youtube.com/watch?v=Il-Joaulnlc
I saw this video from Business Insider. It is saying that famous verses in the bible weren’t in the original manuscript, etc.
Is this true?
It bothers a lot of people to even discuss this subject, because it shakes their faith, I suppose.
Old Testament: Hebrew and Aramaic had no upper and lower case, no spaces between words, no punctuation, no footnotes, no dictionary to define the words in scripture, and what ever else I forgot, off the top of my head. There were no chapter and verse numbers in the originals (not until the 1100’s or so). So, when you pick up and read your English translation, there’s a LOT of opinion and interpretation that has already taken place.
By close analysis of the text, Genesis does not have those 50 chapters we see now, it was divided into 12 sections because of some wording found which indicates the transition from one section to the next. And, 12 is significant for the tribes of Israel.
Because of different names for God in different places in Genesis, because of the probably melding of oral traditions (2 creation accounts one after another, three accounts of the flood woven together, etc) a hypothesis was developed that Genesis is a patchwork of verbal accounts. There are even pagan words inserted in a couple places.
New Testament: The gospels (all four) have similarities, up to a point, then vary in different ways, for example. In one place, Jesus is quoted as referring to Himself as Jesus Christ, not otherwise attested to in the gospels, undoubtedly a later addition.
At another point, Jesus said that we must take up OUR cross and follow Him. What would his followers have understood by that?
Chapters 20 and 21 of John’s gospel seem to both be concluding chapters, 21 seemingly added later.
Judaism and Catholicism each profess to accept the scriptures as they have received them, with whatever changes may be evident.
In a book probably not common to Catholic readers, the Commentary on Numbers from the Jewish Publication Society, there is an interesting textual analysis to show that the whole Torah (first five books) have some very strategically placed verses, giving it a structure that is not readily apparent and was only described in the later 20th century.
(There is a large chiastic structure there, spread over several books. A chiastic structure takes the form ABCD X D’C’B’A’, where the letters are statements, and the primed statements are obvious repetitions of a form of the corresponding letter.) In this case the X statement is the one that is being highlighted. In this case, the X in the Torah is the giving of the covenant at Sinai and the structure is a lot larger than ABCD…
These have been studied for centuries. Sometimes there are notes in study bibles about a verse added or taken out. but,
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary is the Catholic version describing some of the research about the subject you raise.
In some cases, different people and groups have intentionally changed English wording to reflect their system of beliefs.
In Crossing the Threshold of Hope St John Paul II noted that some people reject faith in Christianity, because they don’t like how God chose to reveal Himself, in the word and in Jesus Christ and in the Church.
