The Bible is an old book that was compiled over many years. Because of its age and the materials on which it was written, we don’t have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible. This has led some people to argue that the Bible we have today is inaccurate. Skeptics argue that parts of the Bible have been changed or altered by zealous monks or power hungry priests. Are these criticisms valid? Fortunately, we have three major pieces of evidence at our disposal to help us understand the manuscript issue.
New Testament Manuscript Evidence
The New Testament was written in the Greek language. It was handwritten and from very early on copies were made of the originals. We currently have close to 6,000 copies in existence that contain all or part of the New Testament. The number of NT manuscripts we have compared to the number of manuscripts for other ancient writings is quite remarkable. For many ancient works, we have under 100 copies. Additionally, the gap in time between the original composition of the NT and the next surviving manuscript is far less for the NT than any other work in Greek literature. The gap for most Greek works from the date it was written to the date of a surviving manuscript is 800-1500 years. For the NT, it’s about 150 years for some fragments. And we have a complete copy of the NT that dates from within 250 years of the time of the writing of the NT.
New Testament Translations and Citations
From a very early date, the NT was translated into various languages. These translations give us another 25,000 copies of the NT, which point us to the original text of the NT. Finally, even without all these manuscripts, we could still reconstruct the NT through the writings of the church fathers of the first 250 years of the church. Through commentaries, letters, and sermons, we have over 86,000 citations of the NT from the early church. If we piece these citations together, we find the same text of the NT that we have today.
Old Testament Manuscripts
When it comes to the Old Testament, the situation is a bit different, since the books of the Old Testament are much older than the NT. Even so, we have hundreds of OT manuscripts. The accuracy of our OT manuscripts can be checked by comparing them to the OT manuscripts that were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s-1950s. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a powerful verification that the OT we have is accurate. In addition, Jewish scribes went through painstaking detail to make sure that the manuscripts they copied were accurate. They had complex systems to check their work, including counting the number of letters and words to make sure no errors had crept in. They would count the number of times a letter appeared in a book. If a manuscript had an error, it was destroyed.
[External Resource: Five “Fake News” Stories That People Believe About Early Christianity]
The manuscript evidence tells us that the Bible we have in our hands is the one that was originally written. It hasn’t been corrupted. It doesn’t have missing books. It has been preserved for us by God so that we could have his Word in our day.
- What is your initial reaction to this topic? What jumped out at you?
- Have you ever had anyone tell you that the Bible is corrupted, or that the translations that we have today are wrong? What evidence did they give you?
- In your opinion, what is the most powerful piece of evidence for the reliability of the Old Testament?
- In your opinion, what is the most powerful piece of evidence for the reliability of the New Testament?
- Write a personal action step based on this conversation.
