Scholars refute BBC program claiming Bible was changed

A recent BBC program “The Beauty of Books: Ancient Bibles" claimed the church deliberately introduced thousands of changes into the New Testament for theological reasons. Were church leaders promoting some nefarious agenda, a secretive plot to deceive the masses?

“Similar statements have been made before in the media and we believe they are highly misleading,” says Dr. David Instone-Brewer, a research fellow at Tyndale House, a Bible study center for scholars adjacent to Cambridge University.

The first half of the program highlighted “Codex Sinaiticus,” the oldest Bible bound in a single volume, made in about AD 350. “Codex Sinaiticus is a marvelous manuscript because it contains the oldest full text of the New Testament on top-quality material,” notes Instone-Brewer. There are approximately 23,000 corrections visible in the original manuscripts, which raises questions in some quarters.

“The 23,000 corrections may seem surprising,” Instone-Brewer notes, “and the program concluded that these had a theological agenda.” The BBC program examined two noteworthy examples, both in the Book of Mark. One verse added "Son of God" as a 'correction' to Mark 1:1, and another adds "for they were afraid." The narrator concluded that although some corrections might be scribal errors, these two 'corrections' indicated a theological bias.

Dr. Instone-Brewer takes exception to the interpretation of these corrections.  “Although there are some corrections, where the original is erased or overwritten, this is relatively rare,” he notes. “Most of the 23,000 aren't 'corrections' because they leave the original text fully visible, putting a dot under or over letters instead of deleting them, and writing above letters so you can clearly see the earlier text, as the screenshots from the program show clearly.”

“This demonstrates they didn't want to expunge bad theology, but they wanted to record that other manuscripts were often subtly different. The vast majority of these changes are very minor -- alternate spellings or slight grammatical variations which make no difference to the meaning of the text.”

Thousands of manuscripts that came after Sinaiticus have tiny differences due to inexpert copying in the early church, according to Instone-Brewer. “If a class of students all copied out a short book by hand, they would all make mistakes, but the teacher might still be able to reconstruct the original from all the copies. Textual scholars of the New Testament do this same work today.”

Tyndale House contains excellent photographic facsimiles of Codex Sinaiticus, which are closely studied next to the original. Scholars at the study center can look at the identical lettering of different scribes by enlarging the text on computers.

The documentary concluded that the phrase "Son of God" in Mark 1:1 was missing from the original Gospel and that Mark believed that Jesus became divine at his baptism.  “If Mark had wanted to teach this, then Jesus' baptismal saying would be: "You are now my Son" or "You have become my Son," notes Instone-Brewer. “But Mark couldn't make this point by omitting "Son of God" from verse 1, because no one would expect it to be there.”

“This phrase occurs in some older manuscripts and not in others, and the debate continues about whether it was added or omitted, but it is unlikely that the variant is an attempt to change the theological message of the whole gospel,” he notes. “Some manuscripts have “Son of God” added above the line.”

The main conclusion of the documentary is that the scribes of Codex Sinaiticus added alterations because of their biases. “The only theological agenda that can be demonstrated is a high reverence for the text and a desire to record differences in manuscripts so that the original can be preserved,” Instone-Brewer concludes.

Dr Dirk Jongkind, another research fellow at Tyndale House concurs. "This is the weak point in the whole documentary: everyone who makes the effort to see what sort of alterations are made to the text will see that the scribes' agenda was to preserve the readings found in older handwritten copies."