God said it … or did He?

May 22nd, 2006 Central Archivist Posted in Commentary |

CHURCHES IN THE SOUTH have a tradition of putting pithy, inspirational, or otherwise relevant sayings on their marquees in an effort to attract notice, and hopefully new members and visitors. A church about three-quarters of a mile from my house has sported a two-liner for the past couple of weeks: “God said it. I believe it.”

The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this was, “but did God actually say it?”

Anyone who has ever argued with a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) knows he bases his belief on the Bible being the inerrant Word of God. And, since the Bible specifically says God created the world in a specific manner, anything contradicting this must, perforce, be wrong regardless of the mountains of evidence supporting it.

This assumes, of course, the words in the Bible have made their way to us unchanged since God first uttered them to His prophets. This assumption not only is not supported by evidence, it is demonstrably wrong.

I’ve recently completed Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman and have started The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament by the same author. Dr. Ehrman, a former Biblical literalist puts paid to the idea Scripture has reached us unchanged from antiquity. In the New Testament alone he has documented thousands of alterations, large and small, among the many thousands of surviving manuscripts.

Many alterations are what we would simply term “typographical errors” –- the copyist misspelled a word, or inadvertently left out a line. Other changes were brought about by scribes attempting to clarify a passage for their readers, and most egregiously of all, by scribes trying to reinforce a particular point of doctrine.

The earliest manuscripts for the New Testament still extant date from the 2nd century, decades after the original texts were written, and changes were already apparent in these texts in that copies of the same book would differ markedly.

The New Testament is only a couple of thousand years old, and was created in a society that was at least somewhat literate. The Old Testament, on the other hand, is a couple of millennia older still, and was not set to paper until about the 6th century BCE, meaning it spent centuries being transmitted by word of mouth before that happened. Anyone who has played telephone knows how altered a story can become with only a few retellings; one can only imagine the changes that would occur over centuries.

And, we’re not even considering the problems arising in translating Scripture from its original language into more modern tongues. As anyone who has studied a foreign language knows, sometimes concepts can be difficult or nearly impossible to translate accurately.

After even a small investigation into the history of the Bible one is forced to reach the conclusion that even if God had a hand in inspiring the original Scriptures, any evidence of His influence has long since been obscured by the minds and hands of man.

So, coming back to the marquee at the church down the street, it’s demonstrably provable God did not say it, whether you believe it or not.