How do we know that the Bible we have today is even close to the original? Haven't copiers down through the centuries inserted and deleted embellished; the documents so that the original message of the Bible has been obscured? These questions are frequently asked to discredit the sources of information from which the Christian faith has come to us.

1. The Old Testament

   For both Old and New Testaments, the crucial question is this: Not having any original copies or scraps of the Bible, can we reconstruct them well enough from the oldest; manuscript evidence we do have so
   they give us a true, undistorted view of actual people, places and events?

   1. The Scribe

      The scribe was considered a professional person in antiquity. Scribes believed they were dealing with the very Word of God and were therefore extremely careful in copying. They did not just hastily write
      things down. The earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Old Testament dates from c. A.D. 900.

   2. The Massoretic Text

      During the early part of the tenth century (A.D. 916), there was a group of Jews called the Massoretes. These Jews were meticulous in their copying. The texts they had were all in capital letters, and there was
      no punctuation; or paragraphs. When the Massoretes copied a book, they would add up the letters and find
      the middle one. If it wasn't the same as the original, they made a new copy. All of the present copies of the Hebrew text which come; from this period are in remarkable agreement.; Comparisons of the Massoretic text with earlier Latin and Greek versions have also revealed careful copying and little deviation during the thousand years from 100 B.C. to A.D. 900. But until this century, there was scant material written in Hebrew from antiquity which could be compared; to the Massoretic texts of the tenth century A.D.

   3. The Dead Sea Scrolls

      The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947, include a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, a fragmented copy of Isaiah containing much of chapters 38-66, and fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament. The majority of the fragments are from Isaiah and the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The books of Samuel, in a tattered copy, were also found as well as two complete chapters of the book of Habakkuk

      These materials are dated around 100 B.C. The significance of the find, and particularly the copy of Isaiah, was recognized by Merrill F. Unger when he said, "This complete document of Isaiah quite understandably created a sensation since it was the first major Biblical manuscript of great antiquity ever to be recovered. Interest in it was especially keen since it antedates by more than a thousand years the oldest Hebrew texts preserved in the Massoretic tradition."{11}

      The supreme value of these Qumran documents lies in the ability of biblical scholars to compare them with the Massoretic Hebrew texts of the tenth century A.D. A comparison of Isaiah with the Massoretic text revealed them to be extremely close in accuracy to each other. Says R. Laird Harris:

      A comparison of Isaiah 53 shows that only 17 letters differ from the Massoretic text. Ten of these are mere differences in spelling (like our "honor" and the English "honour") and produce no change- in the meaning at all. Four more are very minor differences, such as the presence of a conjunction, which are stylistic rather than substantive. The other three letters are the Hebrew word for "light" (__ - or). This word was added to the text by someone after "they shall see" in verse 11. Out of 166 words in this chapter, only this one word is really in question, and it does not at all change the meaning of the passage. We are told by biblical scholars that this is typical of the whole 12 manuscript of Isaiah. {12}

   4. The Septuagint

      The Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, also confirms the accuracy of the copyists who ultimately gave us the Massoretic text. The Septuagint is often referred to as the LXX because it was reputedly done by seventy Jewish scholars in Alexandria around 200 B.C. The LXX appears to be a rather literal translation from the Hebrew, and the manuscripts we have are good copies of the original translation.

   5. Conclusion

      In his book, Can I Trust My Bible?, R. Laird Harris concluded, "We can now be sure that copyists worked with great care and accuracy on the Old Testament, even back to 225 B.C.... indeed, it would be rash skepticism that would now deny that we have our Old Testament in a form very close
      to that used by Ezra when he taught the word of the Lord to those who had returned from the Babylonian captivity." {13}

2. The New Testament
   1. The Greek Manuscript Evidence

      There are more than 4,000 different ancient Greek manuscripts containing all or portions of the New Testament that have survived to our time. These are written on different materials.

   2. Papyrus and Parchment.

      During the early Christian era, the writing materials most commonly used were papyrus, a reed, and parchment, made from the skins of animals. Some examples of documents written on such materials are:

      1. The Rylands Papyrus (P52), perhaps the earliest piece of Scripture surviving, which contains John 18:31-33,37.{14}

      2. Codex Vaticanus and Codex Siniaticus -- two excellent parchment copies of the entire New Testament which date from the 4th century (A.D. 325-450,).{15}

      3. Chester Beatty Papyrus (P45, P46, P47) and the Bodmer Papyrus It, XIV, XV (P46, P75) which date between A.D. 180 and 225.

         From these manuscripts alone, we can construct all of Luke, John, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, I and 2 Thessalonians, Hebrews, and portions of Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Revelation. Only the Pastoral Epistles (Titus, I and 2 Timothy), the General Epistles James, I and 2 Peter, and 1, 2, and 3 16 John), and Philemon are excluded.{16}

   3. Versions (Translations)

      
      In addition to the actual Greek manuscripts, there are more than 1,000 copies and fragments of the New Testament in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and Ethiopic, as well as 8,000 copies of the Latin Vulgate, some of which date back almost to Jerome's original translation in A.D. 384-400.

   4. Church Fathers

      A further witness to the New Testament text is found in the thousands of quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers, the early Christian clergy (A.D. 100-450) who followed the Apostles and gave leadership to the fledgling church, beginning with Clement of Rome (A.D. 96).

      It has been observed that if all of the New Testament manuscripts and versions mentioned above were to disappear overnight, it would still be possible to reconstruct the entire New Testament with quotes from the Church Fathers, with the exception of fifteen to twenty verses!

   5. A Comparison

      The evidence for the early existence of the New Testament writings is clear. The wealth of materials for the New Testament becomes even more significant when we compare it with other ancient documents which have been accepted without question. Consider the following chart:

*Where a slash occurs, the first date is conservative, and the second is liberal.
**New Testament manuscripts are fragmentary. Earliest complete manuscript is from ca. 350; lapse of event to complete manuscript is about 325 years.

6. Conclusion

   In his book, The Bible and Archaeology,Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, former director and principal librarian of the British Museum, said this about the New Testament:

   The interval, then, between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact, negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established. {17}

   B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, the creators of The New Testament in Original Greek, also commented- "If comparative trivialities such as changes of order, the insertion or oniission of the article with proper names, and the like are set aside, the works in our opinion still subject to doubt can hardly mount to more than a thousandth part of the whole New Testament."{18} In other words, the small changes and variations in manuscripts change no major doctrine: they do not affect Christianity in the least. The message is the same with or without the variations. We have the Word of God.

	©1998 Probe Ministries
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