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Hello and welcome to my channel Vice Rhino. Here today we're looking at
a video where Wes Huff of Apologetics Canada is being interviewed about whether or not
the Bible has been corrupted over time, which is really one of those questions
that I don't understand why it's still being asked so frequently. I mean,
I guess I know why people who believe that the Bible is the inerrent word
of God need to deal with the fact that the Bible has been corrupted without
admitting that. For as long as we've had enough documentation to figure it out,
we've had a record of the Bible being corrupted. So we'll get to
watch as they downplay the indisputable record that we have of scribes making mistakes,
adding in new things and taking out old things in an attempt to salvage infallibility
in spite of the overwhelming evidence of fallibility. Anyway, there's only a couple
of weeks left on the sale at my merch store, so go to Merch
dot vice Rhino dot com and use code Rhino fifteen a checkout for fifteen percent
off your order. Onto the video. The big objections I think in this
area is that some people might say, how you know that the Bible just
hasn't been corrupted, so you're talking copies. There are Christian scribes of many,
many, many generations, however, that the text of the Bible isn't
just Chinese whispers, of its fine where it's slowly being changed to suit political
and theological agendas. First to address what is likely the elephant in the room
for a good chunk of my North American viewers in the UK, a lot
of people call the telephone game Chinese whispers. I don't know why, and
apparently neither do they. Aside from some speculation about the inaccuracy of verbal meth
has passed on over the Great Wall of China, but given that it seems
to have originated during the Cold War, a time when the UK had a
bit of an issue with espionage from the USSR and China. It seems more
likely that it originated out of general xenophobia, but that doesn't really matter.
I just thought it would be weird to let it go completely unaddressed. Back
on topic, how do we know that the Bible was not subject to the
telephone game? Well, in short, we actually know the exact opposite.
It most definitely was changed as it was passed on from scribe describe, from
congregation to congregation, from country to country. And we know this because for
an ancient book, we actually do have a pretty good manuscript tradition, so
we can be fairly confident that the Bible we have today has been reasonably faithfully
pieced together to match what the originals likely said. But it is completely undeniable
that it has changed. It's just a question of what changes were made and
how many of them were there in the mess of manuscripts that you're describing.
What's your sense as to how you'd respond to that? Is this problem for
Christianity? No, it's not. It depends which brand of Christianity we're talking
about. Wes happens to believe in biblical inerrancy. So while I have no
doubt that he has some convoluted way that he accounts for the known errors in
his inerrant book. The fact of the matter is that the errors of the
Bible are well documented and so are a problem for inerrancy. Pretty much by
definition, that's the end of discussion, right, No, that is not
the end of the discussion. I know he's being tongue in cheek here,
but really, if the Bible were actually inerrant, that should be the end
of the discussion. The fact that you have to explain away the errors that
are impossible to ignore demonstrates that the Bible is not inerrant. Among apologists that
I've encountered who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible but still acknowledge that there
are errors in the manuscripts, the typical way to reconcile this is to appeal
to the originals. The originals are inerrant, but then fallible humans got their
hands on them and copied them down, sometimes making mistakes, sometimes outright inventing
passages to their theological agendas, sometimes deleting passages to suit their theological agendas.
But none of that matters. It's the originals that are an errant. You
know, those documents that we don't have access to and so can't examine to
confirm that they are an errant. How convenient, But this doesn't even come
close to solving the problem for starters. Why are the bits that we know
we're later insertions still included in modern Bibles? If it was the originals that
were in errant and not the later copies, did God reinspire a later scribe
deciding that his perfect word needed an update in that particular moment? If so,
why was it good enough for the first generation of Christians but not the
later Christians? And when was the cutoff point? When did God stop inspiring
updates? And another thing that you keep hearing about biblical inerrancy is that it's
not only that it's inerrant, it's that it is unchanging. Except we know
that it did change several times. When did those changes stop? Well?
An example I've used in the past is the NIV translation inserting words into the
text that fix some of the apparent errors, with those changes being removed in
the twenty eleven version. So we know that as recently as two thousand and
eleven, God's unchanging word was changing, But why were those changes wrong?
Could the NIV translators not have been inspired by God to fix Jesus mustard seed,
gaff and Holy Hell. I should have come across this earlier. But
there's a whole ass movement of Christians who opposed the two eleven NIV because basically
it's two woke. It made thousands of changes to the nineteen eighty four version
in order to use gender neutral language, like referring to Levitical priests in the
Old Testament, when the more accurate translation would be the priests of the Sons
of Levi. So the two eleven NIV changed some verses to be more accurate
to the manuscripts, like removing your from Matthew thirteen thirty two, but then
turned around and changed thousands of others to be less accurate to the manuscripts.
And as far as I can tell, the people who are arguing against the
two eleven NIV are still fine using the nineteen eighty four version with its apologetically
motivated inaccuracies. So were the translators who added your into Matthew thirteen thirty two
inspired by God to do so? Then why did God not inspire the translators
of other versions to do the same with theirs. And how about Jeremiah seven
twenty two. The NIV added the word just into that one, which completely
changed its meaning. In the ESV, it is for in the day that
I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to
your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But in the NIV,
both the nineteen eighty four and the twenty eleven editions, it is for
when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did
not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices. That one word just
is only found in the NIV and its offshoots no other translations, and it
makes the verse mean pretty much the exact opposite of what it means without it
was that addition inspired by God? Was it not? How can we tell
which ones are and which ones aren't. And if modern translations are not inspired
by God, then again I'm left wondering where the cutoff point was where text
could be changed, and that change could have been inspired by God. Yeah,
you know what, Biblical inerrancy becomes a ridiculous proposition if you actually take
it seriously. You refer to Chinese whispers, or it's sometimes called the telephone
game. That is a single line transmission. It's single in the sense that
it's me whispering into your ear and then you whispering to someone else's ear.
That's not true with copying process of the New Testament. It's not a single
line of transmission. It's multiple lines of transmission, and it's done by different
authors writing in different locations to different audiences who are likewise in different to a
graphable location, and then copyists and strides they copy that text and they're in
different locations, writing to different audiences or themselves in different locations. Yes and
no, so yes, the authors of the New Testament did come from different
regions, and we're writing letters to people who lived in different regions. But
that doesn't actually give us multiple lines of transmission of the message itself, because
we don't actually have the documents from all these different regions, not for several
centuries at any rate. For the first three hundred years of Christianity's existence,
we have a grand total of one hundred and twenty four New Testament manuscripts,
and every last one of them comes from Egypt. Now, admittedly this next
bit is speculation on my part, but given that the religion would change as
it spread geographically, as is well documented in the Bible itself. I mean,
after all, most of Paul's epistles are him fighting tooth and nail against
such changes, which serves to demonstrate that those changes were in fact happening.
But given that, it stands to reason that the church in Egypt would have
been different from the churches in various other locations throughout the ancient world, and
given that we have a well documented manuscript tradition showing that scribes would at least
sometimes feel free to alter the text to fit better with their theology, it's
all but guaranteed that a letter being copied in Egypt would have had different change
is than one copied and say Corinth. And if an orthodoxy emerged where certain
beliefs and practices were elevated over others, and this orthodoxy, let's hypothetically say
it managed to become the official religion of the most powerful empire in the world
for several centuries, and this orthodoxy has a history of going to great length
to suppress any doctrine that they deemed to be heretical, then it's not outside
the realm of plausibility that they would have destroyed any manuscripts that they deemed to
be heretical, thus leaving us with just the one line of transmission from Egypt
that they actually approved of. And this destruction of materials would likely be both
active and passive. Actively they destroyed manuscripts that they thought were heretical. Well,
passively, they just don't copy those manuscripts, allowing the existing ones to
be lost to the sands of time, all well overwhelming the archaeological record with
obsessive copying of the official Orthodox versions. Again, this is speculation on my
part. We don't actually know what happened to those manuscripts, but such behavior
would definitely not have been out of the ordinary for the Roman Catholic Church,
and it does nicely explain why we've only ever found manuscripts from Egypt for the
first three centuries of Christianity. And so you almost have layers upon layers to
the multifaceted aspect of the text. So it's not a single line of transmission,
it's a multiple line of transmission injected with steroids. No, it's multiple
lines of transmission as filtered through a single bottleneck line of transmission in Egypt.
If you play the telephone game and have multiple parallel games going at the same
time, but before you get to the end, all of those parallel games
have to go through one person who gets to unilaterally decide which of the parallel
games they want to transmit, and may or may not transmit them faithfully.
Then you don't get to claim that the existence of the parallel games means that
whatever came out at the end must be accurate to the originals. When it
came to scribes, they weren't asking for their qualifications, whether they had a
diploma from Pharisee University. They wanted you to be able to get a copy
of the text. And so this resulted in the spread of these Christian documents
really far, really quickly. And yes, that resulted in things like scribal
errors and mistakes from handwriting. Yes, and this is a problem because,
as you said, we know that the text spread very far, very fast,
but we don't have any of the far flung texts. We only have
the Egyptian ones. And as you yourself pointed out, the early scribes were
not trained, some weren't even literate, and we're just copying as best they
could, and this resulted in many many errors entering the text. And what's
more, the time period for which we have the fewest manuscripts is also the
time period when most of the scribes would have been amateurs, making mistakes and
altering the text. So ultimately we don't know what competing copies of the same
text were floating around out in the world. We just know the ones that
survived. And we do know that early Christianity was quite diverse, and belief
mostly from the writings of proto Orthodox Church fathers who were trying to counter the
claims made by the competing sects, with the books that they wrote to count
to them often being our only source for their existence in the first place,
as the competing Christian documents were either outright destroyed or just allowed to die a
death of neglect. But it also means that pretty early on, within a
couple of centuries, you have copies of the Gospels of Acts of the business
of Paul and Peter and James and Jude in places all over North Africa,
throughout the Middle East, even into Asia and the British Aisle. That phrase
in a couple of centuries is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And you've
got to assume that by couple he does not mean two, because it's not
for at least three centuries anyway. By in a couple of centuries he seems
to mean not until after the Roman Empire had officially become Christian. So yes,
you find Christian documents spread throughout the Christian Empire. What else would you
expect. And so the accusation of the da Vinci Code one that they inserted
the divinity of Christ into the Bible. I don't know of any atheists who
take the da Vinci Code series sleep. The Book of John, at the
very least, is quite clear about the divinity of Jesus. Sure there are
books onto which his divinity was imposed, and even then it depends on what
you mean by divinity. But with all this in mind, it's still a
point of fact that it took a council organized by the Roman emperor to decide
once and for all that Jesus was in fact divine. I feel like that's
not the kind of thing that would be necessary if he actually were the nature
of how the text was spread out through und the ancient world is that no
one person or no one group could have controlled the text at any one point
in time. So I guess the fact that the vast, vast majority of
manuscripts to ever exist were directly commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church doesn't matter,
because I'm fairly certain that they had near universal control over which books got copied
and which manuscripts to copy those books from, for somewhere around a thousand years.
Sure, occasionally someone would translate a Bible or a book of the Bible
into a vernacular language, but the Catholic Church would actively seek out and destroy
such translations in order to maintain control. If the Bible is written in a
language that requires you to be highly educated in order to understand it, then
that puts a barrier to the common people reading it for themselves and coming to
their own conclusions. The common people must filter their understanding through their local priest,
who has access to the approved official copy of the Bible from the Roman
Catholic Church. It was like shrapnel. They were blown everywhere all over the
ancient world. The officially approved versions were blown everywhere all over the ancient world.
It's still more than a little suspicious that before the Roman Catholic Church became
a thing. Only the Egyptian manuscripts seemed to have survived, despite the fact
that we know that these books were circulating far and wide at that time period.
In order for Constantine to have wanted to insert anything, he would have
had to go and dig up copies of, say, the Gospel of John,
buried in the stands of Egypt, hundreds of years before he was even
born. Conversely, if he didn't want to insert things into the text,
but just preferred one version of Christianity over another one, all he would have
had to do was declare that only the version of Christianity that he liked was
the one that was allowed to persist, and then competing versions throughout the Empire
would either be absorbed or eliminated, and competing texts could be destroyed or ignored.
I am not of the opinion that Constantine made any insertions to the text.
In fact, my understanding is that Constantine, especially in his early days,
was rather lackluster in his Christianity and didn't much care about the various denominational
fights, calling the Council of Nicea mainly as a way to get them to
shut up about their disagreements and stop trying to get him to adjudicate them.
And keep in mind, we're talking about fourth century stuff here with Constantine,
meaning that the time we start to actually see ancient manuscripts coming from regions outside
of Egypt corresponds with the time that one sect of Christianity became politically dominant over
the other sects. So, yeah, I am not saying that Constantine dug
up a bunch of manuscripts, had them edited, and then reburied them,
as you seem to be implying in this argument. I'm saying that after Constantine
gave one sect of Christianity political power, they used that power to suppress competing
sects of Christianity, and part of that suppression probably involved the destruction of competing
manuscripts. It's not feasible and it's not probable. We know from the history
of how the ex spread. We know what Christians were reading in the second
century, and in the third, and the four and in the fifth.
Yeah, actually we do know a lot of what they were reading. Then
there was the Signs Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Adam,
the Egerton Gospel, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Sophia of Jesus Christ.
The Oh wait, none of those are books that made it into the
Bible, are they? They are all apocryphal, and yet some of these
books potentially predate the canonical Gospels. We know that there was a great diversity
of Christian belief that predated the Roman Catholic Church, and we know that these
competing sects died out, many of them in the wake of Christianity gaining its
power in Rome. These other sects would have viewed the books that we call
apocryphal as God inspired scripture, and we know for a fact that many of
them were suppressed and wiped out by the Roman Catholic Church. For some of
the apocryphal books, the only knowledge we have of them comes either from orthodox
and proto Orthodox church leaders writing counter apologetics against them, or from locations where
the books apparently were hidden and buried for safekeeping in what appears to be an
attempt to preserve them from their impending destruction. This whole argument completely ignores the
fact that we know that the Church actively suppressed any document that it considered to
be heretical, So why would they not do the same from manuscripts of canonical
Gospels that had variations that they also considered heretical, not just in Greek and
Hebrew, but in Latin and in Coptic and an old Church Slavonic, and
it's a Hitic, Boheric, you know, you name the language. If
it was an agent world, the Christians were trying to translate it into Yes,
that is correct and fun. Little fact about that. The Latin text
that was used by the Church well into the twelfth century was one called the
Vestus Latina. But a guy named Jerome translated his own version of the text
into Latin in the fourth century, and when the churches in North Africa heard
that version read aloud, there were literal riots and protests in the churches because
of how different it was from the Vestus Latina. And that version that was
so different from the previous one that it literally caused riots is now known as
the Latin Vulgate and has been the official Latin version of the text since the
ninth century, when Charlemagne sought to standardize the texts. Yes, I am
aware that I just said that the Vestus Latina was used into the twelfth century,
which is later than the ninth century. But it turns out standardization of
texts wasn't all that easy in a time when it could take months or even
years to travel across Europe. And also, Charlemagne wasn't the pope, so
while he did have considerable influence over several church reforms, he was not completely
successful. My point is that the official Latin Bible that is still used by
the Catholic Church today was such a drastic change from the previous version that it
caused riots. So to claim that changes were not being made to the text
for theological or political reasons is at best naive, and with translated version it's
even easier to do. It's impossible to directly translate from one language into another
without there being at least some interpretation and ambiguity. Even the simplest concepts don't
translate cleanly. Ask any Canadian school child for whom French is not their first
language what the phrase je mapel means. They will likely say that it means
my name is when a direct word for word translation would be I am called.
But because we don't introduce ourselves in English with the phrase I am called,
the phrase gets mistranslated in order to better capture the actual meaning, rather
than just directly translating the words. Well, what happens when there is doubt
or ambiguity about the actual meaning of a phrase. In an ideal situation,
whoever is doing the translating chooses the meaning that they think fits the intentions of
the original author best, regardless of their personal beliefs on the matter. In
reality, though, they are likely to have chosen the interpretation that fits best
with their theological beliefs. Also, it is again worth mentioning that we don't
actually have any of the non Egyptian manuscripts from any of these translations from the
first three hundred years of Christianity's existence, so it's not like we can just
use them to compare with the manuscripts that we do have to see what changes
might have made in different regions. That history is just so badanced. Even
under Roman persecution, the Christian message was just spread far and wide. It
bears mentioning at this point that, well, there were sporadic bouts of localized
Christian persecution in the Roman Empire, such as neuroblaming the Christians for the Fire
of Roman sixty four CE, there were no empire wide persecutions of the Christians
until three hundred and three CE, and that lasted until three hundred eleven CE,
for a grand total of eight years. Now, don't get me wrong,
I'm not trying to minimize the suffering of early Christians who were persecuted,
nor am I defending the act of persecution. I merely point this out because
apologists like to imply, if not outright claim, that Christians suffered a systemic,
empire wide persecution for the first three hundred years of their existence, which
is just not the case, and any accusation of full scale corruption it would
have been hard to do today, It was impossible to do that. Why
Why would it be harder to accomplish something like that back in a time when
you wouldn't be called out for it immediately on social media and where there isn't
an electronic record of all the changes and revisions that you might make to a
digital text. I think that sort of thing is way harder to get away
with today, especially since the widespread adoption of the Internet, than it would
have been back then. And even then they didn't completely get away with it.
They got away with it enough to maintain and expand their political power and
influence. But looking back on it, now we know that there were all
sorts of shenanigans going on, and that the Catholic Church was undeniably a corrupt
organization that was bent on gaining and keeping as much power and control as they
could. Why would you expect that the destruction of heretical documents would be off
the table when we know for a fact that they engaged in the destruction of
heretical documents. That's it for this one. Today's comment to the day comes
just from Jimmy James eight one sixty four, who says Amelek and his tribe
were Nephelim. But I assume you don't know what that is either. If
Nephelim were still here today, no would survive, study for yourself or remain
ignorant and continue to look like a fool. Yeah, you know what.
I've seen this claim before, and there's a few problems with it. First,
there is zero evidence to support the idea that there were a race of
giants living back then, with the only evidence being mediocre photoshop jobs found in
YouTube videos. Second, I have never found an adequate justification for believing that
the authors of the Bible thought that the Amalekites were Nephelim. They are mentioned
alongside each other once in numbers thirteen, where the Hebrew Spies give the report
of who lived in the Promised Land, but they never called the Amalekites Nephelim.
They're just both groups of people who live in the land that they're about
to conquer. Third Genesis six speaks rather positively about the Nephelim, saying the
Nephelim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of
God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These
were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. Mighty
men of renown doesn't sound like a bad thing, and this makes it seem
like they were a type of people who had died out before the flood.
The Genesis sixth mention, even if we ignore the implied dying out of these
great men of renown, comes before the flood. So if the Nephelim were
real, which to be clear, they were not, they would have died
out in the flood. The fact that the Bible mentions them still existing after
the flood is a bit of a problem for people who want to believe that
the flood was a literal global flood that killed everything on the planet except what
was on Noah's ark. I mean, the olive tree surviving the flood kind
of obviously quashes that view, But Young Earth creationists don't seem to have a
problem with that one for some reason. So why not the Nephelim? Two?
Sure it works, I mean it doesn't, but we'll go with it.
Fifth, If the ancient Hebrews were able to wipe out the Nephelim,
then why do you think that the Nephelim would have successfully wiped out all of
humanity? If a tribe with Bronze age weapons could do it, why would
future generations with better weapons have a problem. Sixth, the Amalekites were not
in fact wiped out, at least not if we believe the Bible, because
King David had issues with them after he took over from Saul. Despite Saul
apparently wiping them all out except for one dude. That dude must have gotten
around quite a bit to build them back up and do a nation that was
a legitimate threat to King David in just a couple of years. So,
if I grant your point, humanity should no longer exist, as the Amalekites
were never completely wiped out. Given that humanity continues to exist, I am
of the opinion that you are wrong, So Jimmy, feel free to study
for yourself or remain ignorant and continue to look like a fool. Thanks for
watching. Don't forget to head to merch dot vice Rhino dot com and use
code Rhino fifteen for fifteen percent off your order. I'll be back next Friday
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