在线书

文本证据

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]基督徒和非基督徒对圣经有普遍误解。他们认为圣经是反复翻译的译文，这种观念是错误的。一些人因此认为最终的翻译结果十分混乱，几乎不能代表原文的意思。这和事实是不一样的。像詹姆斯国王版这样的译本是从现存的旧手稿中衍生出来的，如希腊的文本(收到的文本)和希伯来的马所拉文本，而不是翻译自另一种解释的文本。通常，不同译本的圣经之间的差异仅仅在于学者如何从原文的原始语言(希伯来语、亚拉姆语或希腊语)中解释某个单词或句子¹。那么这些圣经的手稿有多可靠呢?证据确凿，少有争议的。在中东和地中海地区的不同地区，由不同的个体所准备的手稿彼此间有着惊人的一致。同样，手稿也与七十士译本一致。这些译本由希伯来语翻译成希腊文，大概可以追溯到公元前三世纪。1947年发现的死海古卷也为圣经文本的传播提供了一个深刻的证据。每一本旧约全书所发现的内容，都是用今天的圣经来形容的。(少数几个不同之处是“明显的笔误或拼写的变化”²)。为了保证文本的准确性，负责旧约文本的抄写员们可谓是鞠躬尽瘁。为了保证这些副本的可靠性，他们付出了巨大的努力。他们打量每一个字母和每一个单词，并在边缘记录诸如中间的字母和律法的单词。如果发现一个错误，副本立即被销毁。作为一名软件工程师，我个人可以保证，抄写员保护文本的方法比今天用来保护软件程序免受腐败的常见校验方法要严格得多。新约手稿的证据更加令人印象深刻。它有24000个已知的副本，已经完成的有5,366个，有些甚至可追溯到公元二、三世纪。这份手稿权威远远超过了其他所有的古代作品，如下表所示⁴:

作品	写作时间	最早的副本	时间跨度	副本数量
新约	A.D. 40-100	A.D. 125	25 年	24,000
荷马（伊利亚特）	900 B.C.	400 B.C	500 年	643
索福克勒斯	496-406 B.C	A.D. 1000	1,400 年	193
亚里士多德	384-322 B.C.	A.D. 1100	1,400 年	49
凯撒（高卢战争）	58-50 B.C.	A.D. 900	1000 年	10

从表格上可以看到，即使是古希腊最著名的书—荷马的伊利亚特，也只有643本副本，在手稿支持方面远远落后于新约。在这些副本中，有764行是有争议的，而新约只有40行⁵。新约甚至比17世纪威廉莎士比亚的37部戏剧还要好。每一部戏剧的印刷文本中都存在各种空白，在许多情况下学者们被迫“填补空白”。而在新约的24000份副本中，我们可以确信没有任何东西丢失。同样令人印象深刻的是，学者们可以通过将早期教父的语录简单整合，重现新约中的11个章节。学者F.F.布鲁斯在《经书与羊皮古卷》一书中对它进行了总结:

世界上没有一个古老的文学体像新约一样享有如此丰富的文本认证⁶。

Scientific Evidence Other Religions

1. Of course this doesn’t mean that all translations are equal! Some are clearly better than others and convey wording closer to the original language. Most scholars I respect recommend the King James over all other versions – it is the standard that all modern translations are compared to. But please don’t confuse this with those who claim the KJV is the only inspired version. Bob Enyart utterly destroys that argument here. 2. Gleason Archer, Jr., A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 1974, pg 25. 3. A software checksum is typically the sum of bytes or words over the entire software program. In my 17 plus years as an engineer, I have never seen a software program that becomes corrupted yield a valid checksum which causes the corruption to go unnoticed. If a Bible manuscript copy had become corrupted but still yielded the proper word and letter count, it is highly likely that the corruption would still have been detected since the corrupted letter or word would make that portion of the text unreadable. A software program doesn’t have this added safeguard protection since the software is not readable text to the naked eye. 4. Table extracted from Josh McDowell, A Ready Defense, 1993, pg 45. 5. Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, 1986, pg 367. 6. F.F Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, 1963, pg 178.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Ding Peng

Online Book

Textual Evidence

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A common misunderstanding of the Bible by both Christians and non-Christians alike is the mistaken notion that the Bible is a translation upon a translation upon a translation, leading some to believe that the end result is so garbled it hardly represents the original. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Translations such as the King James version are derived from extant copies of old manuscripts such as the Greek Textus Receptus (Received Text) and the Hebrew Masoretic text, and are not translations of a text that had itself been translated from another interpretation. Often, the differences between Bibles with different translations lie only in how the scholars interpreted a word or sentence from the original language of the text source (Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek).¹

So how reliable are the manuscripts that all these Bibles are translated from? The evidence is overwhelming and seldom disputed. Manuscripts prepared from different individuals spread over various parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean region agree remarkably with each other. Also, the manuscripts agree with the Septuagint, which was translated to Greek from Hebrew possibly as far back as the 3rd century BC. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 also provided a profound testimony to the reliability of the centuries of transmission of the Bible text, as every Old Testament book found was virtually word for word with today’s Bible! (the few differences were “obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling”²).

The scribes who were in charge of the Old Testament text dedicated their lives to preserving the text’s accuracy when they made copies. The great lengths the scribes went to guarantee the reliability of the copies is illustrated by the fact that they would count every letter and every word, and record in the margins such things as the middle letter and word of the Torah. If a single error was found, the copy was immediately destroyed. As a software engineer, I can personally vouch that the scribe’s method of protecting the text is more rigorous than the common checksuming methods used today to protect software programs from corruption³.

The New Testament manuscript evidence is even more impressive, with 24,000 known copies, 5,366 which are complete, and some that date as early as the second and third centuries. This manuscript authority greatly surpasses all other writings of antiquity, as illustrated in the following table⁴:

Work	When Written	Earliest Copy	Time Span	No. of copies
New Testament	A.D. 40-100	A.D. 125	25 yrs	24,000
Homer (Iliad)	900 B.C.	400 B.C	500 yrs	643
Sophocles	496-406 B.C	A.D. 1000	1,400 yrs	193
Aristotle	384-322 B.C.	A.D. 1100	1,400 yrs	49
Caesar (Gallic Wars)	58-50 B.C.	A.D. 900	1000 yrs	10

As can be seen from the table, Homer’s Iliad, the most renowned book of ancient Greece, is a very distant second to the New Testament in manuscript support, with only 643 copies. Of these copies, there are 764 disputed lines, compared to only 40 lines in the New Testament⁵. The New Testament even fares better than the 37 plays written by William Shakespeare in the 17th century. Every play contains various gaps in the printed text, forcing scholars in many cases to “fill in the blanks”. With the 24,000 copies of the New Testament, we can be sure that nothing has been lost. It is also very impressive to note that scholars can recreate all but 11 verses of the New Testament by simply piecing together quotations by the early church fathers of the second and third centuries!

The scholar F.F. Bruce, in The Books and the Parchments sums it up well:

There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament⁶.

Scientific Evidence Other Religions

1. Of course this doesn’t mean that all translations are equal! Some are clearly better than others and convey wording closer to the original language. Most scholars I respect recommend the King James over all other versions – it is the standard that all modern translations are compared to. But please don’t confuse this with those who claim the KJV is the only inspired version. Bob Enyart utterly destroys that argument here.
2. Gleason Archer, Jr., A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 1974, pg 25.
3. A software checksum is typically the sum of bytes or words over the entire software program. In my 17 plus years as an engineer, I have never seen a software program that becomes corrupted yield a valid checksum which causes the corruption to go unnoticed. If a Bible manuscript copy had become corrupted but still yielded the proper word and letter count, it is highly likely that the corruption would still have been detected since the corrupted letter or word would make that portion of the text unreadable. A software program doesn’t have this added safeguard protection since the software is not readable text to the naked eye.
4. Table extracted from Josh McDowell, A Ready Defense, 1993, pg 45.
5. Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, 1986, pg 367.
6. F.F Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, 1963, pg 178.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Fred Williams

Fred Williams has been giving lectures on creation for decades to churches, schools, conferences, and other organizations. Mr. Williams has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, and has spent the last 30+ years in the high tech industry as a design engineer of both hardware and software. His projects have included developing software for a cutting-edge adult stem cell growth chamber, managing a team that produced high-precision GPS devices for off-highway vehicles, and is currently employed by Micron developing NAND storage solutions. He is currently the co-host with Bob Enyart on the popular Real Science Radio program that airs every Friday at 3:00pm on the 50,000-watt AM 670 KLTT. He has also long served as the Webmaster for the Creation Research Society, the oldest creation organization in the United States. Fred can be reached at [email protected].