Why Didn’t God Preserve Bible Manuscripts Word for Word? — David Bercot

But as I pondered it more, and this is human reasoning, so I may be totally misguessing the thing, you know, but if he had preserved it perfect, let's say, you know, each of these Greek manuscripts read exactly the same, or we actually had Paul's original, so, you know, it was preserved somehow in a cave, and we knew for certain this was it, you know. So we knew beyond a doubt this is how this book of the New Testament originally read.

Okay, what that would create would mean it's only God's word if you read it in Greek. Mmm. Because the minute you translate it, you have to change something. There are no two languages that are word for word, you know, this language has this word, and this language has the exact same word. There are no two languages where you can do that. So anytime you translate, you automatically have to make decisions, choices, what word should I use to translate this Greek word, etc. So then you'd have a situation that that is God's word, but the minute you translate it, it's not God's word. Whoa, okay, so that's fascinating because that's one of the cornerstones of something like, say, Islam.

Exactly. So if you pick up a copy of the Quran and it's in English, it won't say it's a translation. It will call it a commentary because they know, oh, it's been translated. Right. So therefore it's not the original because in their doctrine it would be, this is, I mean, exactly what, you know, Allah handed down and you cannot translate it. You can't change it, yeah. I never thought of that, but that makes a lot of sense that I can see what you're saying because knowing human nature, I can imagine people doing the same thing if you had an original. It wouldn't. Yeah, okay. And that happened with me with the Quran. I was speaking at, it was a small group of students at Penn State.

It was on how we know God exists. And anyway, several of the people who attended were Muslim because they were interested in hearing proofs for God's existence, the same as, you know, Christians are. So afterwards, well, before it started, I was looking around. They have a building there that's like a religious building. It's got Buddhists and it's got, you know, everything. And so I saw there in the hall, there was a stack of Qurans, you know, in English. And, you know, they were to hand out. So I helped myself to one. And I handed there, and it was just on a stack. I had a notebook and everything. So anyway, during the lunch break or whatever, I'm talking to this guy, and he says he's Muslim, and suddenly we mentioned the Quran, and I looked down, and I know in Islam, if you've got a Quran, it's got to be the highest book in the room, you know.

And here I have it down under, you know, my Bible and then some notebooks and everything. And I immediately said, oh, I'm sorry that if that's offensive to you, you know, I didn't mean to be offensive. He said, that's no problem. That's not the Quran. That's just an English, you know, translation. Oh, interesting. And yeah, it's like, yeah, so yeah, this isn't the Bible. If we had Paul's original in Greek, well, this isn't the Bible. This is just a translation. But yeah, so you would have to, but it gets more complicated. You'd have to know New Testament Greek, but you'd have to know it as a native speaker. I mean, you can study it now, but there's nobody today who speaks Koine Greek the way somebody did in the first century.

You know, they study it as a second language, but there's a big difference between being a native speaker and somebody who's learning it, particularly 2000 years later. So we would still not know exactly what Paul meant because the language has changed over the years, and we'd have to be guessing. But it would mean everybody to share the gospel, yeah, they've got to learn Koine Greek.

And see, that's not what God wanted. So the Bible is a book that from, I mean, the earliest, it got translated into Latin. We were talking about that in an earlier session, how the Latin translation of the Bible, one of the verses, they mistranslated a couple of words there. And, you know, we can correct it now, but it affected some doctrine in that translation. So translations are imperfect, but it got translated right away. They never thought like, okay, the Greek is this magical language. No, it got translated into Aramaic right away. It wasn't too long before it was in Coptic and then Armenian and so on. I mean, that was a mindset from the beginning.

This gets translated. We don't worship the words on the page. We worship the message. And so God's word is his message. It's not the exact, precise words. And so that's my choice. And so I think it's why he didn't want any of those manuscripts to read exactly the same because he's trying to get across to us, dude, it's the message that I want you to focus on. Don't be worshiping these words. And yet I didn't allow enough change in there that you have to worry about is maybe the message is different. No, the message is the same in all the manuscripts. So yeah, God's, his ways are just always, you know, smarter than ours and things that we think because I always thought, well, if I was God, I would have preserved that.

And yeah, he saw the trap that that would have created. Now, this is my answer. And, you know, I may get to him and say, Dave, you got that all wrong. This is the reason I didn't do this. So this is just, you know, how I thought through the problem and realized it wasn't a problem.