discoveries concerning the history of the Bible — and it started in the trash. As a student at the University of Leipzig in Germany, Tischendorf had become interested in the study of the recensions of the New Testament (the New Testament in its earliest form). Naturally, an important part of his research required the examination of very early texts of the Bible. At the time Tischendorf began his work, there were only a few early copies of the New Testament known to exist. So in 1844, Tischendorf set off for the Middle East.
His journey brought him to St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. St. Catherine’s had been founded in A.D. 527 to commemorate the traditional site where Moses saw the burning bush. Throughout the centuries, its large granite walls have provided many with a place of safety. They also contained a library. It was in this library that Tischendorf hoped to find some insight into the early history of the New Testament.
One day, Tischendorf noticed a basket full of parchments, one of the materials on which ancient books used to be written. When he inquired about the basket, the monks told him that it just contained some trash they were using to light their oven. There had been three baskets, but the first two had already been used. Tischendorf searched through the remaining basket, and to his surprise, found 43 leaves (pages) of parchment containing some of the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Bible he had ever seen. While the monks let Tischendorf keep the 43 leaves he had found in the trash, they gathered from his reaction that old manuscripts might be valuable for something other than lighting fires.
Tischendorf returned to St. Catherine’s in 1853 to look for additional manuscripts, but the monks were suspicious and the trip was fruitless. In 1859, under the sponsorship of the Russian Tsar Alexander II, Tischendorf made another journey, but this time he brought a gift. He had recently published a new edition of the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Old Testament. When Tischendorf presented his edition of the Septuagint to the monastery, the steward told him that he also had a copy. The steward then took Tischendorf back to his room, and there, wrapped in a red cloth, was a very old manuscript. Not only did it contain most of the Old Testament in Greek, but the New Testament as well.
The monastery sold the manuscript to Alexander II for $7000. In 1933, the Soviet government, short on cash, sold the manuscript to the British Museum for £100,000. The manuscript found by Tischendorf is now called Codex Sinaiticus, and it is the second oldest nearly complete manuscript of the Bible we have.
The work of scholars like Tischendorf have shed considerable light on the process by which the Bible came down to us. Still, there are many myths concerning the origin of the Bible that are still prevalent. The actress Shirley Maclaine, encountered one of the most common of these myths when, in her book, Out on a Limb, she had a conversation with a friend named David concerning reincarnation and the Bible.
“But David,” I said, “Why aren’t these teachings recorded in the Bible?”
“They are,” he said. “The theory of reincarnation is recorded in the Bible. But the proper interpretations were struck from it during an Ecumenical Council meeting of the Catholic Church in Constantinople sometime around 553 A.D., called the Council of Nicaea. The Council members voted to strike those teachings from the Bible in order to solidify Church control.” 2
While David’s theory would explain why the Bible does not mention reincarnation, or many other such beliefs, it does have a small problem — there is no evidence to support it. Even David’s description of the council where this editing supposedly took place is erroneous. Church councils were named after the city in which they were held. In light of this fact, David’s statement that a “meeting of the Catholic Church in Constantinople sometime around 553 A.D., called the Council of Nicaea,” reveals a lack of understanding concerning even the most basic facts about the councils. The council of Nicaea met in the city of Nicaea in A.D. 325, not in Constantinople in A.D. 553. Since there had already been one council meeting in Constantinople, the council that met there in A.D. 553 was, not too surprisingly, called the Second Council of Constantinople.
This myth has recently reemerged yet again as the backdrop of a popular book and a major film, The Da Vinci Code. While such myths make for exciting stories, they remain, nevertheless, fiction. As we will see shortly, the belief that any of the councils altered the Bible is equally fictitious.
Another common myth concerning the Bible is that over the years the Bible has changed, not through the deliberate editing of a church council, but through the slow, inevitable corruption caused by translation after translation after translation. Often the process of translation is compared to the party game where a message is started, and then whispered from one person to the next until it has gone all the way around the room. By the time the message reaches the last person in the line, it has changed dramatically.
The Bible has supposedly gone through so many translations that we can no longer be sure that what we read in the Bible is what the apostles and prophets really wrote thousands of years ago. Thomas Paine presented a form of this argument in his thesis, The Age of Reason:
The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else.3
The main problem with this line of reasoning is that it completely ignores the process by which modern translations are made. When a new translation is made, the translators do not start with the last translation and then just update the language. Translations are made from the most reliable texts available in the original language; texts that take into account the oldest manuscripts we have. Instead of “passing the message from person to person,” each new translation goes back as close to the original as possible.
If Thomas Paine were correct, then the older the translation, the more accurate it should be. Actually, the newer translations are slightly better than some of the older ones. This is because, thanks to the discoveries made by scholars like Tischendorf, our understanding of the original languages and the texts that we have to translate from have vastly improved over the last few hundred years. An example of this can be seen in the text used to translate the Old Testament.
The Text of the Old Testament
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the oldest complete Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Codex Babylonicus Petropalitanus, located in the city of Leningrad. This copy was made in the year A.D. 1008, over 1400 years after the last book of the Old Testament had been written. Skeptics pointed to this large time span as proof that the text could not be relied upon. They claimed that because of the vast amount of copying that must have taken place during the 1400 year gap, errors were sure to have been made.
After about A.D. 500, the copying of the Old Testament was the job of the Masoretes, and it is from them that we get the name for this type of manuscript: the Masoretic texts. The Masoretic texts are generally considered to be the most reliable texts of the Old Testament, and have formed the basis for most of our translations. The Masoretes took the task of copying the Old Testament very seriously. Because they believed they were copying the Word of God, the Masoretes made a tremendous effort to insure that the copies they made were completely free from errors.
In order to accomplish this task, the Masoretes used very strict rituals to insure that errors would not creep in. Every detail of the copying process was prescribed, from the writing materials (the skin of a clean animal), to the number of columns that were to appear on each “page,” to the length of each column (greater than 48 but less than 60), to the width of a column (30 letters). Even the color of the ink (black) was
