50,000 Errors In The Bible?
The Jehovah Witnesses published an article in their journal called AWAKE! on the 8th of September 1957 with the title “50,000 Errors in the Bible?”
One of the most important subject in the field of Textual Criticism is the textual variants. Textual variants take place when a copyist makes deliberate or unintentional alterations to a manuscripts that is being reproduced.
So, we are talking about errors, mistakes or alterations that scribes makes when copying a manuscript. This is nothing new, and has been recognized by textual critics as something that all ancient documents which were hand copied goes through.[Just recently, Dan Brubaker released his book on the 20 corrections in the earliest manuscripts of the Qur’an, detailing examples of mistakes that scribes copying the text of the Qur’an makes, so this is not a new phenomenon. You can check out the video Jay Smith and Al Fadi on this here.]
It is very important that most of these errors made by scribes which results into variants are very minute and does not affect the core of the Christian faith. Some of the errors are spelling mistakes, word orders, repetition of words and omission.
However, there are three text which were also mentioned, two (Mark Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53–8:11) out of which remains a debate Scholars while one of them (1 John 5:7) has not been recognized as a later addition. Again, as stated, these two textual variant, namely; the longer ending of Mark and the Pericope Adulterae does not in any way affect the core essentials of the Christian Faith.
It is important to note that while the JW are making a case for the reliability of the Bible in this journal called AWAKE, they also promoted their translation of the Bible, the New World Translation.
In conclusion, the argument of the Muslims and the misrepresentation of the JW witnesses publication in an attempt to undermine the reliability of the Bible is not only cheap, but also an evidence of the misunderstanding of the manuscript tradition of the Bible.
Muslim’s, in a desperate effort to locate any scrap that says the Bible contained errors, frequently quote from an article written by Jehovah’s witnesses with the title, “50,000 errors in a Bible”. First we point out that this non-Christian cult had just released their own Bible called “the New World translation “. It is more a sectarian paraphrase of the Bible, than a true translation, which has been universally condemned as a perversion of the original Greek and Hebrew by everyone who is not a member of this cult. Because the Greek manuscripts and English translations of all other Bibles contradicts “watchtower doctrine”, but cult had no choice but to produce a version of the Bible themselves that did teach their doctrine. So the article was written as a cheap self-serving diatribe against all other Bibles, and to provide blind praise for their newly unveiled Bible. (If we can call it that.)
Having said this, we must draw the Muslim’s attention to the fact that these alleged 50,000 errors, which are never specifically identified, exist not in the original Greek manuscripts but claimed to be in the English translations. Of course, such a statement is false, as anyone who has studied the Hebrew and Greek transmission of the Bible will tell you. Furthermore the article claims, in the voice of a deceptive used car salesman, that all these errors have been fixed in the New World translation. So for Muslim’s to quote this article as proof of corruption of the Bible, proves they have no understanding of the subject of textual transmission of the original Greek manuscripts vs. the English translations made from these Greek manuscripts.
It looks good on Jehovah’s Witnesses that the article they wrote in 1957 to trash solid translations of the Bible like the King James version, is being used by Muslim’s today to proof the New World translation contains 50,000 errors. Although the article is actually quoting a “liberal Bible trasher” (a tactic common for JW’s) the JW who wrote the article at world headquarters in Brooklyn, actually agrees there are 50,000 errors in the KJV. In fact, the New World translation is guilty of the very thing Muslim’s would love to know about. Like the fact that the New World translation actually adds words that are not found in any of the original Greek manuscripts. For example, most of the errors in the King James version that Jehovah’s Witnesses claim exist are the fact that the name of God instead of being transliterated into an unpronounceable word, was replaced by the word LORD. So English translations do not actually remove the name of God from the Old Testament but Jehovah’s Witnesses have in fact added it in their New World translation in the New Testament where it is never use in the Greek manuscripts. Here they took the Greek word from Lord and replaced it with the English word Jehovah. This kind of blind hypocrisy is typical of all Jehovah’s Witnesses. Muslim’s merely need to ask Jehovah’s Witnesses this stunning question: “Why he does the New World translation add the name Jehovah throughout the New Testament, when it is never found in any Greek manuscripts in the world? Aren’t you guilty of adding to the word of God in order to propagate your own false doctrine?”
Shortly after the article published in 1957, Bible scholars politely critiqued JW’s and refuted the claim of 50,000 errors in the KJV. Rather than retract the article, Jehovah’s Witnesses merely slithered back to Brooklyn to quietly hide while sales of their New World translation kept raking in the dough. Isn’t Satan clever! What is even more amazing, is that it is a well known fact that there was only one person on the translating committee of the NWT that could even read Greek or Hebrew. Four out of the five men on the committee had no Hebrew or Greek training at all. They had only a high school education. Franz studied Greek for two years at the University of Cincinnati, but dropped out after his sophomore year. When asked in a Scotland courtroom if he could translate Genesis 2:4 into Hebrew, Franz replied that he could not. The truth is that Franz was unable to translate Hebrew or Greek. What we are left with is a very inexperienced translating committee that twisted Scripture to make it fit the Society’s doctrine. Unlike every major translation, the NWT paraphrase was produced under a cloud of secrecy… now you know why!
Finally, Muslims think that because there are a few textual variations in the Bible, that it proves the Bible is corrupt. If we took the sum of all the 5,000 manuscripts of the Bible we will find differences ranging from a missing single letter to entire verses. I make these three important comments to my Muslim friends,
All the differences affect less than 1/10% of Scripture.
None of the textual variants change any doctrine or believe taught in the Bible. This is what Jesus meant when he said Scripture cannot be broken. The message of salvation and the kingdom of God is the same in every Bible in every country in every language in the world.
And perhaps most importantly, only Muslim’s claim the Koran contains no textual variants. Christians openly admit textual variants in the Bible, but the proof of textual variants in the Koran is devastating to Muslims for it contradicts their belief in the “unchangeable Mother book” in heaven.
It is in fact utterly dishonest and deceptive for Muslim’s to use this article to proof that the Greek manuscripts of the Bible have 50,000 errors, when all the article is claiming is a sub-standard translation process from the Greek manuscripts into the King James version. If Muslim’s cannot understand this important point, than they should not speak out of ignorance. If they do understand, which we believe they must, because we’ve explained it to them in great detail many times, than they are being dishonest and deceptive. But why would we expect Muslim’s to be any more honest than the Jehovah’s Witnesses they were quoting?
We must conclude this article by emphatically saying that the King James version is one of the most accurately translated Bibles in the world, even though there are three or four notable translation errors which have been corrected by modern translations. These would be translating Hades as hell in Luke 16; use of the word Easter and inclusion of the of the Trinitarian gloss in 1 John 5:7. We wholly recommend and endorse the King James version as an excellent translation from the original Greek.