Few texts seem as permanent as the Christian Bible. And yet, the 3,000-year story of its composition, transmission, translation – and corruption – is anything but straightforward.
It begins in the Near East in the 9th century BCE, when the earliest parts of what would become the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures sacred to Jews as their Bible and to Christians as their Old Testament, were written down for the first time.
Tradition holds that the Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh, was written by Moses in the second millennium BCE, but its striking variations in prose style and the narrative incoherence of certain episodes suggest that it is not the work of one hand but the sometimes-uneasy compilation of multiple earlier sources. The famous documentary hypothesis of the nineteenth century proposed that no fewer than four sources were melded to produce the Torah; modern scholars are more likely to recognize only three. But the tradition of Mosaic authorship is no longer taken seriously, and the final edition of the Torah may be as late as the 5th century BCE.
At any rate, there is little hard evidence for how the Tanakh was composed, as the earliest surviving manuscripts – the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in a cave in 1947 – are from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, contemporary with only the very latest books of the Tanakh to be written. We can only make conjectures from the historical and archaeological records, and linguistic evidence internal to the text.
In fact, the oldest complete manuscripts of the Tanakh in Hebrew, the Leningrad and Aleppo codices, are from the 9th or 10th centuries CE – nearly two thousand years after the earliest parts were composed.
The situation with the New Testament is better: the books were written in Greek in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, and we have fragmentary manuscripts from the latter half of the 2nd century, and full copies (the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and Codex Alexandrinus) from the 4th century.
Until the advent of printing in the Europe in the 15th century, all copies of the Bible – indeed, all books – were copied by hand, a tedious and error-prone process. The Hebrew scribes who copied out the Tanakh were extremely fastidious: the medieval manuscripts are remarkably similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls a thousand years older, and there is an accepted version, the Masoretic Text, with few points of controversy. But Christian scribes, especially in the early centuries, were notoriously more wayward. Sloppy mistakes, intentional alterations, and even wholesale additions or deletions of entire verses abound in the textual record. What is worse, a change in one manuscript will, unless corrected, propagate to all manuscripts copied from it, and so the reading that is found in the most manuscripts may not be the correct one.
Modern scholars trying to recover the original Greek text of the New Testament are left to reconcile thousands of existing manuscripts, with literally hundreds of thousands of variations between them.
The distance between the texts that we have and the texts as they were originally written is one problem. Another is the distance between the original texts and the events they depict. We have already seen that the Torah was written hundreds of years after Moses, and thus hundreds of years again after the earlier patriarchs. The gap is not quite so large for the New Testament, but it is still significant.
Jesus was crucified in the early 30s CE, but the gospels, the four accounts of Jesus's life, were not written until between 70 CE (the Gospel of Mark) and 100 CE or later (the Gospel of John). Three of them – Mark, Matthew, and Luke – are obviously related: they contain many of the same stories and sayings, sometimes in identical language. Textual scholars theorize that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, as well as a hypothesized "Q" source, now lost, that would have contained sayings of Jesus. No physical evidence of the Q source has ever been found, so we cannot be certain of its existence, but it does explain how Matthew and Luke both include material found nowhere else. Regardless, all the gospels were written in Greek, while Jesus taught in Aramaic (a Semitic language related to Hebrew), so they are already translations of his original words.
The earliest books of the New Testament are not the gospels at all, but the epistles of Paul, which were written around the 50s CE – already two decades after Jesus's life. Because Paul's letters come after the gospels in the New Testament, it is easy to imagine that Paul is responding to them, but of course he is not, as they had not yet been written. Paul never met Jesus, and very little about the life of Jesus is mentioned in Paul's epistles. Although two of the gospels are attributed to Jesus's disciples, the dating makes this unlikely; in all likelihood, no book of the New Testament was written by someone who personally knew Jesus.
There are many difficulties in reconstructing the original text of the Bible. But the situation is not hopeless. Immense strides have been made in the past four centuries, since the King James Version – still one of the most popular editions of the Bible in English – was translated from a rather inaccurate Greek text. Modern Bible translations are the work of teams of linguistics experts using critical editions of the source texts – the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia for the Hebrew scriptures and the Nestle–Aland edition of the Greek New Testament are standard – that are assembled on the evidence of thousands of manuscripts, with a much better understanding of ancient languages than in past times.
Still, the fact remains that we have no originals of any biblical text, Old Testament or New – not even a single papyrus fragment in the hand of a biblical author. What we have are copies of copies of copies – to what degree no one knows – and it is from these imperfect replicas that the Bible text that we have today is reconstructed and translated.
We read the gospels and imagine that we are reading the words of Jesus. But what we are actually reading is an English translation of a scholarly synthesis of numerous conflicting Greek manuscripts, copied out by scribes centuries removed from the original texts, themselves written by men who never met Jesus, in a language that Jesus did not speak – and between us and him, a vast gulf.