The Shield

WAS THE BIBLE COPIED CORRECTLY?

One of the most common objections to Christianity is that the Bible has been copied so many times that we can no longer know what it originally said.

At first, that sounds reasonable.

After all, if a document has been copied by hand for centuries, wouldn't mistakes accumulate until the original message was lost?

The problem is that this objection ignores the evidence.

The New Testament is the most well-attested document from the ancient world. Today, scholars have access to more than 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, over 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands more in other ancient languages. In total, there are over 24,000 manuscript copies and portions of the New Testament available for comparison.

To appreciate how remarkable that is, consider other famous ancient works. The writings of Julius Caesar survive in about 10 manuscripts. The historian Tacitus is preserved in just a handful of copies. Yet few people question whether we know what those authors originally wrote.

Not only do we have an enormous number of manuscripts, but many of them are very early. Portions of the New Testament can be dated within decades of the original writings. Complete manuscripts appear far closer to the originals than those available for most ancient literature.

Because we possess so many copies from different regions and centuries, copyist mistakes are often easy to identify. If a scribe accidentally omitted a word, misspelled a name, or skipped a line, scholars can compare thousands of manuscripts and detect the error.

Think of it this way. If there were only one surviving manuscript, mistakes would be difficult to identify. But when thousands of manuscripts agree with one another, they function as checks and balances.

Critics often point to the existence of textual variants. However, the overwhelming majority are minor differences involving spelling, word order, or grammar. In Greek, changing the order of words often does not change the meaning of the sentence. Most variants are so insignificant that Bible translators simply note them in the footnotes.

Even skeptical textual scholars acknowledge that no major Christian doctrine depends on a disputed passage.

Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Discovered beginning in 1947 near the Dead Sea, these manuscripts included portions of every Old Testament book except Esther. Some of them were over 1,000 years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts previously available.

Critics expected significant corruption of the text over time.

Instead, they found remarkable consistency. The book of Isaiah, for example, was found to be substantially the same despite being copied over many centuries. The differences that existed were overwhelmingly minor and did not affect the message of the text.

The Bible was not preserved because people copied it perfectly.

It was preserved because so many copies were made that mistakes became detectable.

In fact, the manuscript evidence for the Bible is so extensive that scholars can compare copies from different countries, centuries, and language families to reconstruct the original text with a very high degree of confidence.

Every ancient document was copied.

The question is whether it was copied reliably.

When judged by the same standards historians use for every other ancient work, the Bible stands in a category of its own.

Denial of the Creator always requires bigger miracles than acknowledging the Creator.