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Transcript 231C — Is the Bible Missing Any Information?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Did the original version have more details than what we read in, say, the King James translation? In other words, how do we know how tall Jesus is, and his age, and so on. Somehow all the pictures of Jesus are the same. There must be more detail in the original Bible than I can find in the Bible we read today.
HC: The question that was asked concerns the data concerning the history that is recorded for us in the Bible that might not be in the Bible. When the translators of the Bible worked, did they actually pick and choose from a great abundance of data and then collate what they thought was pertinent, and thus we have the Bible?
Well, the fact of course is that that is not at all the case. The translators worked from very exact ancient copies of the Bible, and faithfully they translated every single word into what we call the Bible today. There was no other information.
Now that doesn't mean that there were no other writers at various points in history. The New Testament, for example, was written after around AD 30. And there were other writers of that period. There were writers who wrote particularly during the period around 100 to 200 BC. There were writers like Josephus, who wrote about the same time that the New Testament writers wrote.
We can read their works and discover quite a bit of information about the situation that existed at that time. But these secular works such as the writings of Josephus are not trustworthy because they're like any history book They carry the bias of the writer and the mistakes of the writer, the lack of proper research that the writer may have been guilty of. All of this is found in any of these secular writings.
This is not the case with the Bible. The Bible is the infallible Word of God. It is altogether trustworthy and dependable. Under no circumstance would there be any mistakes found in it.
Now when we talk about the person of Jesus, how tall He was, what did He look like, we of course have no idea at all what He looked like. The Bible doesn't tell us. These pictures that we see of Jesus are absolutely a fabrication. They are simply the imagination of man, of an artist. They no more represent the Lord Jesus than they represent my uncle Harry, or your uncle Tom. They don't represent Jesus at all.
In fact, I personally believe that they should not even exist, because the Bible indicates that we should not make any appearance of God Himself, and the Lord Jesus is God.