History
of the Bible
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Translating
the Bible
General Information
This is only Genesis 1, a tiny portion of the Bible. If you were a Monk responsible for precisely copying about 300 times this much text, in that connected (English) script format above, by hand, one character at a time, are you SURE that your entire copy would be absolutely free of even a single copyist error?
An Experiment
If you're part of a Bible Study Group or some other Christian Small Group, why not try hand copying just this Genesis 1 (not the Greek text, but the script style continuous text) as carefully as you can. Then give YOUR copy to a different member of the group to copy. Then THAT copy would be given to a third person, and so on through the Group. Once everyone has copied their given source text as precisely as possible, you would finally get back a final copy. As long as all of you had done a perfect job of copying, that final copy should read EXACTLY like the original. But it will probably have at least a few minor variations. Even though each of you copyists are familiar with the Genesis story, and even though each of you was extremely careful, small errors are bound to appear. Such an experiment definitely increases one's respect for the multitude of anonymous Scribes that copied the Bible over the many centuries.
The situation with the Bible and its extensive size seems like it would have caused massive copyist errors over the centuries because of the scale of the task and the format that is being copied. It is truly a sign of how incredibly careful the copyists all were that there were as few (minor) errors as are found in a few of the manuscripts. Fortunately for us, there are so many source manuscripts that exist that the few variations that have been found have been checked in all the source documents and scholars are now extremely certain of the accuracy of modern translations.
As an additional element to think about, many early Old Testament source manuscripts are written in Hebrew. Before about 900 AD, Hebrew was written without any vowels! Can you imagine the possibilities of what might happen if copyists were even slightly careless? By the way, this is closely related to YHWH, the Name of God, becoming Yahowah or Jehovah (or Yahweh), when the vowels from Adonai (another ancient Name for God) were inserted into YHWH.
This discussion has been presented so you might better appreciate the amazing efforts put forth by the many copyists of the Bible Manuscripts over the centuries, and also in the task that Bible translators face in making sure they have the absolutely most accurate translation that can be made. It's not quite as easy as translating Buenos Dias into Hello! (even though that phrase could equally mean goodbye!)
Finally, we have really only been considering here the difficulties of perfect copying (for the scribes) and in confirming the perfect accuracy (for the Bible scholars). There is yet another level of complication in the translators' job. Many ancient words had several different meanings, often very different from each other.
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Article by Believe Project
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