The Bible as Far as It Is Translated Correctly — Why This Is the Honest Position

Critics attack the LDS qualification on Bible inerrancy as evidence of distrust toward scripture. The textual record of the Bible makes clear it is the only intellectually honest position anyone can hold.

The Attack

Ask the critic what they object to in Article of Faith 8. They will tell you: “we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly” is a convenient escape clause. Latter-day Saints say they believe the Bible, but they’ve built in a loophole — any passage that challenges their doctrine can simply be declared mistranslated and set aside. It is, the critics say, a way of having the Bible when you want it and discarding it when you don’t.

This is a serious-sounding charge. It collapses completely the moment you open any standard academic introduction to biblical textual criticism. Not an LDS source. Any source. The one used in evangelical seminaries. The one used at Catholic universities. The one on the syllabus at secular divinity schools. All of them say the same thing.

The Numbers

The New Testament survives in approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts. Among those manuscripts there are between 200,000 and 400,000 textual variants. The range is debated; the existence of the variants is not. No two manuscripts are identical. Not one original autograph — the document actually written by Paul, or John, or Luke — has survived. What we have are copies of copies of copies, produced by hand across centuries.

Scribes made errors. They made “corrections.” They harmonized parallel passages. They added clarifying marginal notes that later scribes mistook for original text and absorbed into the body of the manuscript. They occasionally adjusted wording to reflect the theological consensus of their time and place. This is documented. It is catalogued. It is the subject of a vast scholarly literature that spans every Christian tradition.

The King James Version — the translation most critics of Article of Faith 8 are actually defending — was produced in 1611 from the Textus Receptus, a Greek compilation assembled by Erasmus in 1516 from a handful of late medieval manuscripts, the most recent of which dated to the twelfth century. Erasmus had access to roughly half a dozen manuscripts. For the book of Revelation he had only one, and it was missing its final leaf, so he translated the missing verses back from Latin into Greek — producing readings found in no Greek manuscript anywhere on earth.

Earlier and more reliable manuscripts — Codex Vaticanus (4th century), Codex Sinaiticus (4th century), Codex Alexandrinus (5th century) — were unavailable to the KJV translators. When those manuscripts were studied, they revealed that the text the KJV was built on differed in hundreds of meaningful ways from the oldest witnesses to the New Testament. This is why the NIV, the ESV, the NASB, and the NRSV regularly read differently from the KJV and include footnotes acknowledging manuscript variation. They are not being liberal with scripture. They are being honest about what the manuscripts show.

Examples of Significant Variants

Textual criticism is not an abstraction. It has produced specific, documented findings about specific passages. Four of the most significant:

The Comma Johanneum — 1 John 5:7

1 John 5:7 (KJV)

“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”

This passage — the most explicit Trinitarian statement in the entire New Testament — does not appear in any Greek manuscript before the fifteenth century. It was not in Erasmus’s original Greek text; he refused to include it because he could find no Greek manuscript that contained it. Under ecclesiastical pressure he eventually relented when a single late manuscript — almost certainly produced specifically to force his hand — was presented to him. The KJV translators included it. Every reputable modern translation either omits it entirely or marks it with a footnote explaining that it is absent from the earliest and most reliable manuscripts.

If your definitive Trinitarian proof text is 1 John 5:7, you are building your doctrine on a passage that textual scholars across every tradition — Protestant, Catholic, secular — agree was not written by John.

The Longer Ending of Mark — Mark 16:9–20

The final twelve verses of Mark — the section in which the risen Christ commissions the apostles to cast out demons, speak in tongues, handle serpents, and drink poison without harm — are absent from the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Most scholars believe this section was appended by a later hand. It is also the textual foundation on which entire denominations have built serpent-handling practices and the theological requirement to speak in tongues as evidence of salvation.

The NIV, the ESV, the NASB, the NRSV all contain footnotes acknowledging the textual uncertainty of Mark 16:9–20. The KJV does not, because the KJV translators did not have access to the manuscripts that reveal the problem.

The Woman Taken in Adultery — John 7:53–8:11

The story of the woman brought before Christ — “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” — is one of the most beloved passages in the Gospels. It is absent from the oldest Greek manuscripts. It appears in different locations in different manuscripts: some insert it after John 7:52, others after John 21:25, others in the Gospel of Luke. Some manuscripts that include it mark it with asterisks or obeli indicating scribal doubt. Most scholars conclude it is an authentic early tradition about Jesus that was not part of the original text of John.

This does not mean the story is false. It means its textual history is complicated — precisely what Article of Faith 8 acknowledges about the Bible as a whole.

The Agony in Gethsemane — Luke 22:43–44

The verses describing an angel strengthening Jesus in Gethsemane, and Jesus sweating blood, are absent from important early manuscripts, including some that are otherwise quite reliable. They are present in others. Scholars debate whether the verses were original to Luke and removed by later scribes uncomfortable with their implications for Christ’s divinity, or added later to emphasize His humanity. What is not debated is that the manuscript tradition on these verses is divided — and that any honest account of Luke’s Gospel must acknowledge it.

The LDS Position Is the Scholarly Position

“As far as it is translated correctly” is not a dismissal of the Bible. It is not a theological escape hatch. It is an acknowledgment of what every competent Bible scholar on earth already knows: the process by which scripture was transmitted was a human process, subject to human error, and no translation is without limitation.

This is not skepticism about God’s word. It is honesty about the human process of transmitting it. Every evangelical scholar who has studied textual criticism affirms this distinction. They simply do not apply it in their confessional statements — because doing so would require acknowledging what the Latter-day Saints stated openly in 1842.

The Restoration also produced the Joseph Smith Translation — a prophetic engagement with the scriptural text that identified specific passages in need of clarification or correction. This is entirely consistent with the principle that the transmission of divine truth is an ongoing process requiring prophetic oversight, not a one-time event frozen in a twelfth-century manuscript tradition compiled by a sixteenth-century scholar with half a dozen sources.

The critic who attacks the LDS position on the Bible has never seriously engaged with what the Bible actually is — what its transmission history looks like, what the manuscripts show, what scholars across every tradition quietly acknowledge when they open a critical apparatus. The critique is built on a doctrine of inerrancy that the manuscripts themselves refute.

The Verdict

The critic who attacks Latter-day Saints for qualifying their acceptance of the Bible has either never studied textual criticism — or has studied it and prefers to ignore it when attacking the Church. There is no third option. The manuscripts exist. The variants are catalogued. The passages are footnoted in every serious modern translation. This is not disputed territory in scholarship. It is settled.

Article of Faith 8 is not a dodge. It is not an evasion. It is the most intellectually honest, most academically defensible statement about the Bible that any Christian denomination has ever committed to print. While others were constructing confident doctrines of inerrancy on a twelfth-century manuscript tradition Erasmus assembled in a hurry, Joseph Smith said: we believe the Bible is the word of God, and we acknowledge the transmission process was imperfect. Both things are true. Both things every serious scholar already knows.

The attack fails. The qualifier stands. The 400,000 manuscript variants are not going anywhere.