Dr Paul Allen

We can illustrate the need for text criticism by examining a particular text, Psalm 104:6a . תְּהוֹם כַּלְּבוּשׁ כִּסִּיתוֹ A wooden translation would be, “The deep like the garment you covered it.” This text, though, contains a grammatical problem and a theological problem. The grammatical problem is in the final form כִּסִּיתוֹ,, which is typically translated, “You covered it.” There is no masculine singular antecedent for the suffix. The logical antecedent is אֶרֶץ (“the earth”) in verse 5 , but אֶרֶץ is feminine. The LXX has, περιβόλαιον αὐτοῦ (“his garment”), and the Vulgate follows suit with amictus eius (“his garment”), providing evidence for the masculine, singular suffix, but apparently reading כְּסוּתוֹ (“his garment”) for כִּסִּיתוֹ (“you covered it”). Other witnesses give evidence of a feminine, singular suffix, which the context seems to require. The theological problem is found in the logic of the passage if we keep the text as is. Verses 5–9 are a strophe that describe...

You’re in church for worship, and your pastor is preaching through the book of Acts. The day’s text is Acts 8, the part about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Your pastor is reading from the ESV, and you’re following along in your NKJV. The translations are a little different, but you can usually follow. The pastor reads And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. ( Acts 8:36–38, ESV ) Following along in your NKJV, you see: Now as they went down the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, “See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?” 37 Then Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” And he answered and said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” 38 So he commanded the chariot to stand still. And both Philip and the...

The Bible was written at a time when the means for sharing documents were far different from the technology we have today. When the church in Thessaloniki received a letter from the apostle Paul in the mid-first century, the believers there would have read it aloud in their gatherings, and then devoted followers who recognized the value of Paul’s words would have produced handwritten copies of the letter to pass around to a wider audience. By the end of the first century, Paul’s letters were being copied as a collection. Copying manuscripts Hand-copying of the Pauline corpus continued through the centuries, until Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in fifteenth-century Germany. With some variation, this process of repeated hand-copying happened with every book in the Bible—the New Testament books in Greek, and the Old Testament books in Hebrew and Aramaic. In addition to these original language manuscripts, Christians translated their sacred texts into other languages. The Old...