Bible #4: What Mistakes Am I Aware of in the Bible?

What? There are mistakes in the Bible? Well, kind of…

This is the fourth post in a series that looks at how the Bible came from God to me. This post looks at some of the potential mistakes in today’s printed word.

Some who read this might react that there are no mistakes in the Bible. I believe the Bible is from God, and God does not make mistakes, yet some errors have crept in from when God inspired the writing of his inerrant Scriptures to when later generations have read his word. Below are my experiences.

– The Concept of Biblical Inerrancy
– Moses with Horns in the 4th Century Vulgate Translation
– Errors in Manuscripts
– The He and She Copies of the 1611 King James Version
– The 1631 Wicked Bible
– The 1795 Killer Bible
– The Book of Eekiel in My 1995 Bible
– The Under Rower
– The Python Woman
– Reflection

The Concept of Biblical Inerrancy

The theology classes that I took introduced a concept known as biblical inerrancy, i.e., the Bible is without error. It helped me rationalize things I found in the Bible that did not appear completely truthful. Below is a brief and inadequate summary of my take on it.

1. The inerrancy applies to the original autographs, i.e., the documents that the biblical authors wrote. Our best manuscripts are copies, and errors were injected into the copying process. However, evidence suggests that such errors are minimal.
2. The inspired biblical authors wrote from their perspectives. God did not dictate the words to the authors, so the words are from the authors’ viewpoint and their use of language. For instance, Ecclesiastes 1:5a says, “The sun rises, and the sun goes down.” Arguably, this is incorrect because the Earth is rotating rather than the Sun going up and down. However, such terminology continues to be used today, as it is from our perspective.
3. The Bible was written in certain styles, known as literary genres. It is not an encyclopedia with a list of facts. For example, when Mark wrote, “And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men” (Mark 6:44), he did not intend to imply that there were exactly five thousand men.
4. The Bible appears to have contradictions, with one part disagreeing with another. Examples are found in the Gospel accounts where the four narratives don’t agree. Such eyewitness accounts are known to describe things differently. An example is the descriptions of who was present with Mary Magdalene at the discovery of the empty tomb. Each narrative mentions different people, as each author wished to describe the scene differently. I examined this more in this paper on apparent contradictions in the Gospels for my theology class.
5. The Bible disagrees with science. People struggle to reconcile what the Bible says in Genesis 1—2 about creation and what science suggests. I believe both, even if they disagree, and that takes faith. I accept that there are things that I don’t understand. Regarding creation, I am open to the concept that it was not six twenty-four-hour periods, and I was happy to read about multiple evangelical positions about this in Reading Genesis 1—2: An Evangelical Conversation, which presents five views on interpreting this passage from evangelical Christians. My main takeaway is that the purpose of Genesis 1—2 is to explain that the omnipotent God created the heavens and the earth, in contrast to other gods that ancient civilizations believed in. The creation account’s intent is not to provide a detailed scientific explanation about how God did it.

Now, to mistakes. This first one is brilliant!

Moses with Horns in the 4th Century Vulgate Translation

A visit to the St. Peter in Chains church in Rome reveals a fascinating translation error. The church houses Michelangelo’s Moses, a sculpture from 1515, and shows Moses with horns. Michelangelo used the Latin Vulgate as his Bible which describes Moses as descending from meeting God on Mount Sinai “with horns” (Latin: cornata) (Exodus 34:29). The Hebrew word is “qâran” translated as “radiant” in today’s English Bibles, but it is similar to “qérén” which means “horned”, which led to the Vulgate’s mistranslation. The Vulgate’s mistranslation is reflected in the English Douay-Rheims translation from the Vulgate, which translates Exodus 34:29 as, “And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony: and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.” It is even reflected in Wycliffe’s Bible, the first English translation from 1388, because Wycliffe translated from the Vulgate.

Errors in Manuscripts

As discussed in previous posts in this series, the Bible we have comes from manuscripts that are copies of previous manuscripts. The earliest version of the Bible in existence today, a Latin translation called the Vulgate, used one set of New Testament manuscripts, known as Western text-type. The King James Version used another set, known as the Byzantine text-type, which were considered to be a more accurate representation of the original documents. Modern New Testament translations are largely based on the manuscripts of the Alexandrian text-type, which scholars assess as being more accurate than the Byzantine texts. What sort of differences are there?

• The King James Version (KJV) includes some verses that are not found in the Alexandrian text-type manuscript, and scholars believe they were added through the copying process. The Alexandrian manuscripts do not include sixteen verses (e.g., Matt 17:21, Mark 7:16, Acts 8:37, Romans 16:24) and omit several other partial verses.
• An example of a partial omission is from the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13. I remember learning the “longer” version of the prayer, which includes the phrase, “For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power and the glory for ever. Amen.” This phrase is in the King James Version, and related Bibles, because it was in the Byzantine manuscripts. When I was young, this was the only translation available. However, it is not in translations like ESV or CSB, because it is not present in the Alexandrian manuscripts, though they include a footnote. Such a phrase is known as a “doxology,” and while there is nothing wrong with it, it probably was not in the original biblical text that Matthew wrote. Indeed, our church recently led the congregation through the KJV’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, and it is the version that anyone over a certain age memorized.
• The KJV includes two passages that continue to appear in modern translations, but with a footnote indicating that scholars believe that they were not part of the original text of the Gospels. The passages are Mark 16:9—20 (an alternative ending to the Gospel) and John 7:53—8:11 (the narrative about the adulterous woman).

I accept that better manuscripts might be discovered that lead to a “better” New Testament text. This happened to the Old Testament with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946. For instance, some translations, such as CSB and NIV, include “light” in Isaiah 53:11, which was in the Dead Sea Scrolls but not the main manuscript used for translation (the Masoretic Text). The ESV omits “light,” but all of these translations include a footnote.

The variations between these manuscripts are very small, nearly insignificant, and do not affect the Bible’s overall message. I recognize that calling these differences in the KJV “errors” is strong. However, this does not mean the KJV is bad, and there can be value in leveraging this traditional translation. After all, no translation is as accurate as the original Hebrew or Greek, but we don’t read those in our churches!

The He and She Copies of the 1611 King James Version

The first printed edition of the King James Bible in 1611 had some printing errors. One prominent one was in Ruth 3:15. The earliest edition reads, “and he went into the city,” while subsequent editions read, “and she went into the city.”

However, there is variation between extant manuscripts on whether this word should be a “he” or a “she,” with NIV and NET choosing “he” and CSB, ESV, and NASB choosing “she.” These five translations of this verse are compared here.

The 1631 Wicked Bible

A misprint led to a rendering of Exodus 20:14 as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The publisher was fined £300 and lost their licence. A copy of this Bible is on display in the Bible Museum in Washington DC.

The 1795 Killer Bible

Another misprint from 1795 led to the unfortunate printing of Mark 7:27 as “let the children first be killed” instead of “filled.” A copy of this book is also on display at the Museum of the Bible.

The Book of Eekiel in My 1995 Bible

I can’t remember finding a misprint in the body text in a Bible. However, I did find this error in my NASB Bible. It occurred just once.

The Under Rower

An obituary on billgraham.org recalls John MacArthur’s teaching on the topic of being a servant. MacArthur had said, “I just really want to be known as someone who was a servant of the Lord. You know, Paul uses the word hupēretēs, a galley slave, under rower.” The context comes from 1 Corinthians 4:1, where Paul describes himself using this term. The Greek word looks like the combination of words for “under” and “rower.” I heard the pastor at my former church preach on the same concept, and there are many online articles about how “under rowers” reflect Christ’s servant.

In his book Exegetical Fallacies, D. A. Carson notes that R. C. Trench popularized this view in 1854. However, Carson uses this as an example of what he calls the root fallacy. Carson writes,

to derive the meaning of ὑπηρέτης (hypēretēs) from ὑπό (hypo) and ἐρέτης (eretēs) is no more intrinsically realistic than deriving the meaning of “butterfly” from “butter” and “fly,” or the meaning of “pineapple” from “pine” and “apple.” Even those of us who have never been to Hawaii recognize that pineapples are not a special kind of apple that grows on pines.

I was unable to find a published Bible translation that used “under rower.” However, it appears that even learned preachers are misinterpreting the Greek and introducing a meaning that was not intended by the author, especially when it makes great preaching fodder!

The Python Woman

A visit to Greece, following in Paul’s footsteps, revealed how translators have chosen to simplify texts to make them understandable. In the second half of Acts 16, Luke describes Paul being thrown in jail in Philippi because he commanded an evil spirit to come out of a girl. All major versions describe the slave girl in Acts 16:16 as having a spirit of divination or the ability to predict the future.

However, the Greek word used to describe this spirit translates literally as “Python.”

Luke’s contemporaries would likely have understood this as a link to the Oracle of Delphi, who was believed to predict the future when speaking in a trance caused by fumes at Delphi. In Greek mythology, the site at Delphi was guarded by Python, a monstrous serpent, which Apollo killed and established his own priestess called Pythia.

A literal translation of “Python” in English would be confusing. While this is not an error, it highlights the challenge of retaining all of the original meaning when translating into a receptor language.

Reflection

In my introductory post on this site, I described how I used to take the Bible “with a pinch of salt.” I thought there were lots of inconsistencies, contradictions, and errors in the Bible, which effectively allowed me to pick and choose what I wanted. While I subsequently accepted the whole Bible’s truth by faith, my academic Bible courses and travel to biblical lands have convinced my brain that these supposed “errors” are not errors at all. Above, I outlined some of the more unfortunate errors, which I find amusing, but help make it real. However, aligning the Bible with modern science remains a challenge, and I accept that an element of faith is required to accept both.