After thousands of years of copying and translating, do you believe the original survives?

🔥The question: “Translated over and over, the original meaning must have vanished, like a game of telephone?”

🛡️The Church's answer: Modern Bible translations are usually not made by copying other translations again and again, but by studying the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek textual traditions. There are differences of spelling and word order among hand-copied manuscripts, but textual criticism, which compares many manuscripts, can settle a great many of them, and no core Christian belief hangs on a single uncertain letter. Translations can differ in wording because they have different aims.

How this is actually checked — comparing manuscripts side by side

It is not a game of telephone in which you trace back one final translation. Scholars set the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts surviving from different eras and regions side by side with the ancient versions, and judge which form of the text is older. Where a reading is uncertain, they do not conceal it; they leave it in the critical apparatus and the footnotes so other scholars can review it.

🧐If they press further: “Is only one translation perfect?” — No translation holds every nuance by itself. Keep at the center the translation the Church has approved for liturgy and teaching, and where a passage is difficult, compare other translations and commentaries.

✨In one sentence: “The Bible isn't a game of telephone between translations. Scholars compare the old manuscripts in the original languages, publish the differences, and keep refining faithful translations.”