They Say : ​“Your Bible Has Not Been Cor­rupt­ed”. Really ?

As-salaa­mu ​‘alaykum wa rah­mat­ul­lahi wa barakatuh ;

What do the dif­fer­ences between Bible man­u­scripts reveal ? This paper is divid­ed into the fol­low­ing sections :

1. They require you to pro­duce evi­dence on : WHEN, HOW and WHY was the Bible corrupted
2. Once upon a time, there was a myth about Bible manuscripts
3. Evi­dence : more than 50 vers­es either omit­ted or added, hun­dreds of oth­ers changed
4. Evi­dences from sec­ond and third cen­tu­ry about Bible corruption
5. Do the changes and cor­rup­tions of man­u­scripts affect doctrine ?
6. ?=“For God so loved the world”? 

1.They require you to pro­duce evi­dence on : WHEN, HOW and WHY was the Bible corrupted

My fel­low coun­try­man, Hil­ki Berisha, in an arti­cle pub­lished in ?The Live Paper ? with the aim of evan­ge­liz­ing Koso­var Alban­ian Mus­lims, writes :

Many Mus­lims wrong­ly pre­sume that the Qur?an was revealed to replace Hebra­ic and Chris­t­ian Holy Writ because of the alleged rea­son that these last scrip­tures were cor­rupt­ed, changed and lost ?

Ques­tions that are raised now are :

1. When and where did the change happen ?
2. How did the change happen???[1]

And so on and so forth, con­tin­u­ing with Chris­t­ian promi­nent log­ic of ?tell me how the orig­i­nal uncor­rupt­ed spe­cif­ic scrip­ture read?. His broth­er in Christ from one anti-Islam­ic web­site makes two more spe­cif­ic questions :

3. What changes were made ?
4. Where is the ​“orig­i­nal” Bible that we can com­pare it with to prove the change happened?[2]

We were asked these ques­tions and we will now answer them.

“A lay­man in New Zealand, Evan Sad­dler, con­cerned about the for­ma­tion of mod­ern Bible ver­sions which he believed to have been pre­pared from cor­rupt­ed man­u­scripts, was chal­lenged by a pas­tor con­cern­ing his com­pe­tence to make such a judg­ment. ​“How many lan­guages do you know?” asked the pas­tor. Mr. Sad­dler, a man of good humor, prompt­ly replied, ​“Two ! New Zealand and Australian.”

Unfazed by this humor­ous rejoin­der, the pas­tor pressed his point. ​“How can you make your­self an expert on Bible trans­la­tion if you do not know Greek or Hebrew?” Mr. Sad­dler replied by ask­ing a ques­tion him­self. ​“Do you under­stand Greek?” When assured that the pas­tor did, Mr. Sad­dler request­ed an analy­sis of the Greek word­ing upon which the New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion trans­la­tion of Matthew 18:11 was based. The pas­tor dili­gent­ly set about his assigned task, but soon dis­cov­ered that it was not eas­i­ly ful­filled. Look­ing up from his Bible in con­fu­sion and amaze­ment, the min­is­ter explod­ed, ​“But there is no Matthew 18:11!” His obser­va­tion was cor­rect. The tenth verse is present, and the twelfth, but the eleventh is entire­ly omit­ted. Qui­et­ly, Mr. Sad­dler replied, ​“Now what use is your knowl­edge of Greek when the text is missing?”[3]

A lot of noise has been raised, pro and con­tra on Bible cor­rup­tion. You may have heard that the cor­rup­tion issue is all about hearsay, prej­u­dices and noth­ing else. The above-cit­ed frag­ment from the book ?Mod­ern Bible Trans­la­tions Unmasked ? by Dr. Rus­sell R. Stan­dish tells us a lot. It shows gen­tly the ongo­ing war between ?King James Ver­sion Only ? sup­port­ers and the rest of Chris­ten­dom on the issue of which Bible version[4] to use, since the dis­cov­ery of dif­fer­ent Bible man­u­scripts faced us with a lot of prob­lems and cleaned out the mythol­o­gy of One Unchanged Bible. A miss­ing verse tells us about tex­tu­al cor­rup­tion ; it either shows that once the verse was there and than some­body removed it or oppo­site, the verse was nev­er there but some­body added. But is it only a verse ? If that would be the case, there would be no need to lose so much ener­gy on that. How­ev­er, what if the num­ber is being mul­ti­plied bad­ly and that sev­er­al oth­er changes in man­u­script read­ings arise beside the omission/​additions that may put faith in the Bible as an unchanged scrip­ture in a real mess ? You are then advised to pre­pare your­self in deal­ing with such chaos when read­ing what fol­lows, for it may shat­ter what­ev­er pre­vi­ous beliefs you may hold about the Bible.

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