Q. I am so grateful I came across your blog. I struggled with understanding about the Trinity, it just never seemed logical that three could be one. I finally started to see that as a possibility. But then I read an article in Newsweek magazine entitled “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” I still totally know that God exists, the Son exists, and the Holy Spirit exists. But that article claims that the Scriptures might no longer be presented in a a totally correct dialect any longer. If, indeed, they have been changed, why have they not been taken back to the original Greek, to be totally accurate again?
I read the Newsweek article for the first time after I received your question. Let me share some thoughts about it.
I think one important thing to say first about the article is that it is completely one-sided. The sources for the article are all people who do not believe that the Bible is the word of God. Indeed, some of them, such as Bart Ehrman, are former believers who now actively oppose the faith. Imagine if someone wrote an article about a company and cited as sources only disgruntled former employees. Would we consider that fair and accurate reporting? There are very good responses to all of the claims that this article makes, and it would have been responsible journalism to seek out and quote believing biblical scholars who could have given those responses. That would at least have told both sides of the story, whatever the reporter believed personally. Instead, the tone and bias of the article make me feel that Newsweek was engaging in sensationalism. The fact that they published the article a couple of days before Christmas (on December 23, 2014) suggests that they were indeed trying to be provocative, which I find cynical and disappointing. So please take all of these things into account as you think about this article. Do not regard it as a fair and balanced treatment of its subject.
As for the claims that the article makes, while they are presented as if they were news that would stun believers, they come as absolutely no surprise to people who are well familiar with the Bible. For example, the author, Kurt Eichenwald, says at one point that preachers and politicians have not read the Bible; “Neither has the pope. Neither have I. And neither have you.” It turns out that he means that no one has read the originals of the biblical writings. And that is quite true. We no longer have the originals. All we have are copies. But we have many independent copies, and for the New Testament writings, they date back to close to the composition of the works themselves. The oldest ones differ in small ways, but that simply increases our confidence in them as independent witnesses.
Indeed, Bibles published by and for people who believe in the Scriptures as the word of God are careful to say where the copies differ. Let me use as an example one case that Eichenwald cites. The New International Version (NIV) includes a note before the story of the woman caught in adultery that explains, “The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53–8:11.” The English Standard Version (ESV) notes similarly, “The earliest manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11.” And so forth. So believing biblical scholars are aware that John most likely did not write this section, and they are completely forthcoming about that.
I would say further that Eichenwald’s claim, “The event simply never happened,” is not justified by the absence of the account from early manuscripts of the gospel of John. Rather, as Bruce Metzger says, writing on behalf of the Editorial Committee of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, “The account has all the earmarks of historical veracity. It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in various parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places.”
Eichenwald says further that the biblical manuscript tradition includes “changes made by literate scribes centuries after the manuscripts were written because of what they decided were flaws in the accounts they were recopying.” He cites this example:
An early version of Luke 3:16 in the New Testament said, “John answered, saying to all of them.…” The problem was that no one had asked John anything, so a fifth century scribe fixed that by changing the words to “John, knowing what they were thinking, said.…” Today, most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct, yet confusing, “John answered.” Others, such as the New Life Version Bible, use other words that paper over the inconsistency.
Let me say in response first that this is not an inconsistency. This is simply a Hebrew idiom—”he answered and said”—that Luke is employing, even though he is writing in Greek. This Hebrew idiom can indicate how someone responded to a situation, not just to a question that someone asked. But the fifth-century scribe apparently no longer understood that idiom and felt that he needed to account for the term “answered” somehow. So is this evidence that errors have crept into the Bible steadily over the centuries? No, this is actually a demonstration of the self-correcting process of manuscript transmission. As Eichenwald himself acknowledges, “Most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct” reading. The reading is only “confusing” (as he also calls it) if one does not understand the Hebrew idiom. Now since it is the case that readers may not understand that idiom today, I think English Bibles serve their readers well if they convey its meaning in other words. The reading in the New Life Version (NLV), “John said to all of them,” does not “paper over” an “inconsistency.” It conveys the meaning in natural English where a Hebrew idiom might be misunderstood.
As for the Trinity itself, Eichenwald writes, “So where does the clear declaration of God and Jesus as part of a triumvirate appear in the Greek manuscripts? Nowhere.” But this ta-da statement is only true on one level: The actual word “Trinity” does not appear in the Bible. This, too, is something that people who believe in the Trinity and in the Bible as the word of God freely acknowledge. If you study systematic theology in seminary, as I did, when you get to subject of the Trinity, that’s the first thing you are told. But this does not mean that the concept of the Trinity is not clearly taught in the Bible. For example, Jesus himself told his disciples, as he was giving them his final instructions before ascending to heaven, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” In his first epistle, the apostle Peter addressed his readers as people who had been “chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ.” The apostle Paul ended his second epistle to the Corinthians with this benediction: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” And so forth. So the absence in Scripture of a word that was later adopted as a name for a doctrine does not mean the absence of that doctrine itself.
As for 1 John 5:7, “For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one,” it is true that these words do not appear in any early Greek manuscripts. They appear to be a later addition. But once again, people who believe in the Bible as the word of God freely acknowledge this. The NIV, for example, puts those words in a footnote and explains that they are “not found in any Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century.” So this is further evidence of the self-correcting nature of the manuscript tradition and the use of it in modern Bibles. Moreover, belief in the Trinity does not depend on this one verse. As I have already shown, that doctrine is well expressed in other New Testament writings.
I hope that these observations will be reassuring to you. I am sorry that you encountered a biased, sensationalist article just as you had begun to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. I hope you will appreciate that that doctrine has a sound biblical and theological basis. It remains a paradox, a mystery, but as I have said in other posts on this blog, it nevertheless tells us essential and beautiful things about God.
Good Question 