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Material Concerns: Canon, Textual Criticism, and Translation Issues that Matter—
for Biblical Interpretation
By Brian R. Doak, PhD, for Portland Seminary (SBIS 530 Biblical Hermeneutics)
Created 26 August 2025 (last updated 9 September 2025)
The most foundational material issue for biblical interpretation concerns the actual words we are reading on the physical page (or screen). Are we all reading the same words? What about the same books? The same Bible? If one affirms the Bible with any number of “big theological terms”—inspired, holy, inerrant, perfect, divine, authoritative—to which words, translations, manuscripts, and books do these terms apply and not apply? This is not a trivial question, and anyone devoted to serious theological teaching, preaching, and reflection needs to have a basic sense of what is at stake. Most of us simply read the Bible and take the form we are familiar with as “authoritative enough”—and the spiritual community in which we read may provide us with additional support to ground our reading experience.
Image: Papyrus 66; c. 150–250 AD; Gospel of John (found at Jabal Abu Mana, Egypt) (source)
Catholics, for example, have sometimes attached what we might call a strong practical authority to certain manuscript traditions. The Septuagint (early Greek) text, read and quoted by New Testament authors, served as “the Bible” for most of the Church Fathers who have been claimed by both Catholic and Orthodox traditions in the first few centuries AD. Catholics adopted the Vulgate (an official Latin translation) soon after its completion around 405 AD, and used this particular text throughout the medieval period, reaffirming it forcefully at the Council of Trent (1545–1563 AD) and sticking with it as an official Bible of the Church until well into the twentieth century. Indeed, only with proclamations such as Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) and Dei Verbum (1965) was there a formal proposal that scholars translate from original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) rather than merely relying on the Vulgate. Orthodox practice, on the other hand, has been much more open with regard to “official texts” and translation of the Bible, though the Greek Septuagint translations have often taken pride of place.
Some Protestant groups, however, have made a point to affirm the Bible’s “special” status particularly with reference to the original document written by the original author(s), sometimes called the “autograph.” Consider, for example, statements by influential Christian “Fundamentalists” (= a technical term, historically) throughout the early twentieth century on this question—here I draw the following two representative quotes from William W. Combs, “Errors in the King James Version?” Detroit Baptist Theological Journal 4 (Fall 1999): 151–64 (online):
James M. Gray, writing in original Fundamentals publication: “The record for whose inspiration we contend is the original record—the autographs or parchments of Moses, David, Daniel, Matthew, Paul or Peter, as the case may be, and not any particular translation or translations of them whatever. There is no translation absolutely without error, nor could there be, considering the infirmities of human copyists, unless God were pleased to perform a perpetual miracle to secure it.”
R. A. Torrey, writing specifically about translations in 1918: “I have said that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as originally given were absolutely inerrant, and the question of course arises to what extent is the Authorized Version, or the Revised Version, the inerrant Word of God. The answer is simple; they are the inerrant Word of God just to that extent that they are an accurate rendering of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as originally given, and to all practical intents and purposes they are a thoroughly accurate rendering of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as originally given.”
And note also the extensive faith statement of an institution in the Fundamentalist tradition, Moody Bible Institute, particularly with regard to which form of the Bible is “inerrant” (purple font mine):
“Moody Bible Institute believes strongly in the factual, verbal, historical inerrancy of the Bible. That is, the Bible, in its original documents, is free from error in what it says about geography, history and science as well as in what it says about God.”
(All purple quoted text above is my emphasis—and throughout this document I use purple font to emphasize things in primary sources.)
One simple and initial conclusion already seems fair to suggest: If you belong to a community of worship rich in history and tradition, with a strong appeal to tradition, such as Catholic and Orthodox Churches, you may find yourself less concerned with quibbling about the exact status of the original text of Scripture. You have the regula fidei, the “Rule of Faith,” to guide you—that is to say, your reading of the Bible is guided by Church theology. However, if you belong to a Protestant tradition in the sola scriptura (“Bible alone”) lane, with a strong denial that official church doctrines and traditions play a major or even any role at all for what Christians should believe, then your appeal to original Biblical authors, original context, and original manuscripts becomes massively important. Of course, many Christians find themselves poised between what they may see as “extreme” views or practices, i.e., on the one hand, that an iron Church Tradition guides all reading, and on the other hand that there are no rules at all other than one’s own individual sense of what the Bible says.
What I offer here in this document are three categories of consideration: Canon (which authoritative books are in the Bible?), Textual Criticism (which manuscripts and words are the best texts for those books?), and Translation (which language are we reading?). Outside of the canon chart below (which is an objective historical fact), the examples for textual criticism and translation I give below are by no means comprehensive—they are simply ones I find personally fascinating, and as this is a “living document” of sorts, I reserve the right to add examples here as I find them.
The Canon: A potentially surprising fact: the first major Christian voice to clearly affirm the full “canon” we find in Bibles today, i.e., an authoritative list of the books of the Bible, was Athanasius, in his famous “Festal Letter,” in the year 367 AD. Christians went on for over 300 years after Jesus’s death without any leader (that we know of) publicly articulating this! Others, such as Eusebius in his History of the Church (finished around 326 AD), recorded debate about the canon as it existed in his day. Scholars of early Judaism have increasingly questioned whether it is historically accurate to speak of anything like a clear “canon” for the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament during the time of Jesus (see, for example, Eva Mroczek’s The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, Oxford, 2016). This is not to say we cannot begin to define an emerging set of books and scrolls and traditions that Jews considered clearly authoritative already in the second century BC, e.g., among the writings discovered at Qumran (“Dead Sea Scrolls”) and referenced in the prologue to the second century BC book Ben Sirah / Sirach, which mentions a trifold division of “the Law, the Prophets, and the rest of the books” (which seems suggestive of the Jewish division of the Torah, Nevi’im, and Kethuvim?). But we have to admit uncertainty about those exact boundaries for hundreds of years. Simply put, in the time of the Old Testament and in the early centuries of Christianity, even, there was no clear, singular “Bible.” You could not go to a store and buy a Bible. People did not own Bibles.
And of course even within (or around) Christianity, there were challenges to the canon. Marcion of Sinope and his movement posed the most serious problem, beginning with Marcion himself (c. 85–160 AD) but continuing on for centuries after his death. Marcion was actually the earliest “Christian” to clearly propose a canon, though it was one Christians would not recognize today: He thought Bible should contain of a select group of Paul’s letters, an edited version of the Gospel of Luke (“The Gospel of Marcion”), and . . . that’s it! No Old Testament, either.
We do have one other early “canon list” worth mentioning, the so-called “Muratorian fragment.” This Latin text from the 700s AD was rediscovered around 1740 AD, and seems to be a translation of an earlier (now lost) Greek text that most assume dates to around c. 180 AD (i.e., around the time Irenaeus wrote his Against Heresies). This Muratorian document contains a canon list of the New Testament, but it is not identical to the list of books Christians came to consider authoritative centuries later. You can see a comparison list of books at the entry “Muratorian fragment” on Wikipedia, and notice that Hebrew, James, and 1–2 Peter were not included for this document, while the document does include a second-century AD text called “The Apocalypse of Peter” that later Christians did not officially adopt.
Once the canon was more or less set for Christians during the first few centuries AD, and Marcion’s ideas were officially rejected, all major Christian groups have affirmed the same set of 27 New Testament books as canonical. However, in the Old Testament and in a series of “apocryphal,” “deuterocanonical,” or “intertestamental” books, we see divergencies. In the chart below, we can see that Protestants and Jews share the same Old Testament / Hebrew Bible, but with a different order in some places—an order which may, even subtly, affect interpretation (e.g., ending the Old Testament with Malachi’s prediction of the coming Elijah [= John the Baptist] bridges nicely into the New Testament for Christians, whereas ending with Chronicles is a more Temple-centric move, for non-Christian Jewish readers).
However, Protestants and Catholics/Orthodox differ on a set of books—which in some Bibles had been set apart in a different section, and in others they may be integrated into the Bible in various ways—and then Orthodox groups add even more books beyond the Catholic canon (which may differ according to the branch of Orthodoxy). Most popularly defined, these “Apocrypha” or “Deuterocanonical” books are a “(variable) group of books placed separately in some post-Reformation Bibles between the two Testaments. Those are works found in the 3rd-century BCE Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) but not accepted in the Hebrew canon, which was established later” (source).
Image: Canon chart comparing Jews, Protestants, Catholic, and Orthodox
One may understandably ask what major impact these canonical differences, particularly between Protestants and Catholics/Orthodox, make for interpretation generally, or for major salvific issues. If you want to hear me talk through this issue a little, I have a YouTube video reviewing the question, here. Below is a list of texts in the Apocrypha—in Catholic/Orthodox Bibles but not Protestant Bibles—that one might want to examine on this front (purple font added to highlight issues, with commentary in brackets beneath the passages):
2 Maccabees 12:41–45 (NRSV) So they all blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous judge, who reveals the things that are hidden; and they turned to supplication, praying that the sin that had been committed might be wholly blotted out. The noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened as the result of the sin of those who had fallen. He also took up a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for
the dead, so that they might be delivered from their sin.
[[The issue here: a collection of money to aid the dead in their resurrection—which could
support a Catholic notion like Purgatory.]]
Tobit 4:8–11 (NRSV) “Act according to what you have, my son. If you have much, give alms from it; if you have little, give alms in accordance with what you have. Do not be afraid, my son, to give alms. You will be laying up a good treasure for yourself against a day of need. For almsgiving delivers from death and keeps you from going into the darkness. Indeed, almsgiving, for all who practice it, is an excellent offering in the presence of the Most High.”
[[The emphasis on almsgiving, with a link to keeping one from “going into darkness,”
would support a view of salvation based on “works,” charitable acts, etc., as opposed to a classic Protestant notion of sola fide, “faith alone.”]]
Tobit 12:12–15 (NRSV) “So now when you and Sarah prayed, it was I [the angel Raphael] who brought the record of your prayers before the glory of the Lord, and likewise whenever you would bury the dead. And that time when you did not hesitate to get up and leave your dinner to go and lay out that corpse, I was sent to you to test you. And at the same time God sent me to heal you and Sarah your daughter-in-law. I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord.”
[[The text here promotes a detailed angelology, where angels—and perhaps by
extension, saints who have died—can give intercession for the living before God; this is
a feature of Catholic spirituality, but not for Protestants.]]
Esther 4:13–17, 5:1 (NRSV) Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” Then Esther said in reply to Mordecai, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him. On the third day Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the king’s palace, opposite the king’s hall. The king was sitting on his royal throne inside the palace opposite the entrance to the palace.
Esther 4:12–17, 5:1 (Septuagint, Old Greek) So Hachrathaios reported to Mardochaíos everything Esther had said. Mardochaíos said to Hachrathaios, “Go, and say to her, “Esther, do not say to yourself that you alone of all the Judeans in the empire will be safe. Because even if you keep silent at this time, from elsewhere help and protection will come to the Judeans, but you and your father’s household will perish. And who knows if for this time you were made queen?” Then Esther sent the messenger who had come to her back to Mardochaíos, saying, “Go, gather the Judeans that are in Susa, and fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night and day. I and my attendants will also abstain from food. And then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, even if it be that I perish.” And Mardochaíos went and did what Esther had commanded him. Then he petitioned the Lord, remembering all the works of the Lord. And he said, “Lord, Lord, king of all powers . . .” [long prayer follows before ch. 5 begins]
Esther 4:12–17, 5:1 (Greek “Alpha-text”) So Mardochaíos sent to her and said to her, “If you ignore your nation and do not help them, then surely God will be to them a helper and deliverance, but you and your father’s household will perish. And who knows if for this time you were made queen?” Then the queen sent saying, “Proclaim a religious service, and petition God earnestly, and I and my girls will do likewise. And I will go to the king uninvited, even if it be necessary that I die.” And Mardochaíos did so. Then he petitioned the Lord, remembering his works. And he said, “Master Almighty, under whose authority are all things and there is no one who can resist you when it is your will to save the house of Israel . . .” [long prayer follows before ch. 5 begins]
[[Some Christian Bibles actually have the book of Esther twice, or in two places—one
version, found in both Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox Bibles, is a translation of the Hebrew Masoretic text of the book—in which the author famously and mysteriously never mentions God explicitly (a unique situation among all books of the Bible). The NRSV translation of the famous excerpt above reflects this Hebrew text. However, the early Greek version of Esther—represented in the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon for Catholics and Orthodox Christians, included as a second book of Esther (or as additional chapters/sections)—does explicitly mention God, and thus offers a transformed theological vision for the narrative. But if only it were that simple: there were in fact two major Greek editions of Esther from antiquity, and it is not clear which of those was older or more “original.” See a brief discussion here (introduction to the Greek translations, presented side by side). Moreover, at least one major scholar, Jon Levenson (one of my teachers!), has argued, against the mainstream assumption that the Hebrew text is older, in his commentary on Esther than in fact both Greek versions are older than the Hebrew version—meaning that the Hebrew book would have actually removed the references to God in order to create a more challenging theology of divine absence. See some of the “Introduction” to his commentary here, in at least partial view on GoogleBooks. At any rate, the theological challenge of Esther’s “absent God” is only a challenge in the Protestant canon and in that singular (Hebrew) form of the book. This issue is also a text-criticism problem (on which see more below), prompting us to ask: Which version of the book is the “original” to which one might attach a label like “inspired,” or “God’s word”?]]
Here are two examples of a different type, both from a book all Christians accept, Jude. Minimally, these references suggest early Christian authors saw Jewish sources not in what became “the Old Testament” as trustworthy enough on some issues to cite. Maximally, such quotes could suggest that Jude saw his source here as equally authoritative to other books we now call “the Old Testament”; however, on this maximal view, we should note that there are not many other (if any other) examples like this. Granted, it’s possible that biblical authors (particularly in the Old Testament) quote extensively from sources that we no longer have and we do not recognize the quotes as quotes.
Jude v. 9 (NRSV) But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
[[This story about the body of Moses, not recorded in the Torah, was part of an
apparently-authoritative book called “The Assumption of Moses,” which only survived through a 6th-cen. AD Latin translation. Jude seems to be quoting from that source.]]
Jude vv. 14–15 (NRSV) It was also about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “See, the Lord is coming with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict everyone of all the deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
[[Here Jude quotes from a book called 1 Enoch, a book that was very popular in early
Judaism but which was not canonical in a clear way in early Judaism nor for almost all later Christian groups.]]
TEXTUAL CRITICISM: We can simply define “textual criticism” as the attempt to discover what the “original author” wrote, as opposed to mistakes that have crept into the centuries-long process of hand-copying texts (until the printing press). This process must occur for any important ancient book with many manuscripts, by the way, and not just the Bible. If one counts every single textual divergence in the biblical manuscript tradition, both Old and New Testaments, we have literally millions of variant readings! No two ancient hand-written biblical manuscripts, even in the same language, contain the exact same text in every detail and spelling. So the challenge here is massive; fortunately, at least for major questions of theology and practice, a large majority of the variants are not particularly interesting.
Let us clarify an important and perhaps unsettling fact about taking these ancient manuscripts and creating a clear “Bible”: The text we read in translation today is generally not translated from any one, single manuscript of “the Bible.” Rather, translators tend to work with the largest, most coherent collections we have in the original language—say, the Leningrad Codex for the Old Testament, and the Codex Vaticanus for the New Testament—but then supplement those manuscripts with corrections, additions, and other readings from a variety of other manuscript traditions. On strict historical terms, when textual critics and translators work together to compile a modern Bible, they are creating a new, synthetic document that never existed in any such format, with those exact words, from the period of the Old Testament events, the New Testament events, or even the early Church. What they are creating is . . . a hybrid thing. A holy thing! But something that you cannot go back in time and locate, as a bound document with exactly every book, chapter, phrase, and word, anywhere at all in history outside of the creation of that exact (modern) Bible.
Image: Fragments of the Book of Samuel scrolls from Qumran (source)
Before diving into a few examples, let us list—in simplified fashion—the ancient manuscripts that have been the most important for giving us the coherent, bound Bibles we have today:
For the Old Testament: Most Old Testaments translations in Bibles today have had, as their starting point in Hebrew, something we call the “Masoretic Text.” In Hebrew, the word masorah means “tradition,” and this is who the “Masortetes” were—a traditional scribal group, through generations, who copied and maintained the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible from around the fifth through tenth centuries AD. (For a technical ten-part article series online describing the Masoretic tradition, see here, by the eminent textual critic Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University.) The best example of their work is a document called the “Leningrad Codex,” which is the earliest, most complete version of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament that we have—and it dates quite specifically to the year 1009 AD (see some images and further discussion here). We did have another scroll like this, from the 900s AD, called the “Aleppo Codex,” and this used to be our earliest full example of a Masoretic text—until around half of it was destroyed in 1947 (see here).
However, we cannot simply take the Masoretic tradition, as embodied in the Leningrad Codex, and say, “Great, this is it, this is the Hebrew Bible”—because we now know that texts earlier than the Masoretic versions existed (even if mostly now incomplete and damaged), and those earlier texts had divergent readings all over the place. We know this for a fact from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and from other lines of evidence. So the Masoretic Text is very likely not a perfect representation of our "original authors.” (One of my teachers, the textual critic Richard Saley, referred to people who naively take the Masoretic text as an automatic base to be “Masoretic Fundamentalists.”) And just what are these earlier texts, you ask? Here are the two most important categories:
The Dead Sea Scrolls—a term for texts found in the Dead Sea region around Qumran, in the 1940s (and ongoing), the most interesting of which for Biblical scholars are actual copies of most books we came to call the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible (see here for a list of the types of texts found at Qumran, and the table of contents in this book, on GoogleBooks, for a list of all the texts found there, by name). The community who lived at Qumran and collected these scrolls probably constructed their settlement in the mid-second century BC, and most scholars identify them as an apocalyptic Jewish sect called the “Essenes.” These Essenes may have brought some existing texts to the area, including, for example, the text many consider to be the oldest recovered from the site, 4QSam(b), with parts of 1 Samuel in Hebrew and possibly dating to around c. 250 BC. Other biblical texts were copied by scribes on site, who also wrote their own sectarian documents and interpretive texts of various kinds that are of enormous value for understanding the Jewish world of the time. These texts are in various states of preservation—some are tiny shreds with only a word or two on them, while others are near complete forms of entire books. Visit the website of the Israel Museum to see what some of these look like.
What is the upshot here for textual criticism? It’s hard to summarize in a few words. Let’s try this: In some cases, the version we found at Qumran, such as the famous “Great Isaiah Scroll” (of the prophet Isaiah), was amazingly similar to the Masoretic tradition in the Leningrad Codex we have from 1,000 years later. Bible believers breathed a sigh of relief at this discovery, and often point to this Isaiah scroll as an example of faithful biblical transmission. However, in other cases, we see a bewildering variety of text types, such as for the prophet Jeremiah, which was apparently preserved at Qumran in two versions that differ by as much as 15% (nearly 3,000 words) in content from one another (see example below for Jeremiah).
The Septuagint—an early Greek translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew), which was hypothetically a single, legendary document produced somewhat miraculously around the year 250 BC (according to the pseudepigraphic “Letter of Aristeas”). In historical reality, what we call the “Septuagint” was probably a series of early Greek translations that were produced in the third, second, and first centuries BE. When quoting the Old Testament (as they do hundreds of times), the authors of the New Testament quote from various Greek manuscripts of this type, and not from a single, authoritative “Greek Old Testament.” Why is the Septuagint considered so important as a witness to the “original” Old Testament, if it is not even in Hebrew? Because we presume that the people who created the various Septuagint translations in these early centuries were translating from early, Hebrew versions of the Old Testament—and even if we no longer have these early Hebrew versions, we can discover, detective-style, something of the original Hebrew style and wording from the Greek translation . . . assuming, that is, that these Greek translators were practicing something like a more “literal” translation style, which they were not always doing! It is a mixed situation. Of the approximately 2,000 different manuscripts we have of Septuagint-style traditions, several stand out for their importance:
Rahlfs 801, 819, 957, etc. Fragments of Torah and the Minor Prophets
translations from around the second–first centuries BC, named “Rahlfs [###],” after Alfred Rahlfs, a German biblical scholar and champion of compiling Septuagint fragments together in the early twentieth century. Though very fragmentary and not full “books” or scrolls, these remains do at least confirm that Greek translations clearly existed in the first few centuries BC. When New Testament authors quote the Old Testament in Greek, of course, we know they are quoting from some Old Testament texts they considered authoritative, and presumably those had not just been created two weeks before they did their writing. So there is a long tradition of the Old Testament in Greek translation, but we don’t know exactly when or where it started (except through legendary accounts).
Hexapla: Not strictly a “Septuagint” text in its entirety, this was the project
of an early Christian scholar named Origen, who lived from around
185–253 AD. We only have some small parts of this Hexampla today, but
we know it did exist. Origen was so intense about studying the Bible and getting the text established that he made his own multi-version Bible in six columns, which we could call the first intense text-critical project by a Christian scholar! He was amazing.
Here is what he put in these six columns: (1) the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible he had at that time (unclear what version); (2) that same Hebrew text “transliterated” into Greek, i.e., the Hebrew text rendered out in Greek characters, with vowels; (3) a Greek translation of the Old Testament by Aquila of Sinope made around 130 AD; (4) another Greek translation of the Old Testament by Symmachus the Ebionite in the late second century AD; (5) a version of the “Septuagint,” mostly from a Greek translation by Theodotion from about 150 AD (see col. 6 below), with Origen’s own markings to indicate where he thought this Septuagint translation was different from his col. 1 Hebrew text; (6) a Greek translation of the Old Testament by Theodotion around 150 AD. If we had the entire Hexapla today, we would learn a lot about the text of the Old Testament from this early period. Origen’s work was so intense, though, that almost no one could really understand it properly and when people tried to hand-copy it, they mostly failed, gave up, or conflated and confused the various columns together, thus tragically erasing textual witnesses that Origen had tried to preserve.
Codex Vaticanus: Probably the oldest (almost-)full Bible, all in Greek,
from the 300s AD. Vaticanus contains most of the Old and New
Testament, but some parts are missing. This text was re-discovered and
brought to light by the Dutch scholar Erasmus in the 1500s. When New Testament scholars today buy an “original” version, in Greek, of the New Testament, like this one, that version is probably based largely (though not completely) on the Codex Vaticanus. Today it is in the Vatican Library.
Codex Sinaiticus: Dated to around the same time as Vaticanus, perhaps
a little later, to the 300s AD. Like Vaticanus, this text was “rediscovered” and brought to light long after its composition—in this case in the 1840s, when the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf found the text at the Saint Catherine’s Monastery and claims to have rescued it from being burned (the Monks who lived there disputed this). Check out its official website, here.
Codex Alexandrinus: Comparable to Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in terms
of its beauty and complete nature, and dates perhaps a century later, to the 400s AD. The text originally came from Egypt (Alexandria), after which it was acquired by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and then in the 1600s gifted to the English monarch Charles I (and today it resides in the British Library).
For the New Testament: Most New Testament translations we read in English Bibles today are largely based on the earliest (mostly-)full Christian Bibles described above: Codex Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. We also have earlier fragments and papyri—and for the New Testament, we have many more pieces of textual evidence from the early periods than we have for the Old Testament. Granted, the New Testament is substantially shorter; but the number of manuscripts makes New Testament textual criticism a complex project. Here are some of the major textual witnesses that make a difference in the New Testament we read today (see also this good source):
Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. Though cited above, for emphasis
I want to mention again that these relatively full Bibles (all in Greek, including the
Old Testament) are the best and most complete early Bibles that we have, and thus the most major source for the text we now have in Greek editions of the New Testament that Bible translators and scholars use today. They all date to the 300s–400s AD.
Miscellaneous numbered Papyri: These date to the 100s and 200s AD, and
they are the earliest pieces of the New Testament that we have. They are housed in various places today, such as the University of Oxford, and they have uninspiring names such as P75, P46, P90, P104, etc. These are by no means “full books” at all—some of these early papyrus shreds, which were clearly part of full books long ago, are the size of a credit card, or smaller, and contain only a few words (but enough to tell what they are). The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (online), led by the New Testament textual critic Daniel Wallace, is a great place to view these texts and learn more—see the list of manuscripts they have digitized here, starting with the oldest at the top. The mere existence of these fragments is amazing, and shows us that the production of the New Testament was going on pretty early. However, as the (critical, non-Christian) New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman correctly points out, we have to admit that we have very few texts from the earliest period (second century AD), and 94% of the texts we do have are from 800 AD or after. Nevertheless, here are some of the most significant early examples (Wess Huff has really nice visuals and charts of these documents described below):
P66, The Bodmar Papyri, is a good example of an early
copy—maybe from the 200s–300s AD, but date is unclear—of nearly a
full book (well, 65% of a book), in this case, the Gospel of John.
P75, Papyrus Bodmer XIV XV, contains parts of the ending of Luke and the beginning of John, and probably dates to the 200s AD. The fact that parts of two books are represented here shows that these Gospels were collected together already at an early date.
P46, Papyrus Chester Beatty II, is fragmentary, but contains what appears to be a collection of Paul’s letters (and the person who put this together apparently thought Hebrews was a part of that group, though scholars today typically don’t agree). Dates to the 200s AD.
Textus Receptus (“Received Text”): A name given to an edition of the Greek New Testament compiled by Erasmus in 1516, based on what he thought was the best set of three Greek manuscripts available at that time. Several others continued this collation of text after he died, through various editions. Some Christians from the nineteenth century through today have insisted that this collection of Greek manuscripts was uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit and could even be traced back to the Apostles themselves. A major reason for the influence of Textus Receptus comes from the fact that the King James Bible of 1611 used it as its base for translating the New Testament, and this collection was also influential during the previous century for Martin Luther and also William Tyndale for their translation efforts. When other, better manuscripts came to light and were made widely available in the 1800s–1900s, however, such as those described above, Textus Receptus fell out of use. I mention it here not because it plays a major role for scholars today—though as a project of the High Renaissance period it is a significant historical artifact in its own right—but rather because it was influential for generations of scholars and may even still linger in the minds of some people when this topic of textual criticism and the New Testament comes up.
In summary of all of these textual traditions: Could a person just take the Leningrad Codex for the Old Testament in Hebrew, and then the New Testament in Greek as represented in the Codex Vaticanus, put them together, and say, Here it is, here is the Bible, in its original languages, full and perfect as the original authors intended it! No, not really. But you could do worse, and when scholars talk about textual criticism and millions of variants, the truth is that 99%+ of these variants seem to be not of earth-shattering importance for most believers. Probably, on a theological level for thoughtful people, the sense one does get, though, is that all of these text traditions and the instability and history and complexity does cast some amount of uneasiness upon what would seem to be a simple question, namely: What did the original authors of the Bible actually write? And that uneasiness is, in my view, totally appropriate. It’s worth exploring. Archaeology and complex academic work continues! And new discoveries could revolutionize our understanding—though really, since the initial Dead Sea Scrolls discovery in 1947, nothing really major has appeared.
Image: Erasmus, getting excited about the Textus Receptus
(portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1555; British Museum) (source)
Here are some examples of where text critical concerns could make a difference for the interpreter—understanding that there are many more examples we could add:
1 Samuel 10:27–11:1 (NRSV) But some worthless fellows said, “How can this man save us?” They despised him and brought him no present. But he held his peace. Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan whose right eye Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were seven thousand men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh-gilead. About a month later, Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh-gilead; and all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, “Make a treaty with us, and we will serve you.”
[[Purple text above does not appear in the oldest Hebrew or Greek texts that we have—however, it was present in 4QSam(a), an ancient Dead Sea Scroll, as well as a passage in the 1st-cen AD Jewish author Josephus, and now has been widely deemed “original” to the book of 1 Samuel. As such it appears integrated into the official text of some contemporary translations, but not all. The interesting problem raised here regards what other “lost pieces” of the text we simply do not know about! We do have enough ancient textual witnesses that we should be reasonably certain about most of the text, but something like this can provide just enough space to wonder.]]
Jeremiah 10:3–11 (NRSV) For the customs of the peoples are false: a tree from the forest is cut down, and worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan; people deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, nor is it in them to do good. There is none like you, O LORD; you are great, and your name is great in might. Who would not fear you, O King of the nations? For that is your due; among all the wise ones of the nations and in all their kingdoms there is no one like you. They are both stupid and foolish; the instruction given by idols is no better than wood! Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz. They are the work of the artisan and of the hands of the goldsmith; their clothing is blue and purple; they are all the product of skilled workers. But the LORD is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation. Thus shall you say to them: The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.
[[The traditional (“Masoretic”) text of Jeremiah is around 15% // 2,700 words longer than the ancient Greek translation of the same book. One might assert that the Greek text shortened what was an originally longer Hebrew text, but in fact we can now be reasonably certain that there were two distinct versions of Jeremiah that circulated in early Judaism—and the Dead Sea Scrolls do not solve the problem, as that community seems to have copied/kept both versions! The text above is one example where we can see the longer text, as it appears in modern translations—all of which follow the longer (Masoretic) tradition for Jeremiah—but I have placed the “longer text” parts of the Hebrew text in purple, so that one can see how the two versions interact with one another. The passage reads normally with or without the purple text in the “expansion.” This is a great example of how confusing it can be to talk about “original manuscripts” or “autograph” versions of the Bible—what if a particular biblical book grew in stages, and was edited by many “authors” over time, as most scholars now assume to have been the case with almost every biblical book? At which stage do we declare the book “finished” and worthy of “inerrant” or “inspired” status? The borderline between what we are defining here as “textual criticism” and a historically-oriented “source criticism,” tracking additions and changes to the text through time by different sources, could become blurry.]]
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (in the Masoretic/traditional Hebrew text, as reflected in the NIV translation) When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel; the LORD’S own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.
[[This is a complicated text, and I have a YouTube video here in which I explore the
problem with these verses in more detail. In short: the traditional Hebrew/Masoretic text
here, which the NIV follows for these two verses, reads as quoted above. However, we have other textual traditions—also ancient, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and from the Septuagint/Greek traditions—that read differently here in key places, and the differences seem to reflect what was probably a more original, older text. How do we know for sure? We don’t, but on the principle of lectio difficilior, “the more difficult reading” (= is probably more authentic), we might surmise that someone would take a text they found problematic or troubling and change it to a text they felt would be more acceptable. What is this more “difficult” text, reflected in the Dead Sea Scroll and some Greek traditions? the NRSV adjusts the Masoretic Text (which it otherwise often follows) and translates according to what those translators perceived to be older, more original text:
When the Most High (Hebrew elyon) apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of divine beings (Hebrew bene ‘elohim); the LORD’s (Hebrew yahweh) own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.
To put it plainly: the older/original text here sounds like there was some leading deity
figure named Elyon, dividing up people groups and giving them to various divine beings
(= various gods) for care and ownership. Elyon gave Yahweh, Israel’s deity, Israel, as
one of these arrangements. If this reading is in fact older, then one can see why scribes
altered the text here!]]
John 7:53–8:11 (NRSV) Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
[[This beautiful story is, unfortunately, not represented in any of the oldest and best
manuscripts of the book of John from the ancient world, such as Papyri 66 and 75,
the Sinaticus and Vaticanus codices, and so on, and some traditions do not even
mention it at all in their preaching or writing until the 12th century AD. Some manuscripts include this story but have it somewhere else in John, or even in another Gospel altogether, such as Luke. As a result, many modern Bibles put the story in brackets, or qualify it with a footnote (though few seem to remove it entirely), casting doubt on whether the story was an authentic one or one that the original author of John wished to tell. Now, it may be the case that the story is an authentic vignette from the life of Jesus that someone added later in the tradition (as argued here in this blog post by someone who seems to know the basics of the scholarly situation). But most scholars seem to have judged the story as a pious later addition to the text.]]
Luke 22:43–44 (NRSV) Then an angel from heaven appeared to him [Jesus] and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.
[[Similar to the woman caught in adultery story above—most early New Testament
manuscripts do not have this sweating blood story, and most Bibles now put it in brackets or mark it off in brackets or italics and have a note doubting its authenticity.]]
Codex Bezae and other “Western Text” examples. Codex Bezae is a New Testament manuscript with Greek on one side and Latin on the other. A scribe copied this in the 400s AD, and this document is part of what some call a “family” of Greek texts of the “Western” type or “Western Recension." See this description and photos in the Cambridge Digital Library. Codex Bezae does not contain the entire New Testament, but rather the four Gospels and Acts (and the manuscript as we now have it is damaged). The fact that it is so old—a generation or two later than Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus—makes it a valuable early witness, but texts in this “Western” family, including Bezae, are known for being rather free paraphrases at points, and contain what many see as “expansions” upon the text (i.e., non-original additions by the scribe). Therefore these “Western” texts are usually not preferred by scholars for their ability to get us closer to what original authors wrote, but they were influential forms of the New Testament throughout the medieval period and beyond. There are so many differences between Bezae and other textual traditions that it would be impractical to list too many of them here—but I will quote the following from Professor David Parker, University of Birmingham, as he describes several notable features of Bezae:
It is the oldest manuscript to contain the story of the adulterous woman (John
7.53-8.11).
The genealogy of Jesus in Luke's Gospel is arranged in reverse order so as to
conform more closely with that in Matthew.
There is a story about Jesus found in no other manuscript (the story of the man
working on the Sabbath, placed after Luke 6.4). [see here]
It is the oldest manuscript to contain the longer ending of Mark (16.9-20).
In Acts, when the angel delivers Peter from prison the detail is added that they go
into the street down seven steps (Acts 12.10).
Additionally, many have noted that Codex Bezae seems to have been created by a scribe who had some, shall we say, problems with women—evidenced by various "corruptions" to the text this scribe introduced. Many of these sorts of things can also be found in other texts that are part of this “Western” type/family. Below I offer a chart of these anti-woman “adjustments,” at points replicating and at other points re-wording a graphic on the blog of a thoughtful independent researcher, which she cites from another scholar (Joseph A. P. Wilson)—note that Codex Bezae is not the only text with these tendencies:
Text
Summary of the
Western Text-Type Redaction/Corruption
Manuscript Witness(es)
Source
Acts 1:14
The women are shifted from being an independent group of prayer warriors to wives of the apostles
Codex Bezae;
Unical 05
Acts 16:13–15
Lydia and the other women are removed from their context of being Jewish “God-fearers,” in a Synagogue context, and recharacterized as pagans
Codex Bezae;
Unical 05
Acts 17:4, 17:12, 17:34
Women here are reduced to being wives of the apostles (as opposed to independent actors); men are elevated; a woman named Damaris is completely deleted
Codex Bezae;
Unical 05
Acts 18 (throughout)
The notably unusual order of names for a husband and wife, with the wife first, “Priscilla and Aquilla,” are reversed to “Aquilla and Priscilla” in most cases, and Aquilla’s name alone is added in 18:3
Codex Bezae;
Unical 05; Codex Gigas
Romans 16:3–5
Prisca (Priscilla) and Aquilla, and presumably Prisca in particular as she is mentioned first, are said to have “risked their necks” for Paul, but the Western text moves up the name of a male in v. 5 before the risking of the necks reference, implicitly minimizing Prisca (and Aquilla)
Codex Claromontanus; Codex Augiensis; Codex Boernerianus
Romans 16:7
Paul’s praise of two individuals, Andronicus (male) and Junia (female) is downplayed by adjusting the grammar to make the phrase “they were in Christ before I was” (for Andronicus and Junia) seem to apply to others
Codex Claromontanus; Codex Augiensis; Codex Boernerianus
1 Corinthians 13:34–40
A possible (even likely?) reading here is that Paul quotes the words of others in v. 34, “Women should be silent in churches,” but then offers his own critical response in v. 36—these texts take Paul’s critical response and displace it after v. 40, thus making the “Women should be silent” quote stand unchallenged
Codex Claromontanus; Codex Augiensis; Codex Boernerianus
Colossians 4:15
Nympha, the female host (pastor?) of a house-church, is changed into a man
Codex Claromontanus; Codex Augiensis; Codex Boernerianus
Image: Chart showing places in the “Western” New Testament texts where someone
went out of their way to downplay or insult women (source)
1 John 5:7–8 (KJV) For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
1 John 5:7–8 (NIV 2011) For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.
[[The NIV 2011 here represents the normal Greek text here—and if there was even a
hint of this “Father, Word (Logos), and Holy Ghost” language in the text, the NIV 2011
would, of all translations, surely be representing that (see John 1:18 in the translation
examples below). What we have here in the KJV is the so-called Comma Johanneum
(“John’s Short Phrase”), explicitly gesturing toward the Trinity, not otherwise attested in
quite this way anywhere in the Bible. Alas, for us Trinitarians, this phrase is not found in
any Greek manuscript of John before the fourteenth century, though it is in some
lower-quality manuscript traditions of the Vulgate. Most importantly, for the KJV, this
phrase does appear in the Textus Receptus, the Greek text used by the KJV translators,
which apparently is also the Greek text used by the BibleHub website (though they list
“variants” below the main interlinear presentation—they should be listing the Textus
Receptus here as a “variant” and not the main text). The checkered history of the phrase
in older sources and its non-inclusion in any of our best textual traditions almost certainly indicates the non-originality of the phrase—especially given the fact that such a phrase would have been most welcome, theologically, if it were clearly authentic.]]
Image: Fragments of the Book of Revelation ch. 13 from P115; Oxford Imaging
Papyri Project, via the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (source)
Revelation 13:16–18 (NRSV) Also, it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be given a brand on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the brand, that is, the name of the beast or the number for its name. This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number for a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.
[[Some ancient manuscripts read “666” (as above) for this mysterious “number of the
beast, but other manuscripts read “616.” (See technical discussion here, esp. p. 129,
where the author lists evidence for the 616 reading; see here for images of P115, the earliest text fragment of Revelation 13:18, which has the 616 reading.) The most common understanding of this dual textual witness for the number actually seems to confirm the identity of the immediate historical reference, the Roman emperor Nero. Jews in this time period readily used and understood a symbolic number-letter system called the gematria; think of it like a simple code where the letter A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, and so on. The Hebraicized Greek name of Nero, neron qaiser (Nero Caeser) = 666 in the gematria (nun = 50 x2, resh = 200 x2, qoph = 100, samek = 60, waw = 6), whereas if we drop the -n in neron, and use the Latinate form, nero qaiser, where nun = 50, then we have 666 - 50 = 616.]]
TRANSLATIONS: Perhaps the most wide-open space for interpretation to be affected by material concerns, before we even begin reading, occurs in the realm of taking something in one language and translating it into another. The saying is true: All translation is an act of interpretation. No way around that. And not even just “translation”—all language and any single language is itself presumably a “translation” of some larger reality, a translation of the world, and not merely a neutral, objective direct link to things “as they really are.” This is normal. This is good. But it is something to think about.
The earliest translations of the Bible probably occurred beginning in the third century BCE, with the Greek Septuagint (discussed above under Textual Criticism) and also with Targums, i.e., translations of passages or whole books of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Aramaic. The Latin Vulgate, produced in the late fourth century AD by Jerome, was hugely influential for some parts of the early Church and through the Medieval period and beyond for Catholics. Languages are often viewed as holy—consider some traditional Islamic theology for the Quran, for example, which claims that the Quran is really only the Quran in its original language, Arabic. Christians have, historically, tended to be very open to translations; New Testament authors themselves largely quoted the Old Testament from the Septuagint, in Greek. But not always: the Catholic Church exercised a tight control on translations and reacted negatively to vernacular translations attempts in some cases.
The story here regarding the Catholic Church, however, is more complicated than the ones we sometimes tell. Catholics have, throughout history, encouraged translations of the Bible into local (vernacular) languages—in fact, this is why various Latin versions, culminating in the Latin Vulgate, were created in the first place. What Catholic authorities have tried to do in various ways is guide and control authorized translations, and, in some periods of intensity (e.g., 1200s–1400s AD), strongly restrict who can do the translating and under what circumstances. For a century before Luther’s Reformation in the 1500s, Catholics had in fact approved of translations into German, Italian, French, and Spanish. So it is not true that Catholics persecuted Luther because he translated the Bible into German (which he did do), but rather we should say that Luther and Catholicism developed a feud that certainly included his translation work (outside of Church sanction) but also went far outside of that. Similarly, for poor William Tyndale who was strangled and burned for his Bible translation efforts in 1536, the punishment was focused more on his general “heretical” activities (as part of the Reformation) and not only based on his translation as such. (The account of Tyndale’s death in Foxe’s 16th-century “Book of Martyrs,” at any rate, does focus on the translation as part of its heroic account.)
In the modern world, Bible translations have proliferated. Estimates vary, but in English alone we have something like 300–500 different translations, and the 2025 Wycliffe Global Scripture Access report claims that some part of the Bible has been translated into over 4,000 different languages. The physical packaging and marketing of the Bible, regardless of translation, is also a major part of the “materiality of interpretation,” as I have been describing it, and the marketing, cover, footnotes and other interpretive apparatus attached to the text (and for some readers, indistinguishable from the text!), and other things like this play a serious role in the interpretive task. The scholarly Timothy Beal has a wonderful book on this topic called The Rise and Fall of the Bible.
As always, so much more could be said with regard to this topic. Below I present a series of translation issues and comparisons that I think will be enough to convince us that translations are indeed interpretations. I could have many more examples here, but I have to cut this off at some point (and I may expand the list later). In many cases I’ll focus on comparing the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) with the New International Version (NIV), because the NIV has been the most popular Bible in the world—with over 400 million copies in print—and is a favorite of more conservative Evangelicals in America (= my own tribe, by culture and upbringing), whereas the NRSV is the preferred volume of scholars (= also my tribe) and more progressive ecumenical types of readers. Many people have heaped abuse upon the various changes and tactics used by the NIV translation, especially those upset about changes male-oriented to gender neutral language, and I have perused many websites where people make long lists of what they see as NIV follies (e.g., this site, from which I draw inspiration for several examples below).
The NIV is particularly confusing, by the way, because there are three major versions of the NIV that have been rolled out over the years: the NIV 1984 (basically the original NIV), the TNIV 2005 (“Today’s New International Version”), which was a commercial disaster because of its inclusion of gender-neutral language in many places and then what we could call a “re-branding” of the TNIV as the “NIV 2011,” which in fact kept a lot of the gender-neutral language (but rolled back some of the most controversial changes). None of the NIV versions changed male-gendered language for God, but in around 3,000 instances the TNIV 2005 update took words like “he,” “brother,” “father,” “son,” and so on and changed them to “they,” “brothers sisters,” “parents,” “children,” and other inclusive language. Around 25% of the total changes related to gender, and the other 75% made a wide variety of other updates, such as replacing the NIV 1984 word “alien” (for Hebrew ger) to “stranger,” especially as the E.T. movie in 1982 made the association between “alien” and an “outer space being” much more popular.
Today, the organization that owns the copyright of the NIV and publishes it, which was the “International Bible Society” but changed its name to “Biblica” in 2009 after the TNIV disaster, has basically tried to erase the TNIV from memory and you cannot easily find it online or in print (BibleGateway, the most popular website featuring Bible translations, simply calls what is actually the “NIV 2011” Bible the “NIV” and gives no other options for previous NIV versions in the drop-down selection list). People have accused the NIV publishers of trying to put “stealth” Bibles out into the world, i.e., trying to sneak various changes into the text without clearly branding those changes and pretending it is just the good old NIV that you used to read all along (see this article for some of the story). The NIV melodrama shows how affected Bible translations can be by the politics and desires of their consumers. This is also true of the NRSV—and every other translation.
Genesis 3:16 (ESV 2001) To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Genesis 3:16 (ESV 2016 revision) To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Genesis 3:16 (ESV 2025 revision) To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
[[For a nine-year interval between the 2016 and 2025 revisions of the English Standard
Version, readers saw a completely different translation of a key phrase as God doles out punishments in Genesis ch. 3. The ESV Bible was created, as some have put it, to be an “anti-NRSV” type translation, which is to say, an explicitly theologically conservative option. That theological view is expressed in the 2016 revision in a notable and curious way. The Hebrew language here is not really in question, as the preposition ‘el means “to, for, toward” etc. In some rare cases, depending on context, one could find a nuance of ‘el to translate as “against,” such as Ezek 38:2 (“set your face ‘el [to, toward → against] Gog…”), but as this blogger points out, in such cases the to/toward translation “is still latent in the word ‘against’.” The other major word in question here is the rare term teshuka, “desire; sexual desire,” which in Songs 7:10 refers to sexual desire, in Gen 4:7 refers to a more general desire (?), and in Gen 3:16 refers to desire that seems sexual, in that the woman’s paradoxical desire for her husband produces children which then produces pain in childbearing (these three passages are the only occurrences of teshuka). In 1975 a conservative journal published a short article in which the author tried to make a case that teshuka in Gen 3:16 has nothing to do with a punishment for sin in this text, as most commonly supposed, but rather argued that a husband’s dominance over his wife is part of the natural, created order. In this view, the woman’s teshuka (“desire”) is a desire contrary to her husband’s rule—i.e., it is a desire for dominance. Apparently, the ESV decided in 2016 to revise the Gen 3:16 translation to follow an interpretation like this—which, in effect, links a woman’s desire for independence to “the fall” and to sin. Thus, the clear implication is that the feminist movement in general is a sort of divine punishment. As Scot McKnight puts it in a blog post, rather than viewing the result of the Garden punishments as “descriptive” (= this is the broken way things are now because of our sinful choices, and we should work to reverse this), the ESV 2016 revision makes the problem “prescriptive” (= men and women are naturally in a war for dominance, certainly in this life and maybe even eternally!). I have a YouTube video talking through the issue here, and Christianity Today published an essay about this in February 2025, here (might be behind a paywall).]]
Genesis 47:31 (NIV 2011) “Swear to me,” he said. Then Joseph swore to him, and Israel worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff.
Genesis 47:31 (NRSV) And he said, “Swear to me,” and he swore to him. Then Israel bowed himself on the head of his bed.
[[This is a low-stakes example, but still shows how the sausage is made. The Hebrew
word mittah means “bed,” but if vocalized differently, as matteh, the same consonants in Hebrew could mean “staff.” The Masoretic Text reads mittah, “bed.” As he is about to die here, Jacob (Israel) could certainly be leaning on his staff, but perhaps the “bed” fits more naturally. However, in Hebrews 11:21, the author there quotes this verse, but likely from a version of the Septuagint that reads tes rabdou autou, “his staff,” and thus Hebrews 11:21 has Jacob leaning on his staff. The NIV translators, wanting to make sure to harmonize the verse in Genesis with its quote in Hebrews, chooses to read the word in Gen 47:31 as “staff” instead of “bed,” against the Masoretic vocalization. The issue here is not particularly jarring, and will likely not get anyone a ticket to heaven or thrown into hell. However, as we will see in other examples, the NIV translators show a proclivity to smooth over what they fear will be problems of contradiction in the text by simply changing their translation, even without the textual warrant that they may have here.]]
Exodus 6:2–3 (NRSV) God also spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The Lord’ I did not make myself known to them.
Exodus 6:2–3 (NIV 2011) God also said to Moses, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself fully known to them.
[[As you can see from the Hebrew text here, there is no qualifying adjective that can be
translated “fully” in this passage. So why does the NIV 2011 read “full known” instead of
just “known”? This reference in Exodus is a well-known problem: God does indeed make himself known, by name, as “the LORD” (= Hebrew yhwh) several times in the Torah before this moment in Exodus ch. 6—e.g., Genesis 4:26, 15:7–8, 18:19. The NIV 2011 tries to fix this problem by inserting the word “fully,” so that we can still acknowledge that God had indeed revealed his name before Exodus 6 but that it was not “full” knowledge. This may indeed be an interpretive solution one could take, and it may be true, but I leave it to the reader to decide whether the translator should take the liberty of presenting this interpretation to readers without any textual justification.]]
Judges 3:22 (JPS) The fat closed over the blade and the hilt went in after the blade—for he did not pull the dagger out of his belly—and the filth came out.
Judges 3:22 (NRSV) the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not draw the sword out of his belly, and the dirt came out.
Judges 3:22 (NIV 1984) Even the handle sank in after the blade, which came out his back. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.
Judges 3:22 (NIV 2011) Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.
[[Something gruesome is going on here, and translators have struggled to clarify exactly
what that is. I note that the NIV 1984 simply omits the offending phrase, hay-yetse
parshedonah in Hebrew, i.e., “and the parshedonah came out.” The NIV 2011 then added a translation of the phrase.]]
2 Sam 21:19 (NRSV) Then there was another battle with the Philistines at Gob, and Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.
2 Sam 21:19 (NIV 1984) In another battle with the Philistines at Gob, Elhanan son of Jair the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite, who had a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s rod.
2 Sam 21:19 (NIV 2011) In another battle with the Philistines at Gob, Elhanan son of Jair the Bethlehemite killed the brother of Goliath the Gittite, who had a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s rod.
[[The NRSV here replicates the Hebrew text in a straightforward way; but there is no
textual warrant whatsoever in 2 Sam 21:19 for the NIV 2011’s phrase “the brother of.”
So why do they have it there? Because this odd little text, tucked away at the end of 2
Samuel, seems to suggest an alternate heroic story for the killing of the famous Goliath, whom David had killed earlier in 1 Samuel, in which some other hero, Elhanan, actually does the killing. Some apologists have tried to argue that “Elhanan” was another name for David, but there is no evidence for this. 1 Chronicles 20:5 actually repeats this story (as it repeats other stories in the life of David and Solomon), but in doing so adds the phrase “Lahmi the brother of” before “Goliath the Gittite”—probably because that author was also aware of the potential contradiction, and sought to solve it (or maybe the Chronicler had extra information on the identity of this alleged brother of Goliath). What the NIV 2011 translators did here is to directly alter the translated text of 2 Samuel to match the Hebrew text of 1 Chronicles, and solve a potentially unnerving problem. Note that the NIV 1984 does not have this insertion; did the NIV committee truly learn something crucial to prompt the insertion between 1984 and 2011? Perhaps the NIV 2011 group could claim that they were doing no more or less than the biblical author of 1 Chronicles did on this point! Although, oddly enough, rather than truly assuming the author 2 Sam 21:19 did have, or meant to have, the exact text as 1 Chronicles 20:5, rather than insert the actual name as Chronicles does, Lahmi the brother of, 2 Sam 21:19 in the NIV 2011 omits the name “Lahmi” (maybe to somehow minimize the insertion?). Whatever the case, in terms of faithfully rendering the text at hand in 2 Samuel, the NIV 2011 translators created a “new reality” in 2 Sam 21:19 by way of trying to help the reader avoid a contradiction.]]
Psalm 1:1–3 (NIV 1984) Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.
Psalm 1:1–3 (TNIV 2005) Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but who delight in the law of the LORD and meditate on his law day and night. They are like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.
Psalm 1:1–3 (NIV 2011) Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.
[[Here we see an interesting gender and number journey for not walking with the wicked
through three iterations of the NIV: from a “man” in 1984, to a plural “those” and “they” in 2005, to an un-gendered and singular “the one” who then gets pluralized to “they” in 2011. Some have pointed out that this is an egregious example of where removing the gender and pluralizing to “they” actually ruins the sense of the original text—one could argue that part of the poetic and emotional power of Psalm 1’s Hebrew focus on “the man” (Hebrew singular, ha-’ish) is precisely the plural identity of the “sinners” and “mockers” in whose counsel he does walk; there are many who sin, many who mock, but sometimes we have to stand alone, planted by that stream, etc. Making “the man” into “those” and “they” ruins that sense of the one versus the many.]]
Image: Unicorns run wild in the original 1611 King James Bible: Psalm 29:6,
“He maketh them also to skip like a calf: Lebanon, and Sirion like a young Unicorne”
(Hebrew ben-re’emim, “young ox”; Septuagint monokereton, “unicorn”) (source)
Isa 19:16 (NRSV) On that day the Egyptians will be like women and tremble with fear before the hand that the Lord of hosts raises against them.
Isa 19:16 (NIV 2011) In that day the Egyptians will become weaklings. They will shudder with fear at the uplifted hand that the Lord Almighty raises against them.
[[All Hebrew manuscripts here really do read as the NRSV has it, “like women” (Hebrew
nashim). In order to avoid this painful gendered image, the NIV 2011 gives a
gender-neutral interpretation for readers.]]
Job 13:15 (NRSV) See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face.
Job 13:15 (NIV 2011) Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.
[[Does Job have hope or not? There is a bit of a trick on the part of the underlying
Hebrew text here, involving an issue the Masoretes called ketiv (= what is
written) and qere (= what is read). The ketiv reads lo, “in him” (Hebrew letters
lamed + waw), but the Masoretes marked in their text the fact that they thought this
word, lo, was in fact a mistake, and the text was supposed to read with a different vowel,
lo’ (Hebrew letters lamed + aleph), which means “not” in Hebrew. The two words are
homonyms in Hebrew—lo and lo’ sound the same when you say them, and this is likely
where the textual error had crept in. Almost all Joban scholars would interpret this
problem, especially in the context of Job’s bitterness, along with the Masoretic ketiv-qere
judgment, and judge that Job is most likely saying, “I have no (lo’) hope.” But probably
because of the popular devotional use of the phrase, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope
in him,” in liturgy, song, prayer, etc., the NIV 2011 kept this other reading.]]
Matthew 1:4 (NIV 2011) Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon
Matthew 1:7 (NIV 2011) Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa
Matthew 1:10 (NIV 2011) Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah
[[The NIV 2011 translation of Matthew ch. 1 contains several “corrections” to the presumably original Greek text in order to make sure Matthew is not making any “errors” in his genealogy. They could make footnotes about these changes, but they simply introduce them into the translation without any notice. In each case above, the purple text name is not the actual name in Matthew’s original Greek text—those names are actually, and incorrectly (in terms of Old Testament tradition) listed as Aram, Asaph, and Amos, respectively.]]
Matthew 13:32 (NRSV) it [the mustard seed] is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.
Matthew 13:32 (NIV 1984) Though it is the smallest of your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches
Matthew 13:32 (NIV 2011) Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches
[[Despite having no textual warrant in Greek, the NIV 1984 translated the word panton
(“all”) as “your.” Why? To save Jesus from making a mistaken statement about the status
of the mustard seed, which is not, technically speaking, the smallest of all seeds in the
world (apparently orchid seeds are). One could easily read Jesus’s statement as simple
emphasis or hyperbole, and at any rate one would not be sinning by making a botanical
miscue of this sort. Still, it was too much for the NIV 1984 translators. The NIV 2011 adjusted the word back to “all”—but they omit the definite article (ton in Greek), “the,” which is definitely there, perhaps to make the phrase sound more folksy and less literal?]]
Luke 14:26 (NRSV) Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:26 (NIV 2011) If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:26 (Good News Bible) Whoever comes to me cannot be my disciple unless he loves me more than he loves his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers, and his sisters and himself as well.
[[The Greek here is pretty straightforward, but apparently it is not “Good News” to hate
your family! This is clearly a case of a translation adding a thick interpretive layer on top
of the text in order to try to explain a difficult thing.]]
John 1:18 (NRSV) No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
John 1:18 (NIV 2011) No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
John 1:18 (NKJV) No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.
John 1:18 (NASB) No one has seen God at any time; God the only Son, who is in the arms of the Father, He has explained Him.
[[This is a famous translation problem that goes very deep, but for our purpose here let’s
focus on the Greek text behind the translation. Sampling the four translations above, we
can see that three of them are similar (NRSV, NKJV, and NASB), whereas the NIV 2011 is different in that it seems to add a phrase—and it is a very serious phrase—viz. “who is himself God.” Where do the translators get the justification for this? Did they add this to try to clarify what they want the passage to clarify theologically—the idea that Jesus is to be equated with God? Why doesn’t any other translation render it that way? As it turns out, there are two Greek textual traditions here: one reads monogenes theos, and the other monogenes uios. Monogenes = “being the only one of its kind, unique, a unique class of thing,” or something in that zone; theos = “God”; and uios = “son.” That makes sense, and it would seem that one would have to choose a textual tradition here, and the options would be something like “the one and only Son” or “the one and only God,” right? But the NIV 2011 seems to have . . . both? In fact, both the NASB and NRSV seem to be doing a similar thing through the terse phrase “God the only Son”? I am not a New Testament scholar and I would need a better explanation here to get to the bottom of this. See a simple explanation here. As it stands, any reader can see that the NIV 2011 has an “expanded” interpretation of the Greek text.]]
Acts 13:48 (NRSV) When the gentiles heard this, they were glad and praised the word of the Lord, and as many as had been destined for eternal life became believers.
Acts 13:48 (NIV 2011) When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.
Acts 13:48 (The Living Bible) When the Gentiles heard this, they were very glad and rejoiced in Paul’s message; and as many as wanted eternal life, believed.
Acts 13:48 (New Living Translation) When the Gentiles heard this, they were very glad and thanked the Lord for his message; and all who were chosen for eternal life became believers.
[[The Living Bible does have a note in the text indicating what they think is an
“alternate” reading here, namely the one reflected in the NRSV and NIV 2011, and which follows the Greek for the verb tetagmenoi, “appointed, ordained” etc. However, there is no grammatical or textual warrant for the phrase “as many as wanted.” Rather, what we have here is a rather direct interpretation placed into the text by the solo translator of The Living Bible, Kenneth Taylor, to emphasize his own theology of free will, as opposed to divine choice, for salvation. And to be fair, The Living Bible does not claim to be a strict “translation” of the Bible, but rather a “paraphrase.” Taylor invited a team of scholars to revise the Living Bible, and the result is the 1996 “New Living Translation,” which, as you can see above, conforms to the Greek text in a normal way.]]
Romans 16:1 (NRSV) I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae
Romans 16:1 (NIV 2011) I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae
[[Etymologically, the Greek word diakonos means “servant,” and is a commonly used
New Testament term for “minister.” As those in denominational traditions with structural
roles called Deacons know, the word “deacon” can today also designate someone in a
formal leadership role. Notice the “servant” translation in a famous saying of Jesus,
recorded in Matt 20:26: “...whoever wishes to be great among you must be your
diakonos (servant).” Translators do not have to rigidly translate the same word, in every
context, with the same translation; sometimes diakonos might best be rendered as
“servant,” sometimes “minister,” and sometimes transliterated as “deacon” (i.e., a formal role). In Rom 16:1, which sense is best? There is room for debate. However, what is fascinating to track in this case is not just this particular translation in isolation, for (the female) Phoebe, but rather to follow the way diakonos is rendered by the NIV across multiple examples in the Pauline corpus (notwithstanding the question here of whether Paul was actually the author of all the letters attributed to him, though that is a question one could pursue).
The NIV 2011 choices are revealing: When Paul refers to himself or to Jesus as a diakonos, the translation is usually “servant” (e.g., Rom 15:8, 1 Cor 3:5, 2 Cor 6:4, Eph 3:7, Col 1:23). When diakonos refers to other named male individuals who are not Paul, a pattern emerges: in Col 1:7 and 4:7, two males, Epaphrus and Tychicus, are called “faithful ministers” (diakonos); however this same Tychicus, in Eph 6:21, is translated as a “faithful servant” with the same underlying language in Greek (diakonos); in 1 Thess 3:2, (the male) Timothy is called a “brother and co-worker” (diakonos; though in this case we have variant manuscripts that use a different word here, not diakonos); in Phil 1:1, we get a more formal translation of diakonos as a role, i.e., “deacons,” and the diakonos = “deacon” translation appears again in 1 Tim 3:8, 3:10, and 3:12 (and note the male context especially in 1 Tim 3:12: “A deacon [diakonos] must be faithful to his wife and must manage his children and his household well.”)
So when we arrive back at the female Phoebe in the NIV 2011 of Rom 16:1 . . . what exactly is it that prompts this translation of her diakonos role as “servant”? Why not call her a “co-worker,” or a “minister,” like the named males Paul identifies with this exact same term? There may be no clear warrant to use the formal, transliterated term “deacon” for Phoebe, as the NRSV does here—surely this is a place where the NRSV wants to emphasize its own theology and go hard on the idea that Phoebe is a “deacon” in the leadership sense, i.e., affirming women in leadership. Otherwise, why doesn’t the NRSV translate the term diakonos as “deacon” when it refers to the male leaders in Col 1:7 and 4:2, and 1 Thess 3:2 ( the translation in the NRSV in these cases mirrors the NIV 2011 as “minister” and “co-worker”)? But one may have cause to wonder whether the NIV 2011 is intentionally attempting to minimize Phoebe’s leadership role vis-a-vis others like Epaphrus, Tychicus, and Timothy by calling her a “servant”—to reflect the perspective of its general readership, at least historically, which believes that men are more naturally affirmed in Scripture as leaders.]]
Very Brief Concluding Reflections
(1) The Bible—like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—comes to us in a material form, as matter. Even Jesus wept, felt hunger, broke down, and eventually died. The analogy between Scripture and the incarnation can only take us so far, but I find it helpful in some ways: Just as early Christians had to confront “Gnostic” ideas about Jesus not having a material body, so too we must confront those who want to bypass the material concerns raised above in favor of seeing the Bible as a thing with no history, no form, and no format. Such a view risks participating in what I think is maybe the most troubling criticism of the project of interpreting the Bible: the idea that in the end we really don’t need to interpret at all. But in fact, we do need to interpret. This is work that the community must do, together, in bodily form with a “bodily” text. Affirming the importance of canon, textual criticism, and translation can thus be considered a kind of spiritual practice—a way of affirming the centrality of the incarnation and thus the value of the material world in God’s redemptive plan.
(2) In addition to preparing us to accept the mystery of the incarnation, I believe that doing the theological and intellectual work these “material concerns” provoke also prepares us for a practice of deep importance: Telling the truth about the world. Sometimes “the truth” stares us right in the face, and sometimes truth-telling requires difficult labor. We are tempted to lie, constantly. Our character and the moral fabric of our lives are at stake every day, at every moment—do we ignore uncomfortable things, dismiss facts and stories that do not fit our narratives, and refuse to change? In discussions about the Bible, do I recklessly appeal to half-understood things merely to make myself feel better or “win” a point against someone else? The practice of putting in even just a little bit of research, whether preparing a sermon or Bible study or engaging in private study, to clarify what the text actually says in varying manuscripts, to vet this translation against that one, and to work one’s way through an ancient language—this is time spent practicing for facing what is real and true about what is most important in our lives. In this way, I see the practice of study—whether in this respect for the Bible, or in any discipline!—as parallel to the way Simone Weil famously wrote about how work on difficult math problems can help prepare us for prayer, in that such attention to difficult things participates in something eternal and forms in us the best kind of disposition to the world: “The solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but the same law applies to it because it is the image of something precious. Being a little fragment of particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared: ‘I am the Truth.’ Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.”
(2) I am astounded by how many variant readings textual criticism has revealed, bewildered by how many different translations we have, captivated by how those translations are always inherently “biased,” and frustrated by the fact that Christians still have not come to full community agreement on the canon of books in the Bible. However, at the same time I’m impressed by how much unity Christians do have, despite all this, on major doctrinal issues—such as the Trinity, the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus, and so much more. These things shine through again and again, despite the barriers of materiality and human error that we face. I’m also impressed by our ability to sort through all of this complexity and—in some cases relatively easily—find errors or expansions or changes that have crept in during a period clearly later than any original author could have written. I do think that those with a “low view” of Church authority, tradition, and hierarchy might need to get more serious than they sometimes are about theologically explaining how they often have such a “high view” of the Bible, as perfect, inerrant, and so on, while as interpreters we ourselves individually and our communities are so . . . imperfect, errant, and so on. Presumably, an imperfect reader engages with a perfect text by mediation of the Holy Spirit; most Christians would agree on that. But this takes many forms, and the fact that Christians count on the Holy Spirit for guidance has not, it turns out, solved disagreements in the community over the past two millennia. Maybe the point here is that we do not have to avoid every disagreement and every difference and replace it with totalitarian certainty. At any rate, my own view is that the difficulties of canon, textual criticism, and translation have in no way ruined the Bible's sacred status—even as I am sympathetic with anyone who feels confused or bothered by these issues.
(3) In terms of creating or adhering to a “theology of Scripture,” i.e., some basic sense of what the Bible is, how it functions authoritatively, and how we interpret it, I do think it’s worth ruminating about whether one wants to attach the status of “inspiration” or “God’s word” or “inerrancy” to any one version of the text. There are difficulties here either way:
(a) If you don’t attach that status to a particular text or translation or tradition, then what is your confidence level about what you are reading and interpreting?
(b) If you do attach that status to a particular text or translation or tradition, then you can get into a tough position if that text/translation/tradition you adopt proves to be erroneous in any number of ways.