Where do they look up the Greek and Hebrew?

[Elzee]

I posted this on Ask the Apologist but it didn’t get picked.
My question was similar to this: I’ll often hear Tim Staples, Jimmy Akin, etc. say that a particular English word in the bible is this word or that word in Hebrew or Greek. For example, in Greek there are several words that get translated to our English word ‘know’. When explaining a passage of Scripture, they will say something like ‘in this instance, the Greek word for ‘know’ that is being used is ….’ and then proceed to explain what the word was in Greek (or Hebrew, etc.)

My question is…how do they know what particular version or tense of a Greek or Hebrew word was used since we don’t have the original scrolls? Is there an ‘earliest’ available translation all apologists refer to? Do they refer back to early Church Fathers commentaries? I often find myself using the examples they give (as I have on this forum a few times), but if I’m ever asked how these people are certain about the Greek and Hebrew words they are basing a controversial interpretation on, I wouldn’t know what to say. I hope this isn’t a silly question. Since it didn’t get picked for Ask the Apologist I have a feeling it might be…

 

[RyanL]

Here’s a link to a Protestant site with free tools (includes LXX and Hebrew OT). For the most part, scholars agree on the texts with only minor exceptions. There are a few different manuscripts (Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus), but the renditions are a match with only very minor exceptions (in my opinion).

searchgodsword.org/isb/

God bless, and remember: the best Bible to have is the one you read.



RyanL

 

[Liberian]

Elzee:

I posted this on Ask the Apologist but it didn’t get picked.
My question was similar to this: I’ll often hear Tim Staples, Jimmy Akin, etc. say that a particular English word in the bible is this word or that word in Hebrew or Greek. For example, in Greek there are several words that get translated to our English word ‘know’. When explaining a passage of Scripture, they will say something like ‘in this instance, the Greek word for ‘know’ that is being used is ….’ and then proceed to explain what the word was in Greek (or Hebrew, etc.)

My question is…how do they know what particular version or tense of a Greek or Hebrew word was used since we don’t have the original scrolls? Is there an ‘earliest’ available translation all apologists refer to? Do they refer back to early Church Fathers commentaries? I often find myself using the examples they give (as I have on this forum a few times), but if I’m ever asked how these people are certain about the Greek and Hebrew words they are basing a controversial interpretation on, I wouldn’t know what to say. I hope this isn’t a silly question. Since it didn’t get picked for Ask the Apologist I have a feeling it might be…

Elzee,

No, it most certainly is not a silly question. It’s a great way to check up that you are not being hoodwinked.

While we don’t have the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, we do have copies of them. We have a LOT of copies of them. In fact, the New Testament is absolutely the best documented piece of writing from before the invention of the printing press. The reason you never hear of “variant manuscripts” of Caesar’s Gallic Wars or Aristophanes’ plays is that we don’t have any "variant manuscripts.’ We have one, maybe two, medieval manuscripts of each, and they are copies from the Middle Ages, several hundreds of years after the originals were written down. On the other hand, we have literally hundreds of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament dating from one or two hundred years after it was originally written down.

The Old Testament is a different, but also compelling, story. Our earliest manuscripts of the Old Testament dated from about the same time as our earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, a few hundred years AD. This is over a thousand years after the earliest parts of the Old Testament were written down. Then about 50 years ago somebody discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls which dated from about the time of Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain large chunks of the Old Testament, and what they contain is pretty much identical to the other ancient manuscripts we have. This demonstrates that the texts did not change significantly over the course of a few centuries.

Now to the best of my knowledge James Akin and Scott Hahn don’t have access to these ancient manuscripts. Instead, some scholar has copied the text from these manuscripts down and published the copy. They read the copy. I can’t speak for them, but I get the Greek words from my Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament, bought in my Protestant days, with the words indexed to the numbers in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the (Protestant) Bible. It’s incomplete, but it’s a lot better than nothing. The Old Testament Hebrew words I get from a Jewish Hebrew-English Tanach (that’s their name for the Old Testament–“T” for Torah, or Law, “N” for Nevi’im, or Prophets, and “Ch” (pronounced “Kh”) for K’tuvim, or Writings) that the Jewish Publication Society puts out.

• Liberian

 

[porthos11]

Elzee:

I posted this on Ask the Apologist but it didn’t get picked.
My question was similar to this: I’ll often hear Tim Staples, Jimmy Akin, etc. say that a particular English word in the bible is this word or that word in Hebrew or Greek. For example, in Greek there are several words that get translated to our English word ‘know’. When explaining a passage of Scripture, they will say something like ‘in this instance, the Greek word for ‘know’ that is being used is ….’ and then proceed to explain what the word was in Greek (or Hebrew, etc.)

Not a sillly question at all.

The other posters, of course have given their excellent answers, so I have little to add.

Anyway, today, there are generally accepted texts that are considered the most accurate possible today, and are published in what are called “Critical Editions”. For the Old Testament, the most widely-used is the Masoretic Hebrew text published in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, while the New Testament is generally worked off the Greek New Testament, edited by Nestle and Aland. There are others (Liddell-Scott, Textus Receptus), with small differences.