Do we have the Old Testament?

I am on an email list from Crossway. Sometimes there are links to helpful articles; sometimes not so much. November 3rd’s article was “I’ve Heard It Said the Old Testament Is Full of Errors.” Coming from Crossway, I was not exactly hopeful that it would exude the kind of confidence that many regular folks have in their Bibles.

In the brief article/video, Old Testament scholar John D. Meade says that the Old Testament has “all the signs of human fragility,” but it “has a wealth of manuscripts, a ton of evidence, and textual critics who can actually look at all those manuscripts, compare them, sift out what are simple copyist errors, and actually restore the original text based on comparing all of the evidence.”

Just what parishioners in the pews pine for, a troupe of text critics to tell them that they do not have the Old Testament. But just hold on till they finish their never-ending work! Like New Testament scholar Dan Wallace, Meade believes “We do not have now—in our critical [Hebrew] texts or any translations—exactly what the authors of the [Old] Testament wrote.” Perhaps he learned from experience to try to maintain a little more optimism (or something) than Wallace, and did not go on to say, “Even if we did, we would not know it.”

After I first wrote this for a Facebook post in early November, I was excited a few days later that Pastor Jeff Riddle posted a review of it. His goes into more detail than mine. You can listen and read on the Stylos blog, as well as listen on YouTube.