purposely alter the text? How do I know that somebody didn’t add put some words in Jesus’ mouth, that He didn’t actually say? How do I know that the later Church didn’t make up some miracles that Jesus didn’t do?
Now, I am not trying to depart from the main theme of this study, by introducing questions of faith. There will always be a degree of faith in believing Scripture. But, because I, as a Christian, believe that these things in the Bible actually happened, I also believe that the evidence will validate that belief. I believe that there should be evidence that these copies are reliable.
And what kind of evidence am I talking about? I am talking about consistency. You may not know if an individual copy matches the original. But you can compare that copy to other copies for consistency.
So, in terms of the manuscripts that we have, if they were all faithfully copied, by people who believed they were handling the Word of God, then you would expect the copies to be consistent with each other. But if they were being copied by people who had no qualms about adding or subtracting things for their own purposes, you expect there to be huge variations from one copy to the next. So, what do we find?
When scholars compare the thousands of surviving biblical manuscripts, they find an extremely high level of consistency across the copies. For the New Testament alone, there are about 5,800 Greek manuscripts and many thousands more in early translations such as Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. When these are compared, the vast majority of the text—often estimated at about 99% or more—is essentially the same from manuscript to manuscript.
Let’s say that again. The manuscripts are consistent at about a 99% rate. In other words, copy A is almost identical to copy B, and copy C, and copy D.
Now, with 99% consistency, we know that there are some differences. But the differences that do exist, called textual variants, most are very minor, such as spelling differences, word order changes, or the presence or absence of small connecting words (like “and” or “the”) that do not change the meaning of the text. Let me illustrate that with two versions of the same quote from the Gettysburg address.
Version 1:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation. conceived in Liberty
Version 2:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent; a new nation. conceived in Liberty
Those two quotes are 99% consistent with each other. There are 100 letters in each quote. But if you aren’t paying close attention, you will have missed that one quote has a comma, and the other has a semi colon.
That is an example of what most of the differences are between the copies of Bible manuscripts we have are. Now there are a few larger differences.
A small number of passages contain larger variations, and these are well known and clearly identified in modern Bible translations and scholarly editions. We will discuss those in a later question.
But what this kind of consistency means is that scholars can compare texts and quickly detect where a copying mistake occurred, making it very difficult for any major change to have been introduced and spread unnoticed. So, if you have 100 manuscripts of John 3:16, and 99 of them start with “for” but one of them starts with “so” the error can be identified quickly. As a result, the manuscript evidence shows that the biblical text was transmitted with remarkable care and consistency across the centuries.
Ok, so with all that, I am confident in the transmission of the original manuscripts. But after the originals were copied, eventually someone decided that they needed to be translated into other languages. That gets us to the next question we want to answer.