This episode addresses a common misperception about the trustworthiness of the Bible based on successive generations of copying. If there are 15 generations of copies, and each generation through scribal error introduces some corruption into the text, then, the argument goes, the last generation of copies will express the ACCUMULATED errors of all previous copies. This reasoning is the "telephone game" applied to copying. Such reasoning is invalid because, in the case of the New Testament, the second and third generation of copies can always be consulted. The John Rylands fragment, c.a. 125, is probably a copy of a copy of the original autograph penned by the apostle John. Since we now have a trove of early manuscripts to consult in translation, we're not dependent on successive generations of copies that may have allowed errors to creep into the text. Additionally, if doubt persists over the reliability of early manuscripts, then we simply need to compare them. The huge number of New Testament manuscripts (5,800) enables comparative analysis in which we can, in most cases, be very sure of the original autograph.
Steering between the Scylla of Skepticism and the Charybdis of Presumption
This episode contends that believers should abandon an "all-or-nothing" approach to the reliability of translations of the Bible. As stated in the previous episode, the large number of textual variants is a natural bi-product of the more than 5,500 copies of the New Testament. Since most of the textual variants don't affect meaning (spelling, word-order, etc.), Christians can be confident that English translations of the Greek and Hebrew text are 99.9% faithful to the original autograph. Some are concerned that admission of doubt over the translation of ANY text places one on the slippery slope of skepticism leading to a shipwrecked faith. Miles Smith, one of the translators of the KJV, insisted in the preface that doubt was preferable to dogmatic claims of certainty where the meaning of a text was uncertain. "It is better to make doubt of those things which are secret, then to strive about those things that are uncertain." He acknowledges some room for doubt about the appropriate translation of a few passages, and this posture is preferable to unfounded confidence where "things are uncertain." He nevertheless affirmed the reliability of the KJV in the vast majority of translations, whose renderings amounted to "rubbing and polishing." The episode warns against unhealthy skepticism that quibbles over total certainty where compelling evidence is everywhere. Mark Twain remarked, "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand."