They also spoke multiple languages. In the first century in Roman and Judea they spoke Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. The elite Roman ruling class spoke Latin and Greek. The lower class Romans spoke a number of languages. I think the closest thing to this in our day is Europe where numerous languages are spoken and Europeans commonly speak 3 or more languages.

The Mendicant by Robert Goldstein, on Flickr

In the ancient world people memorized things like the entire Old Testament. (622,771± words). Scribes and educators like Socrates had students that worked to memorize what they were being taught. In the early Jewish and Christian churches disciples spent years studying under a mentor to learn their oral traditional stories. Writing materials were expensive enough it was cheaper and easier to memorize. We have a hard time imagining what their oral tradition was like. But, the point here is ancient peoples were not literate in the way we think of literate. They may not often write or read and certainly were not proficient, but they were educated.

The original texts of the Bible were written in Aramaic (the Syrian language – 200 BC), Hebrew, Greek, and some Latin versions are available. The texts were definitely translated from language to language.

As the priests and scribes translated opportunities for mistakes were present. Opportunities for forgeries were present. How many made it into the Bible? How well did the oral traditions work?

One of the things about forgeries, is in an oral tradition culture, they were quickly detected and eliminated. People actually knew from hearing them often what the originals said and comprehended the message.

To define some of the translation process consider the telephone game. This is an example of linear translation, from person ‘A’ to ‘B’ to ‘C’… Person ‘C” may never catch person ‘B’s mistake and may add his own. This building on mistakes happens in party time telephone games and is what makes it fun.

The Bible translation was done using geometric translation, from one to many. A priest would read a text to a number of scribes. When they had a ‘page’ (scrolls were mostly used in early history but ‘page’ will suffice here) completed they counted lines per page, and words and characters per line. If ten scribes were writing the ten texts were compared. Mistakes were corrected.

Until 1947 Old Testament translations were made from the Masoretic manuscripts dated about 1,000 AD, the oldest known manuscripts of the day. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. A copy of Isaiah dating to about 75 BC was discovered in the find. That gives us a period of about 1,100 years to see how well translators and scribes did. The texts are a 95% word for word match.

The 5% variations are; wrong letters (like we would do today in typing a $ in place of a &), a similar sounding word by mistake, omissions of a letter or word, letters or words written twice, a scribe’s attempt to fix spelling or grammar, and attempts to harmonize a passage.

These variations can be resolved by a science known as Textual Criticism. Because we have a stack of Bible manuscripts about a mile high we can compare different translations and copies from different centuries. By the science of Textual Criticism we can have a high degree of certainly in what the original text was.

An example: If you found I wrote these 3 lines about the Bible;

• The book was well translated.
• The book was accurately translated.
• Awesome was the translation.

A textual critic might never figure out which of those was my original statement. But the idea would be clear. Also, the information that I am talking about the Bible comes from the context around those three lines.

Redo

Now let’s play the game of telephone again and put ourselves in the frame of mind of the people doing the work and use the ancients’ processes. We can see how the game may play out very differently.

One person (I’ll label this one #1) will tell a story they have spent their life memorizing (a Shakespeare fan maybe). Let’s say 10 people will listen as it is told and write it down, making 10 copies. When done those ten will compare what they have written and make corrections. When they are done the storyteller (#1) will retell the story and corrections will be made again.

Now 10 more will come in and one of the previous listeners will tell the story. They write, correct, retell, correct, and have a final copy they compare to one of the previous 10 written copies. We repeat this process endlessly. And each 5^th time storyteller #1 comes back and retells the story for a check.

Eventually storyteller #1 will pass away. From that point on, we will compare the latest copy with the oldest copy we have.