BBC program: The Beauty of Books: Ancient Bibles – claims church deliberately introduced thousands of changes to New Testament
A recent BBC program “The Beauty of Books: Ancient Bibles” claimed the church deliberately introduced thousands of changes into the New Testament for theological reasons. Were church leaders promoting some nefarious agenda, a secretive plot to deceive the masses?
“Similar statements have been made before in the media and we believe they are highly misleading,” says Dr. David Instone-Brewer, a research fellow at Tyndale House, a Bible study center for scholars adjacent to Cambridge University.
The first half of the program highlighted “Codex Sinaiticus,” the oldest Bible bound in a single volume, made in about AD 350. “Codex Sinaiticus is a marvelous manuscript because it contains the oldest full text of the New Testament on top-quality material,” notes Instone-Brewer. There are approximately 23,000 corrections visible in the original manuscripts, which raises questions in some quarters.
“The 23,000 corrections may seem surprising,” Instone-Brewer notes, “and the program concluded that these had a theological agenda.” The BBC program examined two noteworthy examples, both in the Book of Mark. One verse added “Son of God” as a ‘correction’ to Mark 1:1, and another adds “for they were afraid.” The narrator concluded that although some corrections might be scribal errors, these two ‘corrections’ indicated a theological bias.
Dr. Instone-Brewer takes exception to the interpretation of these corrections. “Although there are some corrections, where the original is erased or overwritten, this is relatively rare,” he notes. “Most of the 23,000 aren’t ‘corrections’ because they leave the original text fully visible, putting a dot under or over letters instead of deleting them, and writing above letters so you can clearly see the earlier text, as the screenshots from the program show clearly.”
“This demonstrates they didn’t want to expunge bad theology, but they wanted to record that other manuscripts were often subtly different. The vast majority of these changes are very minor — alternate spellings or slight grammatical variations which make no difference to the meaning of the text.”
Thousands of manuscripts that came after Sinaiticus have tiny differences due to inexpert copying in the early church, according to Instone-Brewer. “If a class of students all copied out a short book by hand, they would all make mistakes, but the teacher might still be able to reconstruct the original from all the copies. Textual scholars of the New Testament do this same work today.”
March 3rd, 2011 at 6:10 pm
David is right to highlight that this is lazy broadcasting at best, and anti-religious propaganda at worst. I remember watching the programme about manuscripts at Timbuktoo. Somehow the BBC didn’t see fit to introduce similar claims about Moslem mss.
March 3rd, 2011 at 6:38 pm
That’s interesting about Mark 1:1 and “Son of God.” I’m taking a Synoptic Gospels course right now and we are covering Mark. I’m very much only a student but it is my understanding that Mark was a disciple of St. Peter which means he would have understood that Christ was the Son of God and divine before baptism. Right?
March 5th, 2011 at 5:09 am
Did they diliberately alter passages or words in the Bible My answer is that
I guess not, Another” Storm in a teacup”