Expectation Church

Can You Trust The Bible You're Reading?

It takes an element of faith to believe the Scriptures we have today are what the original authors actually wrote. But there's a lot of evidence behind that faith.

We don't have the original piece of paper John put his hand to. We have copies. And the further back you go, the more fragile it gets, because this is 2,000 years of history.

Think about it: do you have any notes you wrote in third grade? And even if you did, do you really think they'd survive this long?

So the copies we have today are fragmentary, ancient Greek texts in torn slips and pieces. But some of those slips we can actually fit back together like a puzzle.

That's what textual critics do. They don't grab the most recent copy or go to the end of the line in the telephone game. They compare all the copies across every era and reconstruct the original message.

And we do this with everything, not just the Bible. Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the oldest copies we have come about 500 years after he wrote them.

Compare that to the New Testament, where we have fragments within the first hundred years. Very few ancient texts, if any, can claim that.

On average, we have a thousand times more manuscript evidence for the New Testament than for the average ancient author. So you don't even have to be a Christian. What all scholars agree on, regardless of background, is that the evidence for it is overwhelming.

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