Is it possible for The Bible to contain errors? [closed]

Question

For those who profess to follow the word of Christ, everyone agrees that the Bible is the infallible word of God as transcribed by many different men compiled together in one book. But for this question, I'm not talking about "The Bible" as in the idea of the perfect Bible, but of the copies and translations mankind reads; the one you and I have on our bookshelves. This may seem like a stupid question for some, and I apologize, but is it possible for these books to contain errors?

The way I see it, The Bible is a product of mankind, written by man, transcribed by man, duplicated on printing presses created by man, and thus it may contain errors, mistakes, even contradictions; these mistakes are the result of man's imperfection, not God's.

It occurred to me after reading through many questions on this site that some people think that The Bible is 100% infallible, let alone that their particular copy may be a poor/inaccurate translation. It's almost as if they believe it was written by God himself, so they tend to blame errors on our own reasoning and interpretation of the Bible, as opposed to the simple fact that a particular passage could have been translated incorrectly (which often seems more likely, especially when it stands out from all the rest).

Note that whether errors/mistakes do (or do not) occur in The Bible is irrelevant; this questions asks merely whether it is conceivably possible that it could contain errors.

Answer 1

Yes, it is absolutely possible for editions of the Bible to contain errors. There is no magical mechanism to prevent this. There are some notorious printing mistakes, for example:

• A 1631 printing of the King James version is now called the "Wicked Bible", owing to its rendering of Exodus 20:14,

  Thou shalt commit adultery

• In 1763, the "Fool's Bible" said in Psalm 14:1,

  The fool hath said in his heart there is a God

• The "Owl Bible" of 1944 says in 1 Peter 3:5,

  For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their owl husbands.

Some more are listed at Wikipedia under Bible errata. These are mostly simple mistakes, but some of them might be deliberately introduced (like the Printer's Bible of 1612, having "Printers have persecuted me without a cause" in Psalm 119:161).

In earlier times, when books were copied by hand, monks attributed such slips (in jest) to a demon called Titivillus ¹, whose job was to introduce errors into manuscripts, especially of important texts.

Even in the earliest Biblical manuscripts, there are disagreements, as can be seen by consulting most modern editions that have footnotes - it's not hard to find verses with annotations that note differences among early texts.

¹ Or possibly Titivilus or Tituvillis, etc., it being perfectly in keeping with his nature that there is no correct way to spell his name.

Answer 2

There have been several mis-translations or understandings of the bible.

The church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch comments about this:

"Jerome [the translator of the Old Testament into Latin], mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns - and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in the art of the Western Church, even after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus."

The Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as, "And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord." This was, however, a mistranslation of the original Hebrew Masoretic text which uses a term equivalent to "radiant", suggesting an effect like a halo.

with that Michelangelo made the Moses statue with horns

Isaiah 14:12

How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit.

The word "Lucifer" shows up for the only time in the KJV. The original Hebrew word there wasn't anything near Lucifer at all. The original Hebrew word there was "Helel". Why change it to Lucifer? The translation to KJB translated the name into Latin with the Vulgate. Lucifer is a Latin word. Isaiah nor any other OT prophet knew Latin. Helel as well as Lucifer means "brightness", but in latin it’s also the word for "morningstar". There was some wisdom to the translation since the next line says "son of the morning". One must ask, why the huge differences in not only the names but the meanings? Helel/Lucifer is mentioned only one time in the entire Bible, so why only there? It describes how Helel fell. After he fell, God changed his name. He was the morningstar. Now he's the adversary, and anyone who is Luciferian (as in the Ancient Roman religion) is now branded a Satanist by Christians.

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The "historical-grammatical" method of Biblical Hermeneutics includes consideration of figures of speech. There's a stackexchange devoted to it.

And as mentioned in my comment: mistranslations do not usually affect the whole story

Answer 3

Few Christians would challenge the idea that there can be errors in translation or copying.

You can always correct a translation error by going back to the original language. Copying errors are a bit more of a problem, as how can you know for certain what the original text was?

In practice, though, it is usually possible to identify copying errors by comparing manuscripts. That is, it's not like there was only one copy of the Bible, and at some point someone copied it and then threw away the original. Rather, many many copies were in circulation simultaneously. Depending on how you count, there are somewhere between 13,000 and 24,000 surviving ancient manuscripts of the Bible. So suppose we started with A, and two people made copies, B and C. Then if B made a copying mistake, the chance that C would make exactly the same mistake would be very small. Thus copy B would be different from copy C. If further copies were made from these, they would copy the error. So when we see that two ancient manuscripts are different, that's an indication that there was a copying error.

Perhaps you've heard that there are 150,000 discrepancies in Bible manuscripts. This sounds like a lot. But to get this number you have to count the same discrepancy multiple times. That is, if 15,000 manuscripts say X and 5,000 say Y, then that counts as 5,000 discrepancies. If you ignore the duplicates, there are about 10,000 discrepancies. Still sounds like a lot. But the vast majority of these are spelling errors, changes in spelling over the centuries, changes in grammar rules, and word order, none of which affect the meaning of the text. That leaves about 400 discrepancies in the entire Bible that actualy involve changing the meaning of the text. Most of these are pretty minor. Like in Isaiah 53, some ancient manuscripts include the word "light" and others don't, so the meaning may be "He shall see the labor of his soul" or "He shall see light from the labor of his soul".

I remember seeing a list of all these discrepancies once but I'm unable to find it now. Sorry! The biggest is Mark 16:9-20: some ancient manuscripts include it, others end the chapter at verse 8. None of the discrepancies change any significant event or doctrine.

Answer 4

Summary

The Bible has a long history of textual issues, but none of them have any bearing on the core of our faith.

Textual and translation errors

If you are interested in a fairly detailed and scholarly (yet highly readable) account of the transmission issues of New Testament texts, I highly recommend Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Remarkably the book is available online via archive.org. It's not a perfect book and his theology seems mis-aimed. Nevertheless, it's required reading for anyone interested in the subject.

Experts continue to address problems of textual criticism, translation, and even contradictions. The remarkable thing is that many of these problems are solvable. Compared to other ancient thinkers, we have a high degree of certainty that we know what the authors of the New Testament intended. Counter-intuitively perhaps, the more copies of a text we have, the more likely we are to a complete and accurate understanding of authorial intent. Imagine if we only had Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics and not Nicomachean Ethics—our understanding of the Philosopher's ethical though would be irrecoverably impoverished. Given two separate copies of the work, we can apply simple logic to recover not only his ideas, but even their development.

Theological implications

When I read through Ehrman's examples, I'm impressed by the triviality of the variations. As has been noted over the years by many scholars, none of these variations would alter Christian theology in the least. We could toss 1^st Corinthians 14:34-35 and it would do no harm to our belief the Jesus rose bodily from the dead.

However, there are Christians who believe that any variation (i.e. "imperfection") in the Bible undermines the credibility of Christianity. My impression is that Dr. Ehrman was one of those Christians. I submit that this idea was imported from Islam and not a part of historical Christian theology. In many ways, the real question we ought to ask is not "Is the Bible without error?" but "Does the Bible have authority?" While there are many disagreements about the first, all Christians that I know answer the second in the affirmative.

What we do when we don't understand the Bible

I'd like to take a moment to discuss the deeper question you ask about what we do when we find something we don't understand. Perhaps the easiest way is to walk through how I come to grips with my least-favorite verse in the Bible:

For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.—Mark 12:25 (ESV)

Frankly, the problem is that I love my wife and I can't imagine a (good) future without being married to her. Jesus' teaching (repeated in all three synoptic gospels) is clear, however: marriage does not carry over to the resurrection. Now if I had examined Jesus' teaching and found it generally untrustworthy, there's no question I'd dismiss this bit of the Bible along with the rest. We aren't surprised when a fool says something foolish.

But I've discovered after many years, that Jesus' teaching in the Bible has proved trustworthy in my life. When, for instance, I follow his suggestions to be humble, gentile and to turn the other cheek, I find that it works to avoid escalation of conflict and that I feel a deep sense of peace. And it's not the case that he is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. No. In my experience, Jesus is always right.

This is fundamentally what it means to trust Jesus and to have faith in him. So when I go back to the idea that I won't be married in the Resurrection, I must struggle with the idea that not only is it's true, but that it's good. I don't believe that it can be, but I believe that Jesus taught with authority. So I must echo the father of an epileptic boy who could not be healed:

I believe; help my unbelief!—Mark 9:24b (ESV)

Answer 5

Errors of translation and copyist errors

Many Christians agree it is possible for the Bible to have errors of translation and even copyist errors that were introduced by scribes before translation into other languages. One of the most famous errors of this type occur in the Septuagint, in its translation of Isaiah 7:14, and the error is carried forward into almost all English translations, including the KJV:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

In the original Hebrew, Isaiah uses the word 'almah, which means 'young woman' and is used only in this sense in 9 other references in the Old Testament. The word for 'virgin' is betulah and is used exclusively in that sense more than 50 times in the Hebrew Old Testament. However, the Septuagint mistranslated 'almah as the Greek parthenos, with the English meaning of 'virgin', and it is this version that Matthew relies on, resulting in a further biblical error.

Historical and scientific errors

One of the historical errors in the Hebrew Book of Genesis would appear to be its mention of camels in Genesis 26 and 37. Wayne T. Pitard says in 'Before Israel', published in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, page 28, camels were probably not used in this way before the beginning of the Iron Age (1200 BCE), when Israel was already emerging as a nation. In another example, scientists say that Noah's Flood is impossible, both chronologically and on the geological evidence, in which case the story of Noah and the Flood is either an error or an allegory.

In the end, historical and scientific errors should not be an issue, as long as the Bible does not contain spiritual errors. Most Christians would agree that the Bible is spiritually inerrant.

Answer 6

I think before looking at the question of whether or not the Bible has errors one firstly needs to look at the main purpose of this book and at how he personally views this book's main purpose.

For example, if he takes the Bible as a book that is meant to give us a precise account on how the world came into being, then, of course, Bible will contain a lot of mistakes in this regard, because giving an account on how the world was created is not the main purpose of the Bible. Neither is its purpose to give humans a correct and comprehensive description of the end of the world. The same is true with the Bible providing correct/not correct description of some historical events or facts or correct translation from one language into another - all of these are not the main purpose of the Bible.

The main purpose of this book is to bring those who are to be saved into believing into and the fellowship with the Son of God, Jesus Christ. In this regard Bible really has no errors whatsoever as it absolutely serves its purpose! The numerous linguistic, factual, historical and doctrinal ambiguities that can be found in the Bible only lead those who are to be in/ those who are in the fellowship with the Son of God to pray to Him/to pray to Him more.

Answer 7

In Holy Tradition of Orthodoxy it is known the life of the saint Mary the Egyptian (+522), which is an example of repentence, overwhelming for the human nature. From very young age she left her parents. Far from home, she spent 17 years into lechery. One day happened a miracle in her life and she realized how sinfull she was. Very ashamed in front of the God, she felt so much guilt. Counting on the help of the Virgin Mother of God, she left the world and she went deep in the desert spending there 47 years in very wild places, without to see any human face, without food and loosing her few clothes in a short while. Her surviving there was a miracle. One year before to die, God sent abba Zosima, a monk, to find this treasure hidden deep in the desert. When he met Saint Mary, he implored her to tell about all her life from early ages until the last day. Abba Zosima was very impressed, crying all the time when he heard her story, but in the same he was amazed about the fact that she cited words of Scripture, knowing in the same time that she never learnt from the books and she never heard anyone who sang or read these words.

Saint Mary told to abba Zosima:

The word of God are alive and active, by itself teaches a man knowledge.

The saint John Chrysostom, in Homilies on Matthew, explains that God gave us His word, not using ink and paper, He writes directly in human hearts with Holy Spirit. God didn't gave writtings to Noah, to Abraham, to his offspring, to Job, to Moses. Instead of writtings, He gave to the apostles, the Holy Spirit saying:

(John 14:26) He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.

(Jeremiah 31:33) I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.

(2 Corinthians 3:2-3) You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts

And saint John Chrysostom, concludes in Homily 1 on Matthew:

But, since we have utterly put away from us this grace, come, let us at any rate embrace the second best course: the written Scriptures.

In his Homilies, saint John Chrysostom tell that even in his times, 347-407, the Scriptures had many enemies trying to change them, to cut them or to destroy them completely:

Matthew 28:12-15 And when they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, and said, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ “And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day.

It is known that Orthodoxy is a very "conservative religion" with everything old and everything hard to be understood by our modern minds. But its Holy Tradition, is not tradition made by men, is the way to keep everything revelated from the the God, in its original form as much as possible, unaltered, unreformed, uninfluenced by the temporary teachings of humanity. It is made only by saints, to remain Holy. And the Scriptures are part of this Holy Tradition.

Even if some texts of the Bible were altered by "academic" translations, re-writtings, the good news is the word of God cannot be changed, or losed definitively, because the finger of God will write His word every time in humble hurts looking for Him.