The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-1, titled "Bible Questions and Answers."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE.

Question

Occasionally, you will mention in one of your sermons, and especially when I listened to a few tapes, that you would leave a word or a particular verse out. An example, would be in the 23rd chapter of Matthew, I think the 14th verse or somewhere around there, you said, "was not in the better manuscripts." What are the better manuscripts and how do we determine which manuscripts are better than others?

Answer

You are going to have to trust some other people on this one. This is such a difficult issue, not difficult for me to understand, but difficult to communicate to you in a way that is going to be understood, because it is such a long, drawn out thing.

You have in your hand a Bible, maybe you have like I do, "the Holy Scolly," Scolfield's notes, you know, "My hope is built on nothing less than Scolfield's Notes and Scripture Press" or "Moody Press" I guess. Some of you have the New American Standard (NASB); some of you have the NIV (New International Version); some of you have the Amplified Bible, I don't know what all you have. Some of you may even have an old Confirnity Version, or Douay Version, you got from your Catholic days with the Apocrapha in the middle. You may have a Living Bible, which is not a Bible, but a commentary on the Bible--a paraphrase. But, there are all kinds of things like that.

Some of you have a 1901 American Standard--all these various things, alright? Now, the Bible you have is in our culture. In Latin America they have a Spanish Bible and it's going to be translated out of the original languages into Spanish. In Europe they are going to have a French one, they are going to have a German one, they are going to have an Italian one. You go to the Orient, they are going to have Japanese one, a Chinese one, a Korean one, etc. So, these people who come along and say that the "King James" is the only right Bible--that's not even thinking clearly, because that is an English translation, what are we saying? That is almost like Hitler's "Doctrine of the Supreme Race," as if we got all the corner on all of the truth, and the rest of the world is limping along without the full revelation.

Let me just back up from that by saying this, all the Bibles that we do have are basically translated into the languages in which we read them from "manuscripts." The Bible was written in the Old Testament in Hebrew, with the exception of several passages in Aramaic, which is a Hebrew type language. The New Testament was written entirely in Greek, not classical Greek like Ceaser's "Golic Wars," but "koine" or common Greek, which is a "street Greek." So, what we have to do then, to find out what the Scriptures really say, is to collect the ancient manuscripts.

Point 1. We have no original manuscripts, we have none. We don't have the original Isaiah, we don't have the original John, the original Acts, the original Romans. What we have is copies, and we have copies, and copies, and copies, because once the Scripture was given everybody started to copy it. It was a perfect opportunity for people to change it, as it went copying along--they could put in something here, put in something there. And maybe a scribe made a mistake, I mean, sitting down to copy the whole Old Testament would be a tough job--right? Especially, do you know what they did to help themselves? They took out all the vowels--they took out all the punctuation, all the paragraphs and all the spaces, and just wrote consonants in big long strings.

So scholars just have to come back in--and it is not hard to do if you know Hebrew well. But anyway, they wrote, and wrote, and wrote, in fact, they say Ezra could write to whole Old Testament from memory (he was a scribe) without error. And many of them would write one letter [single character], they were so precise--they would write one letter and wash their pen, because they didn't want to change one single letter. But, there were some who more careless than that.

Through the years of history we have had scholars that are working in a field that is known as "lower criticism" (that's just what they call it). Who have collected and studied all the groupings of these various manuscripts, and they have come down, basically, to two groups of manuscripts. But these two groups of manuscripts; one of them has produced the King James and the other has produced all of the other modern translations. That second group, that has produced all the modern translations, has had the benefit of all the years of study since 1611 when this King James came out. In those 300 years there have been many other manuscripts found, which we now know were the better manuscripts, because there is a science of comparing them.

For example, if you find two manuscripts and one makes something very difficult, like one manuscript says, "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to get into heaven," and this manuscript family says, "It is easier for a thread to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to get into heaven,"--which is the right one? The "camel" has to be right. Because a scribe would change a camel to a "thread," but a scribe would never change a "thread" to a camel. So, one of the laws of lower criticism is you always take the more difficult rendering, because you assume people would try to make it easier, not harder.

So, there are many, many principles that they use in the study of lower criticism and what they have come up with is these two families of manuscripts. The King James was based upon the "best" available stuff in 1611, but now the stuff that the NAS and others have based upon, the NIV, is now manuscripts that are older than the King James manuscripts, and the further back you get, in most cases, the purer you are going to be. Right?

So, that's why, from time to time, we say, "That the better manuscripts indicate" such and such. The newer manuscripts have the benefit of all that was in the other set, and all that has been added to that since that time. You can thank the Lord that there are men who spend there whole life just fussing around with these manuscripts.