An Inerrant Translation?

The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is, without a doubt, the most influential translation of the Bible in the English language. Commissioned by James I of England and completed in 1611, it became the standard for quoting scripture. Written in the language of Shakespeare, millions can quote passages of it from memory: “man shall not live by bread alone,” “for whither thou goest, I will go,” “the Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” and so on.

Since 1611, however, many discoveries either gave us older versions of the manuscripts that were then available to the KJV translators or shed light on the meanings behind the Hebrew and Greek words. Yet, the KJV had become so beloved over the centuries that release of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) in 1952 was greeted with accusations of blasphemy and book burning. It was only inevitable that, after having been used almost exclusively for almost 350 years, there would be a contingent of bible believers who conclude that the KVJ was the only English translations that Christians should read: “If it was good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for me.”

But it is one thing to prefer the KJV for the beauty of its language or its familiarity. It is quite another to fetishize it as a divinely inspired translation, based on specific Hebrew and Greek texts that are also divinely inspired. To be clear, many evangelicals believe the original Hebrew and Greek autographs – originals which everyone agrees are no longer in existence – are divinely inspired or inerrant (or both). But there is a certain cadre of fundamentalists who argue that the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Textus Receptus underlying the KJV are superior to the Hebrew and Greek texts today that have been reconstructed using older and better manuscripts.

If you turn to Gen 4:8 in the KJV, you will read: “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” Now, let’s compare to the RSV: “Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”

Cain’s words “Let us go to the field” (only two words in Hebrew) do not appear in the KJV. In the RSV (and other modern translations that have the line), there is a textual note: “Sam Gk Syr Compare Vg: MT lacks Let us go out to the field”. This note is telling us that the Masoretic Text (MT), the authoritative Hebrew text for rabbinic Judaism, is missing Cain’s actual words, but we are able to fill in this gap by looking at other ancient texts such as the Samaritan Pentateuch (Sam), the Greek Septuagint (Gk, also abbreviated LXX), the Syriac Peshitta (Syr), and the Latin Vulgate (Vg). All of these texts were copied or translated from a Hebrew text much older than the oldest complete Hebrew text we possess today and serve as a check against the MT. 

The relationship between the various ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament, according to the Encyclopaedia Biblica

In the case of Gen 4:8, it turns out that the MT appears to have lost a couple of words and the ancient versions were able to supply them. And Gen 4:8 is not an isolated example. Despite the care of the scribes copying the texts, over the centuries mistakes were made. Sometimes the eye of the scribe would jump over a line and miss copying it.

When you have several ancient manuscripts that agree with each other against the MT, what most likely happened is that the words were originally there in the root Hebrew text. When the other versions branched off they copied or translated the words that were there. But in the branch that led to the MT the words accidentally dropped out at some point.

While logical, this is not an acceptable explanation for the KJV-only crowd. Their doctrinal belief is that the MT on which the KJV is based is without error because God would not inspire the human authors to write down his words, only then to allow those holy words to succumb to scribal copying errors. No, he would divinely preserve his words through the centuries. Any “gaps” in the MT are only apparent gaps. The other ancient versions independently (and erroneously) concluded there were words missing from Cain’s speech and just happened to supply the same words to plug the hole. The KJV translators were divinely inspired to perceive that, in fact, there were no missing words and thus translated the passage exactly how God intended.

It only makes sense if you are already predisposed to the conclusion.

I appreciate that ancient texts can correct mistakes that were made somewhere down the line when a copy of a copy of a copy was being copied. I welcome new discoveries of non-biblical texts that shed light on how biblical words should be translated. We should always be striving to improve our understanding, to make known that which was once hidden.

Or as the KJV itself put it in Luke 8:17, “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.”

Memories of Pearl Harbor

My father was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. In fact, it was his 25th birthday. He had just finished Mass when the bombing started and he took refuge underneath a truck. He told me about other events that happened to him during World War II, but I never wrote them down or made a voice recording of them. Dad died some years back, so I only have what I remember of his war stories to share with my own son. Maybe one day I’ll write them down, but they’ll be only fragmentary and won't be accurate because Dad’s experiences were not my experiences.

That progression from a lived experience to oral history and finally to written history describes how the individual books of the Bible came to be written. Taking the gospels as an example, we begin with the lived experience of people encountering Jesus of Nazareth, particularly those who became his followers. After his crucifixion, they began preaching and telling others about him and his message. As the generation of those who knew Jesus in the flesh began to die off, it became necessary to record those events in writing.

But there’s no guarantee that two people experiencing the same event will remember it in the same way. During his days in the Army, my dad’s best friend was a man named Jacques. Decades after the war, Jacques looked up Dad and they had a reunion. Jacques recalls taking refuge from the bombing with Dad and Dad was certain that Jacques was not with him when he was hiding under the truck. Who was right?



Dad (on left) and Jacques during WWII

In the Gospel of John, the evangelist points out that when Jesus was condemned by Pontius Pilate, it was Preparation Day, the day before the start of Passover when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple. The other gospel authors say that the Last Supper on the previous evening was the Passover seder, so the crucifixion occurred on Passover Day. A biblical literalist who can admit of no contradictions in scripture would argue – without any evidence, I might add -- that it was Passover according to one calendar but Preparation Day according to a different calendar. But if we don’t make it an article of faith that there are no errors in scripture, then this inconsistency in separate accounts of the Passion story is easily understandable as a lived event filtered through two different faith traditions. They agree on the larger picture, but not on every single detail.

Similarly with the stories of the Old Testament, although it must be said that the further back you go, the longer the period of time between a faith event and its subsequent written narrative becomes. Just because Genesis is the first book of the Bible and describes the creation of the world does not mean that it was the first book to be written down. Genesis has some old traditions in it, but in its current form, it was finalized around the time of the Babylonian Captivity. And that was centuries after the time of the patriarchs.

The thinking used to be that there was a kernel of historical truth in the stories of Israel’s formation (Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, etc.) but archaeological discoveries over the past 50 years have not only failed to find evidence to support that, but have actually found evidence in the opposite direction. Instead of being a pastoral group who escaped slavery in Egypt and infiltrated a Canaanite civilization, it seems that the people of Israel were Canaanite all along. They overthrew the ruling class and invented a foundation narrative centering around a God to whom they gave credit for their origins.

Indeed, there were probably multiple origin narratives and, at some point, these were edited together to form the first books of the Bible that we have today. A classic example of that are the first two chapters of Genesis. In the first chapter, God (Elohim in Hebrew) creates the world in six days with human beings being the last to be created, yet in the second chapter the Lord God (Yahweh Elohim) creates man first, and then the animals, and finally woman. Different names for God are one clue for identifying the varying source material forming the biblical work.

This editorial process went on for many centuries. A third-century BCE Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint) shows a number of significant differences from the Hebrew text we have today, shorter in some places and longer in others. This is evidence that the source material was still being shaped by editors.

The takeaway from this is that the Bible did not come about because God whispered into the ears of Moses and others, who then dutifully wrote down the words to form the texts we have today. Neither did inspired authors record historical events as it happened or shortly after the fact. Instead, it is a more complicated process of oral transmission, theological reflection and editing. If we want to refer to the Bible as “the Word of God”, we also have to recognize that it comes to us in human words, subject to the foibles and limitations of human minds.