Why We Know the Bible is True
By S. Douglas Woodward
The Bible we have today is the result of herculean efforts by scholars for over 500 years, built on sustained efforts to maintain the pure Word of God for almost 1,500 years prior to that.
Those who do the work of text criticism to discern the original words written by prophets and apostles almost always believe in the providence of God to preserve the text of the Bible for all generations. The issue is how it was preserved.
This article focuses on the Old Testament and how its transmission to us is indeed an epic story, one that all believers who care about their faith should know something about. Both Jews and Christians turn to the Bible to hear the Word of God. How can we know that the Bible we rely upon is authoritative? I answer that here.
The infallibility and authority of the Old and New Testament texts are matters of great import to believers in the Judeo-Christian traditions and each of our respective faiths.
How we have come to possess both the Old Testament and New Testament are epic stories that persons of faith should know something about. Therefore, this article provides a brief summation of the historical background for how the biblical text has been handed down to us through the centuries, beginning not with the most ancient traditions or who wrote the original books of the Bible, but rather with the process of transmission covering the last 1,500 years.
This discussion is aimed at the contentious debate between the King James Only sect and the rest of Evangelicalism which understand God’s preservation of the biblical text differently. In other words, there are distinct understandings of how God’s providence safeguards the preservation of the biblical text.
Why is this important? It could hardly be more central to our faith; that is, if we care to know how we can be certain of the principles of our beliefs since they are based on what the Bible says. Knowing we have a trustworthy Bible should be vital to every one of us. This article will address the Old Testament transmission. A later article will address the New Testament transmission.
Old Testament Transmission: The Story Starts in Venice
As might be expected, most of the attention from Christians interested in biblical textual criticism over the past 150 years has been directed at the New Testament. Conversely, there is less debate about the textual sources for the Old Testament. This is primarily because the King James Version of the Bible relied primarily upon a singular source, the 1525 Hebrew Bible published in Venice, Italy, by Daniel Bomberg.
His was a translation by Jacob ben Chayyim, born in Tunis in 1490, who escaped the persecution of Jews in North Africa, by emigrating to Italy. Ben Chayyim drifted about homeless in Rome and Venice for months until Daniel Bomberg came across him and offered him a position to help with his publications (having previously published the Talmud in 1519-1523).
His “hand up” proved to be literally providential for the Western World’s Bible. Ben Chayyim would be instrumental in modernizing the Hebrew Tanakh in a fast-developing, printing-press world. Ben Chayyim relied upon the ben Asher family of texts (ben Asher was one of two Masoretic traditions developed and supported by two rival families, the ben Asher family and the ben Naphtali family). Ultimately, the ben Asher texts would be preferred by the Jewish community. Ben Chayyim’s efforts helped to cement this down to today.
It turns out that there were very few differences between the two textual lines. One of the key features comprised a few differences in the vowel pointings inserted above and alongside the texts to help aid the reader in the pronunciation of the Hebrew words. Remember: The Hebrew language/writing was consonantal (having no vowels) which could and did lead to some misunderstanding of the word meant by the author (the context decided the word’s meaning).
Regardless, it is the ben Asher family of texts that comprises what is known today as the Masoretic Text (MT). This name is derived from the Masoretes who copied and safeguarded the text from the fifth century for almost 1,000 years. Although a few changes were made by later Masoretes up to the fourteenth century, the most active period was from the sixth to ninth centuries.
At the center of their effort was a system implemented to keep the Bible from error. This method was known as the Masorah (taken from a word used in Ezekiel, literally meaning “leg cuff.” Jacob ben Chayyim “sorted out” the Masorah for Judaism’s posterity (which had several elements such as the Masorah Parva, or small Masorah). His great effort made sense of it all and was published in Bomberg’s Hebrew Bible of 1524-1525.
The Most Important Hebrew Codices
The two most important ancient Masoretic manuscripts (unlikely available for ben Chayyim’s translation), are the Aleppo Codex (dating to the tenth century, created in Tiberias, Israel) and the Leningrad Codex (dating to 1008 A.D. according to its own testimony in its colophon).
However, despite some who claim differently, the Aleppo Codex, wasn’t available to ben Chayyim for his translation as it was being held tightly in the Aleppo’s central synagogue safe (aka “ark”), after it was brought there in 1375 from Egypt by a disciple of the noble sage Maimonides, the revered medieval Torah scholar.
However, both codices are regarded as authentic texts virtually identical to the “canonized” Old Testament at the end of the first century A.D., revised by Rabbi Akiba and the Jamnia Academy in Palestine in accordance with its anti-Christian bias. (This is documented in my book, Rebooting the Bible.)
Tragically, specific altered texts by Akiba have been brought forward by all versions of the Old Testament except those based on the Septuagint.) There are only tiny differences between the two codices – some of the differences being nothing more than scribal spelling errors. However, it is likely that ben Chayyim used other ancient ben Asher texts identical or almost identical that were available to him five centuries ago but are no longer extant today.
Going a bit deeper into the story: Judaism had speculated, although now it seems well-supported, that the Aleppo Codex was the Codex praised by Maimonides (aka Ramban) in his magnum opus, the Mishnah Torah, compiled between 1170 and 1180. How did Maimonides have access to it? History tells us the Aleppo Codex was redeemed from the Christian Crusaders after the then-resident-in-Jerusalem codex was captured by the Crusaders when they took Jerusalem in 1099.
The Crusaders, not being guided by Christian charity to say the least, then ransomed the Aleppo Codex back to the Karaite Jews in Egypt. Therefore, this codex went to Egypt. Maimonides did much of his work in Morocco and Egypt, as a rabbi, physician, and philosopher. (Maimonides was born in Cordoba, Spain, on Passover in 1135 or 1138. He died in Egypt on December 12, 1204). Maimonides accessed the Aleppo Codex there.
Once the Aleppo Codex was in Aleppo, Syria in 1375, it remained safe there for 572 years until 1947, when it was supposedly damaged by rioters (and perhaps the Syrian army) who firebombed Aleppo’s central synagogue, setting fire to the synagogue where it was kept in an iron safe. This fire occurred (December 1, 1947) as part of the Arab opposition to the U.N. plan to partition Palestine which had created the Jewish State only two days earlier.
The Codex disappeared afterward and then reappeared in Jerusalem in 1958, missing almost all the Pentateuch and several of the Old Testament “Ketuvim” (i.e., poetical books including Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Daniel, Ruth, Ezra, and Nehemiah). It is rumored that private individuals hold the missing pages (leaves) as a two of its pages have been subsequently brought to Jerusalem authorities in 1982 and 2007.
Was the King James Old Testament Just Based on ben Chayyim’s Hebrew Bible Alone?
Now, picking back up with the King James Version and its creation of an Old Testament: The 47 scholars alive when the Bible was published in 1611, utilized Tyndale’s Bible ca. 1535, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (the Bible of Roman Catholics made official at the Council of Trent in 1545-1563), the Septuagint (LXX) otherwise known as the Bible of the Eastern or Greek Orthodox Church (dating back to third and fourth century codices), the Aramaic Targum, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Coptic Bible (translated into four major dialects from the LXX).
In numerous cases, the King James scholars used none of the above in settling the wording of many of the verses, deciding to combine words from differing readings as something of a compromise.
Mention should be made of yet one more source for the New Testament translation on the KJV, the Complutensian Bible of 1522-26 from a Catholic source which was a “polyglot” Bible, providing a new translation comparison of the new Greek with the old Vulgate, aka Latin side-by-side.
However, as a rule, the text of the King James Bible followed Tyndale’s Bible (completed by Coverdale and published as Coverdale’s Bible in 1535) the Anglican Church’s Bishops Bible of 1568, and the Geneva Bible of 1560, published in England in 1575. The Geneva Bible was created in Geneva by exiled Englishmen fearing for their lives with participation of John Knox and John Calvin. In fact, the Geneva Bible was the first English Old Testament Bible 100 percent translated from the Hebrew. Its scholarship ran circles around the Bishops Bible that was hastily assembled to counter the Geneva Bible.
Given this genealogical “stem” (think family tree), it is rather obvious that the KJV Old Testament is what is known as an “eclectic text” as it brings together many voices into one voice, that of the “Old English” Holy Bible familiar to we who are more senior English-speaking people.
While it is denied by the King James Only sect, the scholars often made use of the LXX as well as the Vulgate to supplement the Masoretic Text and make the final determination on the correct English wording.
Therefore, the authorities referenced were not of the same ilk as KJV Only brethren, being Calvinists, Anglicans, and Catholics. In other words, none of these authorities align very well with key attributes of King James Onlyism: That is, Arminian (free will) theology, baptism by immersion, or scripture before tradition. Despite this, the KJV Only community holds these authorities in high regard, contributing as they did to the “perfect” King James Bible. However, it should be noted that by being eclectic, the King James Bible is not the “sole source” that it is misleadingly presented as stemming only from the ben Chayyim/Bomberg Bible of 1525.
Using a descriptor, “eclectic,” is seen by King James Only advocates as the opposite of a “received text” (meaning “regarded as the authentic original”) from a single trusted “traditional” source. This relates to the preference for the Received Text (Textus Receptus) first used in the 1633 edition of the Greek New Testament published by Elziver but applied backwards almost 120 years to the Erasmus text of 1516.
Much of the criticism directed at modern translations asserts that the King James Old Testament as well as the New, was supernaturally inspired to be error free despite its being dependent upon the many sources containing countless variations (several thousand) to what was finally settled in the 1611 translation of the KJV.
The BIble was Created Through Inspiration of the Holy Spirit
Less we think that too many cooks spoil the broth, we should grasp that all of the saints worked in common accord: To determine what was originally written, not to create a book that consisted of what they thought was best about the nature of God and His relationship to us. They believed that the originals were especially created through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit of Christ guided and assured that what was written was precisely what the Lord God was pleased to have recorded and communicated as a testimony to what had happened and what was then written down from the first-hand witnesses. They did not feel that the guidance they no doubt prayed for in performing the translation of the Hebrew (or Greek regarding the New Testament), was inspired in any manner like what occurred in the ancient days. As stated in 2 Timothy 3:16, the Holy Scripture was literally “God-breathed” inspiration. The translators, working together using their vast knowledge and skill, improved prior translations “taking a good one and making it better” as stated in the Preface to the KJV. Indeed, they contended what they were doing wasn’t perfect and others would need to continue revising it.
In conclusion, the KJV used the Bomberg (ben Chayyim) edition which is considered unlikely to be as accurate as the latest Biblia Hebraica version from 1977 but which is based on other missing manuscripts mirroring the Aleppo and Leningrad codices available today.
Ironically, the text used for the King James version is a critical text as the 47 scholars referenced multiple Bibles like the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Geneva Bible, to finalize the wording of the Old Testament, which they judged to be closest to the original based on the a limited number of manuscripts available to them.
Therefore, we can safely say that the comparison between the 1525 Bomberg Hebrew Bible and the 1977 Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia shows variants, but few if any that would alter the text as we know it today. The King James scholars did their work well – but the result was not a “perfect Bible.”
Of course, if the advocates of the Received Text of the New Testament disregard more ancient manuscripts (belonging to the so-called Alexandrian text-type) judging them inferior to the 1516 Erasmus received text, they should likewise hold in disdain the most recent 1977 Hebrew Bible based on the Aleppo and Leningrad codices. That would be a consistent path for both Testaments. Why so? Because the 1525 Bomberg Bible is also based on slightly inferior manuscripts.
Now this is not actually the case. Instead, I should assert this is a case of backward logic to judge the text for both the Old Testament and New Testament from 500 years ago superior to today’s texts for both Old and New Testaments. But, the bottom line, however, is exactly that. The King James Only sect is certainly sincere and passionate about the truth of the scripture. They are wonderful Christians. But their understanding harms the best and strongest way to support the veracity of the Bible.
Hence, it is important to present this clarification, despite the strong language I personally have experienced from these otherwise well-meaning brethren. Unfortunately, while our positions should be the focal point of the debate, the attributes of the person advocating them are slandered or at least called into question.
Finally, to conclude on a positive position statement: The ancient Aleppo Codex (using the Leningrad Codex in those books or passages missing in the Aleppo Codex) is judged by scholars to best evidence the original Hebrew Old Testament text. Likewise, most Evangelical scholars prefer the critical text following the Alexandrian text-type of the New Testament, represented in most of today’s New Testament versions following the Nestle/Aland United Bible Society Greek New Testament, NA28 Edition. The issues surrounding the New Testament will be discussed in another article soon.
S. Douglas Woodward, Th.M., MA in Finance (to be completed, May 2019), is 64. He grew up in Oklahoma City, where he lives once again, after working in Boston for six years and Seattle for 21. Doug’s experience lies primarily in business information technology and financial management where he has served as an executive for Oracle, Microsoft, and a Partner at Ernst & Young LLP. He also founded his own consultancy for young companies, Smart Starters, which he managed for 10 years, before becoming Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma, Price School of Business, where he has taught classes in entrepreneurship for five years. Over the past seven years, Doug has become a nationally recognized author having written fourteen books on the topics of America’s spiritual history, eschatology, theology, and geopolitics. His books of note include The Final Babylon, Decoding Doomsday, Power Quest (Books One and Two), Lying Wonders of the Red Planet, The Revealing, The Next Great War in the Middle East, and Revising Reality. Rebooting the Bible is number fifteen. He frequently appears on radio and television programs having been interviewed on over 100 different occasions on several dozen different shows. Additionally, he speaks at conferences concerning the multiplicity of topics about which he writes. Doug has two amazing adult children, an incredible daughter-in-law, two fabulous grandsons, and a beautiful wife, Donna, with whom he celebrates over 43 years of marriage. Discover more at www.Facebook.com/sdouglaswoodward and www.faith-happens.com.
