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Transcript 346C — The Original Languages of the Bible
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Good evening. I have a question. I'm a born again Jewish Christian, very very young in the Christian faith, though. And every time that I listen to a pastor on television or radio, or even the pastors of the churches that I've attended, when they're interpreting something from either the King James Version or the Living Version, they usually relate back to what they call the original Greek. Could you explain that? I'm not at all familiar with when it was written, or anything, because I know Christ was in Israel, and I know there were Romans there, and Arabs, and Israelites. But Greeks?
HC: Actually, the Old Testament, that is, the part of the Bible that we call the Old Testament, which is the Bible that Jesus used, was originally written in the Hebrew language almost entirely. There was a little of it written in the Aramaic, but almost entirely it was written in the Hebrew language. And we call that the Masoretic text.
CALLER: Right. Those are the scripture that I was raised with.
HC: All right. Now that is the most accurate of the original, or the oldest copies that can be found. There wee a Greek version of the Old Testament later on produced, which was called Septuagint. It was produced by "the seventy," and therefore it was called the Septuagint. But the Greek is a translation and is not nearly as accurate or as authoritative as the Masoretic. When the King James translation was made, and any good translation, it always is made from the Masoretic text.
Of course, we do not have the original document that Isaiah wrote, or that Moses wrote, or the scribes under the kings of Israel wrote. But we do have very ancient copies. For example, in the Dead Sea Scrolls they found a copy of the Book of Isaiah that dates by Carbon 14 (which dating at that time in history is quite accurate) about 150 years before Christ. So that means that that copy was quite close to the original, certainly within 300 or 400 years.
When they compare ancient copies with ancient copies, where these copies are several hundred years apart, they find that the copies are so close to each other, it really indicates how accurately they have been copied. The Jewish nation was just exceedingly careful in copying from copy to copy. In our day, when we have these paraphrased editions, and so on, which are not the Bible at all, not at all, there is just a woeful lack of the holiness of the Bible.
CALLER: You're referring to the Good News Bible, and the New Living Bible?
HC: Anything that all that's a paraphrased edition, it must not be considered the Bible.
CALLER: That explains why I get the terrible feeling I do when I hear people quoting from it.
HC: Yes, because it is so far from the original, and it has so much speculation in it, and it just denies what the Word of God is.
Now the New Testament was originally written in the Greek language, although a little tiny bit of it was in the Aramaic. But virtually all of it was in the Greek language. And again, we don't have the original autographs, but we have very ancient copies that are available for the translators.
And so this is the basis for a good translation, the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament, the Greek New Testament.
CALLER: I see. Another question: In different places in the Bible, with reference to time, I see the little abbreviation cf. What does that mean?
HC: Compare. I don't know what that really means, but it's something the person who published the Bible has put there to indicate that we are to check with these other scriptures for cross referencing.
CALLER: It's usually in the King James version that I see it, because I only use the King James and the Masoretic text.
HC: Are you talking about something that's in the margin?
CALLER: No. I mean within the verses. In italics, c.f., and there's usually not another scripture verse, but it's actually within a sentence.
HC: I don't know what that is. I do know this, that in the King James Bible occasionally you'll find a word italicized. Now the reason for that is that in order to help make the sentence flow, the translator took the liberty of introducing a word that was not in the original, and he italicizes it so that the reader could know that it was introduced by the translator, and therefore is not part of the Holy Canon.
CALLER: Then if you were to read that sentence without that word, you would get the original.
HC: Yes. You'd be much closer to the original. There's a dramatic illustration of this in Daniel 8, where it speaks about the daily sacrifice being taken away, for example, in Daniel 8:11. Now the word "daily" is in the original. The word sacrifice was not in the original. It is a speculation of the translator that that is what is being referred to. And so they introduce the word sacrifice. Actually, in my judgment, in studying the context, I'm quite convinced that the translator introduced the wrong word. When God was talking about the daily, or the continual here, He had not in mind the sacrifice at all. But rather, He had in mind the candlestick that was burning in the temple. This is a word that's also used in Leviticus 24:4, where it's the identical Hebrew word used in connection with continual. And for a lot of reasons I believe it is the continual.
But because I see the word sacrifice in italics, I know that that is a suggestion by the translator, but it is not found in the original.
CALLER: I see. Thank you very much.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night.