Page 43 - Bible Doctrine Survey I- Student Textbook

7. During the copying process, any two words touching each other warranted destruction of that
page, and the page before it (because it had touched that page).

“This strict set of regulations which governed the early Jewish scribes is a chief factor which guarantees
the accurate transmission of the Old Testament text”.
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Confirmation of the Dead Sea Scrolls

“With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have Hebrew manuscripts one thousand years
earlier than the great Masoretic Text manuscripts, enabling them to check on the fidelity of the Hebrew
text. The result of comparative studies reveals that there is a word-for-word identity in more than 95
percent of the cases, and the 5 percent variation consists mostly of slips of the pen and spelling” (Geisler
and Nix, p. 382). As F. F. Bruce says, “The new evidence confirms what we had already good reason to
believe—that the Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the
Hebrew Bible with the utmost fidelity”.
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Methods of Translating the Bible

There are many versions or translations of the Bible today. Why so many? Is one better than the other?
Is there only one true and faithful translation? Let’s investigate the difficulties that translators
encounter.

Translating from one language to another is not as simple as it may sound. You don’t just look at the
word in one language and match it up with the other language. Why?

1. Sometimes there is no match between languages. Example, love in English Language.

There is no unambiguous one-to-one correspondence between two languages, especially in the
idiomatic sense (real meaning). Vocabulary can also be difficult if not, at times, impossible to yield
appropriate receptor words. There are between six and eight different words for love in Greek while the
English language offers only one - love. Let’s look at only four of them.

STERGEIN is rooted in one's own nature. ERAN is the love of passion and sex. PHILEIN is based on a
pleasurable response from something. AGAPAN is a love that is evoked from a sense of value found in
an object which causes one to highly prize that object. English is unprepared to adequately reproduce
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these shades of meaning.
Stergein is rooted in obligatory affection for objects of similar nature. It is the natural affection
that human parents have for their children and similarly, the protective devotion of animals for
their offspring. This word is not found in its root form in the Greek New Testament but does
appear twice with an “alpha” prefix which negates the original meaning. Thus, “unnatural
affection” is the usual translation of Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3. It is also found with
PHILEIN in Romans 12:10 to produce a compound meaning “kindly affection.” Stergein is
obligatory love.

Eran is not found in the Greek New Testament in any word variant. It was used by pagan writers

32 Lightfoot, pp. 97-98
33 F. F. Bruce, Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 61-62
34 https://www.learnreligions.com/types-of-love-in-the-bible-
700177#:~:text=Four%20unique%20forms%20of%20love,love%2C%20and%20God's%20divine%20love.

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