One of the common things you hear in Protestant circles is that the Bible is only 100% inspired in the "autographs," or originals. Basically, the idea is that the Hebrew/Greek manuscripts we have now are pretty good, but only the originals are completely without error. This idea is summed up in The Chicago Statement On Biblical Inerrancy:
ARTICLE X "We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant."
I was raised with this line of thinking, and didn't really question it for most of my life. But recently it's been driving me crazy. Isn't this talk about the autographs and how we don't have them tacitly admitting that the Bible we do have isn't 100% authoritative?
It gets worse because if you compare certain prophecies quoted in the New Testament with how they appear in the Old Testament, they clearly do not match up (Mat 27:3-9 / Jeremiah 32:1-15 is the worst offender). This seems to indicate that the Gospel writers had access to a different version of the Old Testament than we do. And that's terrifying to me.
I think you can work your way around this problem if you're Roman Catholic/Orthodox, since it's the Church/Tradition that guarantees the Bible's legitimacy. But for us Prots, it seems like a huge glaring issue.
Anyone else ever grapple with this? It's making me seriously doubt what I've been taught.
Huh. I think this is the first time that I actually feel sympathy for the KJV only position. It's just so much cleaner.
Joseph Ward
If you know your theology properly you can determine that a translation of a Bible is without MORAL error.
They can misstake some translations, dates and names, for sure. But that doesn't make the translation morally wrong. The point of biblical inerrancy is about that the articles of faith presentend in a modern Bible, if well crafted, can be inerrant. The only Bible that is fully perfect is the originals written by the hands of it's authors. Those manuscripts have no error at all. But that's not important, dude. If a person tries to convince you that a wrong date or misspelling in the translation of your Bible makes it unreliable, this person is trying to destroy your faith and is an agent of the Devil.
Isaac Miller
I'm a translator by trade, so I'm not worried about translation errors or anything else inherent to the nature of translation itself. What troubles me is inconsistencies between the Old Testament as quoted by the New Testament authors and the OL manuscripts of the Old Testament that we have. That stuff goes way beyond names and dates. And while you might be able to argue it doesn't touch on essential doctrine, it does put a big question mark over what else might be different.
The Devil's answer is abandon the faith. I'm looking for a different answer that still resolves the conflict for me.
Adrian Lewis
The NT quotes largely from the Setptuagint, yes.
Just get a Bible like the Douay-Rheims which is translated from the Vulgate, which used the Septuagint and sources we no longer have.
Also the Bible is inerrant, its not always literal but its inerrant.
Aaron Bell
Personally I have no problems with the literality of what is written. I can well imagine that a Jew of the fifth century BC and a Jew of the first century have not received exactly the same theological training. It is very true that Jews have made a considerable effort to avoid any kind of doctrinal deviation (to the point of considering the Law as a solid and permanent entity). But this is simply impossible, even when any copy that is not exactly the same as the original is destroyed.
Lucas Flores
Here's the thing: the Mat 27:3-9 / Jeremiah 32:1-15 mismatch can't be explained by the Septuagint, because the Septuagint has the same version of the story that we use.
It's like that for most of the times that there's a deviation between New Testament quotations of the Old Testament and our Old Testament. If memory serves, only one or two are due to the Septuagint.
It's just troubling for me to think that we have a different version of the OT than the early church.
Michael Turner
most of the time its the Septuagint quoted once or twice there is a mismatch but most of the time its Septuagint
Jace Rodriguez
There are a couple of things to keep in mind: 1) is the distinction between LXX and the masoretic text. LXX was an old testament copy dated to 300AD whose original was authorised by the Jews in Alexandria for their community who spoke Koine Greek but not Hebrew.
The Masoretic text was dated to between 700AD and 1000AD whose oldest copy was of the Rabbis of Russia. This text which is dated to well after the death of Jesus differs greatly from both LXX and the portions we have of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are much similar to each other than to the Masoretic text), and the differences often concern Jesus.
The masoretic text translates it to "like lions my hands and my feet" (that is like lions (they maul) my hands and my feet).
Landon Butler
Well, surely you know about the Septuagent/MT thing, right?
Logan Sanders
NT author's used the Septuagint as source of the OT. I made some quick searches of online versions of the Septuagint and none of them has the full 32ยบ chapter of the book of Jeremiah. But the Vulgata Latina that is a translation of the Septuagint, states that in Jeremiah 32:9 the price paid was of 7 silver staters and 10 silver coins. In Matthew, the verse says 30 silvers.
Get in mind that the Septuagint and the Vulgata makes a dinstinction of staters (greek money) and the silver coins probably were jewish money since the other translations, including the KJV, call it Shekels. I think the question to be made is: converting 7 staters to shekels we get around 20 shekels? And what kind of stater Jeremiah was referring to? The Anthenian Tetradrachm? The Aeginetic Stater named Chleone? Or the Corinthian one called hippos? I made further research on this and historians know the conversion of value of the coins of the New Testament, but what about the older ones from the time of the OT? No idea dude.
See how complicated those things are. And after much study you accomplish nothing with it. Even if this inquiry was solved, nothing changed about our religion. And it even doesn't invalidate the other Bibles that uses the Masoretic Text (that says it was seventeen shekels and not 7 staters and 10 shekels) because it isn't important and doesn't affect the message of the Bible morally.
Xavier Hernandez
Forgive my autism, I didn't refresh the page.
Regarding the mismatch, perhaps you should consider the passage of Zechariah rather than Jeremiah:
Thomas Ortiz
actually the Septuagint is older than that, more likely 2nd/3rd century BC not AD
Joseph Roberts
It's there, the chapter divisions are just different:
1). There is no mention in Jeremiah that the field is a potter's field. Not a huge difference, but weird that Matthew throws it in there.
2). The price paid for the field is seventeen shekels of silver, not thirty pieces of silver. This is probably the least important difference, since it could easily be a conversion thing, as yall pointed out.
3). There is no indication in Jeremiah that seventeen shekels is anything other than the worth of the field - it is not mentioned as "the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced." This is a big deal for me, since without it, the Jeremiah passage seems limited to the restoration of Israel and has nothing to do with anyone being betrayed, which is how Matthew uses it.
Luke Rodriguez
Could you screenshot and show me the verse 9 that Jeremiah talks about the seventeen silvers?
Wow, makes much much sense. Thank you, brother.
Lincoln Campbell
This is a more in depth article with a reference to a book from the 19th century, but without reading the book itself I cannot verify everything 100%.
The price paid was 7 silver staters and 10 shekels. How much 7 silver staters from ancient greece was in shekels nobody knows. As I said here: and also this explanation: .
I keep thinking about the explanation given in that article. The Matthew passage feels like a weird mashup of the Jeremiah passage and the Zechariah passage. Zechariah's got the potter, the 30 pieces of silver, the "price" for a man, and then Jeremiah's got the field buying. If they're both part of the same scroll, I wonder if Matthew just collapsed the two prophecies together for simplicity.
