Have Confidence In Your Bible 3

"The word of our God will stand forever."

Isaiah 40:8

The original books and letters of the Bible were, of course, written by hand. Add to that that they were written on fragile materials and had to be copied and recopied, all by hand, for hundreds of years before the printing press came along. It’s amazing that we have a Bible at all.

What’s even more amazing — it has to be miraculous — is that in all that copying there has been no loss of accuracy. I mean, the works of Shakespeare have been around for just about 400 years yet in every one of his plays there are tens, even hundreds of disputed sections but in your copy of the Bible there are only 12 to 20 places where the authenticity of the words is ever seriously questioned by anyone, liberal and atheistic scholars included.

There are scholars whose job is to look at ancient manuscripts (handwritten fragments, sections and whole copies of books), examine them, compare them and work out how true to the original what we have today is. Their discipline is called textual criticism.

The first thing they will consider is the number of manuscripts available to them. For Caesar’s Gallic Wars, there are 9 or 10 good manuscripts. For the 35 volumes of the Roman history of Livy that have survived, we depend on not more than 20. For what survives of the Histories and Annals of Tacitus we have only 2 manuscripts. The History of Thucydides: 8 manuscripts. The Histories of Herodotus: about the same number. Plato: 7. Demosthenes does better with 200. Homer’s Iliad comes in at second-best with 643. Who ever thinks to question the accounts we have of Roman history?

When it comes to the New Testament there are 5,686 Greek manuscripts, more than 10,000 Latin manuscripts and if you add in manuscripts in other languages the total comes to more than 24,970. That number alone convinces most experts that the original text of the Bible has been handed down with complete accuracy.

The second thing a textual critic will ask is, how close to the time when the book was originally written were the manuscripts I have available to me written? For Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the time lapse between when it was first written and when the earliest copy we have was produced is 1000 years. The Roman history of Livy: there is one partial copy made 400 years after the original was written; the earliest complete copy was made 1000 years after the original. The Histories and Annals of Tacitus: 1000 years. The History of Thucydides: 1300 years. The Histories of Herodotus: 1350 years. The works of Plato: 1300 years. Demosthenes: 1400 years. Again Homer’s Iliad comes in second-best with 400 years between the writing of the original and the earliest remaining copy.

Number 1? You’ve guessed it. The New Testament. We have a fragment of John’s gospel written within 50 years of the original. We have complete books of the New Testament written within 100 years. We have an almost complete copy of the New Testament written 150 years after the last of the original books was written and we have a complete New Testament written within 225 years.

What about the Old Testament? It’s much older. How can we be sure it has been passed down to us intact?

The scribes appointed to the task of copying the Old Testament scriptures were so meticulous it’s almost unbelievable. If a copy was found to break even one of their rules it was immediately destroyed no matter how much time had been spent making it. The Massoretes, guardians of the text from 500 AD to 950 AD, had an even more complicated system of safeguards. Every single letter was counted: they could tell if even one had been omitted, added or changed.

The Dead Sea Scrolls — manuscripts discovered in 1947 — include a complete copy of the book of Isaiah dating from about 125 BC. When it’s compared with the Massoretic text from which our Bible is translated there are no significant differences at all thanks to that meticulous care taken by every scribe who made a copy over 1000 years. Other documents found by the Dead Sea cover almost all of the Old Testament many times over. We can be certain that the Old Testament we read today is identical to the Old Testament read by Jesus and the apostles.

The book you hold in your hand today is true to what was written by its original writers. You can have confidence in your Bible.

Adapted from Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell. Available to purchase at ICM Books.