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Was The Bible Lost In Translation?

Brian Messerli
04/27/25 - Praise and Preaching Service

1 Peter 1:22-25 - Here the apostle Peter says that the word of God is life changing, and that it endures forever!  It’s not like the fragile flowers of the field that wither away with time, but that it’s permanent and never fades away!

That sounds great, but there are some problems with it.  1) We just read that in English, but the original language Peter used to write this letter was Greek.  So how do we know if what we’re reading in English is an accurate translation?  What if the original Greek text said, “The word of God does NOT endure,” but whoever translated it into English changed it to say that it DOES?  2) We don’t have ANY of the original writings of the Bible.  They’re called autographs, documents written by the original authors, and we don’t have them.  The document our English Bible was translated from was not the original, it was a copy of a copy of a copy.

So I can understand why one of the most common objections skeptics raise is that we can’t trust the accuracy of the Bible because it’s been copied and translated so many times!  In fact, the religion of Islam claims that the New Testament documents have been corrupted over time and what the original documents said was way different than what we have in our modern translations.

And the reason people raise these objections is because they imagine the copying and translation of the Bible like a game of telephone.  I’d be surprised if kids today still play this, but most of us remember this game.  You’d sit in a circle, and the first person would turn and whisper a sentence in the next person’s ear.  The sentence might be, “I like to read books.”  Then that person turns to whisper it in the next person’s ear, but sometimes the whisper sounds distorted and they might miss a letter or even a whole word, so by time it gets to the 5th person, they whisper, “I like to eat hooks,” and the more people involved in the process, the more distorted the sentence gets, and when it finally gets back around to the original speaker, it’s turned into “I lied about eating bugs.”  And everyone laughs because it’s fun to see that happen!

This is how people typically view the copying process, and also the translation process.  As if the Bible started in Hebrew, was translated to Greek, then from Greek to Latin, from Latin to Syriac, from Syriac to Coptic, and so on to the point where when we finally get to our English versions, the original message MUST have been lost in translation because it was filtered through 10 different languages first!

Well, this morning I’d like to show you why the process of Bible copying and translation was NOT like the game of telephone at all, and that we can know with 100% certainty that the Bible was NOT lost in translation, and in fact, we can be more certain about the accurate translation of the Bible than we can about any other document in history by far.  And that’s due to 5 main factors.

1. The Copies were Written Down

• It’s certainly true we don’t have any of the original documents, mostly because of the materials they were written on.  They couldn’t go down to Walmart and buy a college ruled notebook, and they couldn’t make digital copies and store them in the cloud.  So they mostly used papyrus.  Papyrus was a type of plant that grew near rivers, and in ancient times they would cut the stalks of that plant into very thin strips.  Then they’d soak them in water to soften them, and lay those strips in two layers; one vertical layer and then one horizontal layer on top, and they’d press them together, let them dry, and polish the surface to make them ready for writing.  They could also join them together into one long sheet and turn it into a scroll.  Now, it’s possible if you stored these sheets in a place with very low moisture, they could last for hundreds of years, but most of them didn’t last very long, and so God always instructed people to make written copies of His word so it could be preserved longer than the shelf life of papyrus.
  • Exodus 34:27-28 - Now here’s a case where Moses wrote the 10 commandments on stone.  THAT would be far more permanent than papyrus, but it would be much harder to write on.  It wasn’t like he took a Sharpe and wrote on top of the stone, he would have to chisel these words INTO the stone, and then can you imagine trying to carry your books around with you?  Your library would be like Stone Henge and you’d need a crane to carry it around with you.  Papyrus was much more convenient both to write on and to transport.
  • Deuteronomy 17:18-19 [Here God commands every king of Israel to make a copy of His law] - God wanted him to make a copy not just to preserve His word, but to preserve the soul of the king so the king could lead his people in following the Lord, and thereby preserve the souls of the whole kingdom!
  • Jeremiah 36:4 - Now, I understand skeptics may not believe this claim, but the entire Old Testament claims to be the word of God written down for us by the prophets and/or scribes like Baruch. Then when we get to the New Testament, it makes the same claims!
  • 1 Corinthians 14:37 - Paul and the other apostles and prophets claimed to be writing down the actual words of God, and they expected other people to make copies and circulate these letters.
  • Colossians 4:16 - Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in the city of Colossae, and after they read it, it would be foolish for them to send this exact letter to the church of the Laodiceans.  Because then they wouldn’t have the letter anymore.  So what they’d do is make copies of it, and then send the copies out to other churches.  So in the first century world, you’d have hundreds of written copies of these letters floating around.  And someone may be wondering, “Okay, so what Brian?  How is this relevant to whether it was lost in translation or not?”
    • Well, imagine playing the game of telephone, but instead of whispering “I like to read books” in the next person’s ear, you write it down and then you give them a handwritten note that says “I like to read books,” and then they make a hand written copy of your note and pass it to the next person and so on.  Do you realize how not fun that game would be?  It’d be way too easy!  It’s hard to hear someone whispering in your ear because 1) the sound can get distorted and 2) you only get one chance to hear it.  But if it was written down, there’s no chance for misunderstanding it, and you can look at it as long as you want to make sure you get it right, and you can even double check your work before passing it along.  So chances are, when it gets back around to the original writer, it’s going to be the same message because transmitting something in writing is so much more effective.  And the Bible was written down.

2.  The Copies were Written Down Carefully

• In a game of telephone, if the sentence comes back around to the original speaker and it’s totally different, it’s hilarious and everyone laughs, that’s what makes the game fun!
  • But what if it was a school project and your teacher told you, “If the sentence is different in any way by the time it gets back around to the original speaker, you will all fail this class.”  Now it’s not fun anymore, it’s not a game, the stakes are too high, and 1) you’re probably going to ask the teacher if you can write it down instead of whispering it because that’ll help with accuracy.  2) You’re not just going to be double checking, you’re going to be triple and quadruple checking to make sure you have copied that message letter for letter before sending it on to the next person.
  • Deuteronomy 4:2-3 - Now these aren’t instructions for how to copy God’s word.  He’s talking about living His word, but the two go hand in hand because we can’t live God’s word in a way that doesn’t add or take anything away from it unless we HAVE God’s word copied and preserved for us without any additions or subtractions.  And notice the price of adding to or taking away from God’s word is death!  He doesn’t say like that teacher, “You’ll fail this class,” He says, “You’ll be punished for all eternity if you add or take away from my words.”  And a similar statement is found in the New Testament in the very last chapter of the Bible…
  • Revelation 22:18-19 - So here’s my question.  Do you think the people writing down and copying God’s word would have treated it like a game that’s just kind of fun and if we make mistakes it’s not really a big deal?  No way!  They would have made those copies as if their souls depended on it, and as if the souls of those who would later READ those copies depended on it, because they did!
    • Now, not everyone making copies were professional scribes, but it’s fascinating to consider how the professional scribes approached the work of making copies of God’s word.  The Masoretes for instance, before they even began working on a copy would wash their whole bodies, then dress themselves in full Jewish garb.  They had strict rules like how not a single letter could be copied from memory.  You had to look at every letter one at a time from the original before copying it.  Every line of each column in the copy must contain the same number of letters as the line in the original.  If the copy deviated in any way from the original it would be destroyed and they would have to start all over again.  When they finished making the copy, they would count the total number of letters in the original and compare it with the copy and if it didn’t match up, the copy would be destroyed and they would start all over again.  They would even locate the very middle letter of the original and make sure the middle letter of the copy was the same; if not, it was destroyed and the scribe would start all over again.  If this was what the game of telephone was like, nobody would want to play, because it was grueling, painstaking work, because they were trying to make it as perfect as they could in order to honor God.  In fact, they would never write the name of God before first wiping their pen clean and dipping it in fresh ink, and it was said that “should a king address you while writing God’s name, you must take no notice of him.”
      • This is so helpful to know because some skeptics will accuse the copyists of having false motives, changing the documents to suit their own agendas.  But why would they do that when they know it would cost them their soul and the souls of those who read their copies?  The people who copied God’s word had tremendous respect for and fear of God, so to purposely make changes in the copies would run completely counter to their character.
        • In fact, here’s a quote from Bart Ehrman that’s astounding because he is NOT a supporter of Christianity, in fact he’s been very critical of it, but he’s an expert on ancient textual analysis, and he says this…
        • “It is probably safe to say that the copying process of early Christian texts was by and large a conservative process.  The scribes were intent on conserving the textual tradition they were passing on.  Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition, but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow them.  Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited.”  [Misquoting Jesus]

3.  The Copies were Written Down Carefully and Passed Down Multiple Lines

• In a game of telephone, the message from the original speaker is passed down one line of people.  So if you have 10 people playing the game, that’s one line of 10 people.  Even if you made the game bigger and had 100 people playing, that message is still only being transmitted down one line of people, it’s just a longer line.  Now, the truth is the more people you get involved in this one line, the more risk of mistakes being made.  So even if you wrote the message down instead of whispering it, and even if the stakes were high and you’d fail your class if the message changed, if you had 100 people, there’s a chance that maybe 1 person in that group accidentally copies it wrong and misses a letter, so the message changes from “I like to read books,” to “I like to read a book.”  So it’s different from the original message, but very similar in meaning.  Yet they would still fail the class because the message changed.
  • But what if there were 9 other groups of 100 students playing the same game using the same message.  Now, the message “I like to read books,” is not just being passed down one single line of people.  It’s being passed down 10 separate lines of people.
    • So now the responsibility for preserving the original message does not lay with one group, but with 10 groups.  Which means one group might end up with the wrong message at the end and it says, “I like to read a book,” but what if the 9 other groups ended up with the message, “I like to read books.”  What would you determine was probably the original message?  It’s the message the 9 groups ended up with.  It gives you 9 other points of comparison to use for cross reference.
      • So having multiple lines of people is an added layer of protection against errors in the copies.
      • Acts 15:21 - There were copies of Old Testament writings by Moses found in Jewish synagogues in almost every major city.  That’s because there wasn’t just one group of people in one city making copies; there were hundreds of lines of people in different cities transmitting copies of God’s word.  The same was true of the New Testament writings, which we saw in Colossians 4:16 where Paul wrote about churches making copies of his letters and sending them to other churches in different cities.
        • In technical terms, this is what’s called a free transmission of the text vs. a controlled transmission.  A controlled transmission means there’s only one group responsible both for making copies and correcting copies from other groups.  While that may sound like a safer way to preserve accuracy in the copies, it’s a dangerous way to do it.  Because in a controlled transmission where one group is in charge of all the copies 1) you’ll have less copies for cross referencing, so if this group messes it up, it’s hard to tell because you don’t have many other copies to compare it to.  2) The group controlling the transmission process could become corrupt and they could intentionally change the document and insert their own additions or make subtractions to suit their agendas and nobody would ever know.  3) Even if they weren’t corrupt or biased, we’d still have to blindly trust that they got it right since there’s no other groups to compare their copies with.  4) Since there are fewer copies, and they’re all stored in one place, there’s a much greater risk of them being lost or stolen or destroyed.
          • But a free transmission means copies are made by different people in different places at different times completely independently from each other and from any ruling group over them, which means there’s WAY more copies to allow for cross-checking, and if one of those groups happens to be corrupt or bias, it’s very easy to catch the changes they made because we’ve got thousands of other copies from other groups who didn’t make those changes.  And if one group of copies gets stolen or burned in a fire in one city, it’s okay because there are still thousand of other copies preserved in other parts of the world.  The Bible is a free transmission text!
            • And I mentioned earlier that Islam claims the New Testament documents have been corrupted from the originals.  But first of all, no one has the originals, so how can they say what we have now isn’t like the originals?  We just have to take their word for it.  Secondly, it’s ironic because the Koran, unlike the Bible, was copied through a controlled transmission process.  And in 650 AD, the religious leader of Islam, Caliph Uthman, standardized the Koran by making one official version of the text, and then he destroyed all the other copies.  Now, I’m not saying that proves his copy was inaccurate, but I’m saying it’s impossible now to know if it was accurate, and again we’re left with just taking their word for it.  The Bible was NOT treated that way, it was a free transmission so we don’t have to take any one particular person’s word for it, we’ve got thousands of copies from so many different people to cross check between!

4.  The Copies were Written Down Carefully, Passed Down Multiple Lines, and Translated Directly from the Original Language

• So let me ruin the game of telephone again.  Instead of the original person writing down the message and passing it to the next person, then the next person passes to the next person and so on, what if the original person gave their message directly to each person separately?
  • So the original person writes down the message and gives it directly to the second person, then they write it down again, and give it directly to the third person, and so on, until they give it directly to the last person.  So now everyone, including the last person got the message straight from the source, instead of it being filtered through the 9 or 99 people before them.  Again, that’d be a terrible game and wouldn’t be any fun because it’s too easy!
    • But that’s what it’s like when the Bible was translated into different languages.  It wasn’t like our earlier picture of the original Hebrew and Greek languages being translated through 10 other languages before getting to English.  Instead, the Greek was translated directly into Latin.  Then the Greek was translated directly into Syriac.  Then the Greek is translated directly into Coptic, and so on, and yes the Greek was also translated directly into English.
      • • And the awesome thing is, we still have thousands of Greek copies against which to check our English translations!  So when we started in 1 Peter 1 about how the word of God endures forever, if we have any question whether that English translation is accurate, we can go right back to the source and cross check it with the Greek!
          • Here’s the same passage in the original Greek language, and you can go through and compare to see if the translation is accurate!  Now, someone might ask, “But if we have copies in the original language to compare with, how come there are so many different English versions and they all word things differently?”  Well, it’s because some English translations try to translate it word for word for maximum accuracy whereas others translate it thought for thought for maximum readability.  If you translate word for word, it can be harder and more unnatural to read.  For instance, if I were to say “I’m 38 years old” in Spanish, it’s “Tengo treinta y ocho anos.”  If I were to translate the Spanish back to English word for word, it’s “I have 38 years.”  So word for word is an odd way to translate it because we don’t talk like that in English.  If someone asks, “How old are you,” you don’t respond by telling them how many years you have.  So a more understandable way would be to translate the thought, and say, “How do they express the same thought in English?”  The same thing is true with translating the Bible from Greek to English.  But even though the wording may be slightly different in our English translations, the meaning is pretty much the same.
            • 1 Peter 1:25 NASB
            • 1 Peter 1:25 NLT - So it says “remain” instead of “endure,” but those words mean the same thing.  Same with “that” and “which.”  And here the word “preached” in the original Greek means “to bring good news,” so the NLT just added that nuance into their translation.  But there’s nothing lost in the differences between those translations at all.

5.  The Copies were Written Down Carefully, Passed Down Multiple Lines, Translated Directly from the Original Language, and Copied More than any Document in History

• Think back to the point I made earlier about multiple lines of people.  That gives you 9 other lines of 100 people to compare your answer to, and helps you realize that your group messed up.  But what if in this game of telephone, you didn’t just have 9 other groups of 100, but 49 other groups of 100?  Well now, there’s a total of 50 final answers to compare with, which makes it even easier to figure out if your final copy was accurate.
  • But let’s take it even further, because you don’t just have the writings of the 50 LAST people in all the groups.  You have the writings of all 100 people in each of the 50 groups, which means you now have 5,000 documents where people were attempting to copy the message, “I like to read books.”  100 from your group, and 4900 from the rest.  But, with more people involved, there’s more chance for errors to creep in, so out of the 5000 total documents, let’s say 1000 of them wrote, “I like to read a book.”  It’s not the correct answer, but it’s close.  Let’s say another 500 added an apostrophe D to make it “I’d like to read books.”  Still not correct.  But then the majority of them, 3500 have the correct answer, “I like to read books.”  Since that’s by FAR the majority translation, we can usually assume that’s the correct one.  BUT it’s possible the majority got it wrong, and the cool thing is, we actually know which order those documents were written in based on where people were sitting, so we can go back and compare our final answer to the earliest copies that were made, which is going to much more reliable than the later copies because they’re closer to the original.  What’s more, if the final answer for one group is different than all the others, we can examine all the written notes from that group and track down exactly WHEN the mistake was made.  You can see, “Hey this message changed with the 23rd person,” and then that mistake was found in all the copies after it because they were copying the guy who messed it up!  And then maybe the 91st person makes a mistake and it changes again.
    • But do you see how mistakes like these aren’t a big deal because 1) we have all these copies so we can actually tell exactly what the mistakes are and 2) when the message changes, it still doesn’t change the basic meaning.
• This is what’s it like with the Bible.  Because for just the New Testament alone, we have 5,700 manuscripts which are copies made in the original Greek language.  Just to give you some perspective about how amazing and borderline miraculous that is, the ancient work that comes in second place for the most surviving manuscripts is Homer’s Illiad, and it only has 1800.  But then if we include copies of the New Testament translated into different languages, now we have 23,000 copies!
  • Textual scholar FF Bruce:  “There is no body of ancient literature in the world that enjoys such a wealth of textual attestation as the New Testament.”  For the Old Testament, there are around 1500 manuscripts, and thousands more in other languages.
  • And there’s an entire field called textual criticism where scholars survey the thousands of copies we have of ancient manuscripts and use them to re-construct the original.  Because just like in our analogy, they can trace any and all mistakes between the copies and when those mistakes were made.
    • John 7:53 - This is the start to the story about Jesus dealing with the woman caught in adultery.  It’s the famous passage where He says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  If your Bible is like mine, you may have a bracket at the start of this verse, or maybe a star or number or special marking of some kind, and then you may have the other half of the bracket or another special marking at the end of 8:11.  If your Bible has footnotes, you may see a note that says, “Later mss or manuscripts added this story.”  That’s because textual scholars, even Christian textual scholars, know for a fact that this section was NOT in the original text of John.  It was in a lot of later copies of John, but it wasn’t found in the earliest copies, which were closer to the original.  Now, I don’t doubt that this story actually happened, but it’s not part of John’s original gospel, and I realize that may make some Christians uncomfortable that something could be in the Bible that wasn’t original to it, but actually it’s the perfect demonstration that because we have so many thousands of copies, we can know exactly what was added or taken away from the original.  Having so many manuscripts gives us the ability to know with nearly 100% certainty what the original documents said.
      • Theology professor Norman Geisler put it this way:  “There are more early manuscripts of the Bible than of any other book in the ancient world. If we reject the Bible’s reliability, we must also reject every other ancient work of literature.”
        • In other words, if we believe the Bible was lost in translation, we have to believe every other book in history was lost in translation too.
        • And let me finish with this, because sometimes skeptics will point out how many errors there are in the copies.  In fact, there are over 400,000 errors, because again, not everyone making copies were professional scribes.  But it’s important to remember most errors in the copies are not like John 7 where there’s an entire passage added.  And even in that case, there’s nothing in John 7 that drastically changes the meaning of the Bible or makes us think differently about Jesus.  But most errors are simple word transpositions like Jesus Christ instead of Christ Jesus.  Or minor spelling errors.  And the numbers are inflated because if one minor spelling error or word transposition gets copied 1000 times, it’s not counted as one error, it’s counted as a thousand.  So overall, there may only be 400 errors, but if they’re each copied 1000 times, that’s 400,000 errors.  It sounds terrible to hear there’s 400,000 errors, like it proves we can’t trust the Bible.  But…
          • Bart Ehrman, again a strong critic of Christianity and a textual scholar said this:  “The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of textual differences among our manuscripts are completely insignificant, immaterial, and uninteresting... Most of the changes are simply spelling differences.”
• All in all, there are about 40 verses in the New Testament with errors that change the meaning of the text.  But considering the fact that there are nearly 8,000 verses in the New Testament, that’s only .05% that’s problematic.  And none of those problem verses are detrimental to our understanding of God or damaging to our faith in any way.  And what it means is that across thousands of independent, freely transmitted copies, there’s 99.5% agreement!  That is beyond astounding, and borderline miraculous!
• Sir Frederic Kenyon, classical and Biblical scholar, and former director of the British Museum: “The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.”   
  • The apostle Peter was right:  the word of the Lord endures forever, and if he was right about that, he was also right that it’s life changing.