Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1109. The Textus Receptus is the name given to a particular printed edition of the Greek New Testament that dominated the Protestant world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and if you have ever heard someone insist that the Textus Receptus is the only trustworthy Greek text, you deserve a clear and honest…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1077. Manuscript transmission is the unglamorous term for a question that genuinely keeps some people awake at night: how do we know the Bible we hold today says what was originally written, given that the ink on the original pages dried out and turned to dust many centuries ago? It is a fair question,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God’s Word, and I think it can bear the weight of honest scrutiny very well indeed. In a sceptical age, people rightly ask how we can trust a set…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1051. The Samaritan Pentateuch sounds like the kind of obscure manuscript detail that only specialists need worry about, but it raises a question worth answering plainly: if the Samaritans have their own version of the first five books of the Bible, and it differs here and there from the Hebrew text we use, how…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1049. Few passages in the Gospels are as beloved as the story of the woman caught adultery, found in John 7:53 through 8:11. Jesus’ words, “let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”, have become proverbial even among people who have never opened a Bible…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1048. If you open your Bible to the end of Mark’s Gospel, you will likely find a note indicating that Mark’s longer ending does not appear in the earliest manuscripts. Some Bibles place these verses in brackets. Others include them with a footnote explaining the uncertainty. This raises an obvious pastoral question about Mark’s…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1046. When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every English version on my shelf, including the ESV. But it is not the only ancient witness to the Old Testament, and understanding how it relates…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1024. What happened to the original manuscripts of Scripture is a question that catches many believers off guard the first time it occurs to them, since no autograph, no original document written by Moses, Isaiah, Paul or John, survives anywhere in the world today. That fact unsettles some readers when they first encounter it,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1018. Textual criticism can sound alarming when you first hear the phrase, as though scholars are sitting in judgement on the Bible and finding it wanting. The reality is nearly the opposite. Textual criticism is the disciplined comparison of ancient manuscripts in order to establish, as closely as possible, the original wording of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01002. Textual variations exist in the Bible because for some fifteen centuries the Scriptures were copied out entirely by hand, and hand copying, however careful and prayerful, inevitably leaves its small traces behind. When a believer first learns that the thousands of surviving New Testament manuscripts do not all read in exactly the same…