A BBC documentary aired earlier this month says the church deliberately introduced thousands of changes into the New Testament for theological reasons.
The program was titled ‘The Beauty of Books: Ancient Bibles’ and aired on BBC TV 4 earlier this month.
According to David Instone-Brewer, of Tyndale House, a division of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) based in the United Kingdom, similar highly misleading statements have been made even earlier in the media.
The first half of the program was about Codex Sinaiticus, which is the oldest Bible bound in a single volume, made in about AD 350, Instone-Brewer said.
Responding to the conclusions of this program about theological agendas, Dr Dirk Jongkind, a Research Fellow at Tyndale House, said: “This is the weak point in the whole documentary: everyone who makes the effort to see what sort of alterations are made to the text will see that the scribes’ agenda was to preserve the readings found in older handwritten copies.”
Codex Sinaiticus, according to Instone-Brewer, “is a marvelous manuscript because it contains the oldest full text of the New Testament on top-quality material, produced at great expense.
“The 23,000 corrections may seem therefore surprising, and the program concluded that these had a theological agenda. It examined two extreme examples, both in Mark: the first verse has ‘Son of God’ added as a ‘correction’, and the last verse ends with ‘for they were afraid.’ The narrator concluded that although some corrections might be scribal errors, these two ‘corrections’ indicated a theological agenda to correct the meaning of the text.”
Instone-Brewer continued: “Although there are some corrections, where the original is erased or overwritten, this is relatively rare. Most of the 23,000 aren’t ‘corrections’ because they leave the original text fully visible, putting a dot under or over letters instead of deleting them, and writing above letters so you can clearly see the earlier text, as the screenshots from the program show clearly. This demonstrates that they didn’t want to expunge bad theology, but they wanted to record that other manuscripts were often subtly different. The vast majority of these changes are very minor – alternate spellings or slight grammatical variations which make no difference to the meaning of the text.
“The thousands of manuscripts later than Sinaiticus have numerous tiny differences due to inexpert copying in the early church. If a class of students all copied out a short book by hand, they would all make mistakes, but the teacher might still be able to reconstruct the original from all the copies. Textual scholars of the New Testament do this same work today,” he added.
Instone-Brewer explained: “The documentary concluded that the phrase ‘Son of God’ in Mark 1.1 was missing from the original Gospel and that Mark believed that Jesus became divine at his baptism. But if Mark had wanted to teach this, then Jesus’ baptismal saying would be: ‘You are now my Son or ‘You have become my Son.’
“But Mark couldn’t make this point by omitting ‘Son of God’ from verse 1, because no one would expect it to be there. This phrase occurs in some older manuscripts and not in others, and the debate continues about whether it was added or omitted, but it is unlikely that the variant is an attempt to change the theological message of the whole gospel.
Instone-Brewer stated: “The main conclusion of this documentary was that the scribes of Codex Sinaiticus added alterations because of their theological agenda. In fact, the only theological agenda that can be demonstrated is a high reverence for the text and a desire to record differences in manuscripts so that the original can be preserved.” ANS
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