Absolutely Reliable After Two-Thousand Years of Transmission

Page 1 of pages 2, 3

Many times when doing Evangelism on the field, people will say to me that the Bible we have today is not reliable, meaning it is no longer true to the original written Manuscripts because it has been changed over and over again since its completion two-thousand years ago. They will also say that it is nothing more than a collection of documents written by men like any other religious book, that there is no God who controlled men in writing the sixty-six books of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Is this true? Are the Greek and Hebrew Manuscripts we have today, that our English Bibles are translated from, an exact copy of the original rendering of the Old and New Testaments? Is there internal evidence in the Scriptures beyond a reasonable doubt that God Himself inspired, led and controlled men in their writing of the Scriptures? I can say confidently and without hesitation, YES! there is. In this Chapter we are going to present to you, first, external Historical and Archaeological evidence that the Greek and Hebrew Manuscripts that we have today are true to the original manuscripts. Second, we are then going to show you internal evidence within the manuscripts themselves of their being letter for letter not only true to the original text, but by their very composition being impossible for man Himself to have composed the text without God’s divine literal absolute control in the writing of every single letter within the text of the Bible.

HISTORICAL & ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

How are ancient Manuscripts tested for reliability and accuracy? Sanders in, Introduction to Research in English Literary History, lists and explains the three basic principles of historiography (methods of historical scholarship).^155/143 They are the

	*Bibliographical* test
	The *Internal Evidence* test
	And the *External Evidence* test

The Bibliographical Test is an examination of the textual transmission by which documents reach us.^156/26 How reliable are the copies we have in regard to the number of manuscripts (MSS) and the time interval between the original and existing copy?

New Testament

Starting with the New Testament first, lets talk about the existing N.T. MSS that we have. The books of the New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely circulated books of antiquity.^157/50 There are over 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today: 5,488 (92') known Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin Vulgate and 8,300 other early versions and translations in Syriac, Egyptian, Arabic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Persian, Gothic, and Slavonic, just to name a few.^434/262 The next closest document of antiquity is the Iliad by Homer which has only 643 manuscripts that still survive. The Iliad was written in 900 B.C. The earliest surviving copy today dates the 13th century A.D.^158/145 That means that the earliest known surviving copy survives 2,100 years from the original document. In contrast, The New Testament was completed between A.D. 85-90 and the earliest surviving copy we have today is A.D. 125. That means the earliest known surviving copy is only 35 years from the original completion of the writing of the New Testament.^158/145

Whereas there is as much as five percent changes in the text of Iliad from the original, less than one-half of one percent changes are found in the New Testament to the Original.^159/366 Of this one-half of one percent changes, their adoption or rejection cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages where they occur.^160/14 Philip Schaff in his book, Comparison to the Greek Testament and the English Version, said the following about these variations in the New Testament: Not one of the variations altered, ". . . an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching."^161/177 Geisler and Nix state,

"Only about one-eighth of all the variants had any weight, as most of them are merely mechanical matters such as spelling or style. Of the whole then, only about one-sixtieth rise above ‘trivialities,’ or can in any sense be called ‘substantial variations.’ Mathematically this would compute to a text that is 98.33 percent pure."^159/365

Due to the existing number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it and due to the number of quotations made by early Church fathers from it, any doubtful passage is able to be checked for accuracy through these ancient authorities. This cannot be said of any other existing manuscript in the world.^162/23

Do the early Church Fathers support manuscript reliability? Prior to the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325) the Church Fathers Clement of Rome (A.D. 95), Irenaeus (A.D. 180), Ignatius Bishop of Antioch (A.D. 70-110), Polycarp Bishop of Smyrna (A.D. 70-156), Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-212), Tertullian presbyter of the Church in Carthage (A.D. 160- 220), Hippolytus (A.D. 170-235), Justin Martyr (A.D. 133), Origen (A.D.185-253), Cyprian Bishop of Carthage (died A.D. 258) made over 32,000 quotations from the New Testament.^159/353-354 If all manuscripts and translations of the New Testament were destroyed today, all but eleven verses of the New Testament could be reconstructed from the quotes of the New Testament made by the Church Fathers stated above.^34/50-51

We have a large number of Roman official records. We also have a large number of Christian writings that have survived the first century. Despite this fact, in all these writings there is not one single eyewitness account of the events recorded in the Gospels that contradicts what we have recorded in the Gospels. Any lawyer or judge would attest to how important and confirming this is to the reliability and truthfulness of the Gospel records.^288/30

Tertullian and Jerome, early Church Fathers, record an account of a presbyter from Asia, Turkey who published a counterfeit epistle that he claimed the apostle Paul had written. What happened as a result? Instantly the Universal Church set forth an ecclesiastical trial to examine this claim. The end result was that they found it to be a counterfeit, convicted the presbyter and exposed and published throughout the Church that it was a forgery.^288/30 We can see from this example how vigilant the Church was to prevent corruption and assure preservation of genuine Biblical MSS. Because of the widespread copying and translations of the New Testament throughout the world, it was virtually impossible for someone to corrupt the text or add a book without immediate criticism and repudiation from the Church.

Old Testament

*How Old Testament Manuscripts Were Handed Down

How about the Old Testament? How reliable is it? According to Jewish Talmuds and Targums, the Scribes whose job it was to copy and preserve Old Testament books were called Masoretic. The Hebrew Word means wall or fence. Their careful and meticulous copying of the Old Testament manuscript, which today is known as the Masoretic Text, was a fence of protection in keeping the text absolutely accurate to the original.^288/14

When I say absolutely accurate I mean just that. They did not just copy the text like we do when we copy a verse from the Bible by reading the phrase and then copying the phrase. They were absolutely meticulous. How meticulous? They had counted and knew exactly how many letters, for example, were in the book of Genesis: 78,064. They knew more than that: they new exactly how many letters of each letter of the alphabet were in the book of Genesis. They also knew how many letters there were from the beginning of the text and from the end of the text to the middle of the text. They also knew what the middle letter in the book of Genesis was to be.

After copying a book of the Bible, if after counting from the ends to the middle the count was not accurate or the letter in the middle was not correct, or there were more or less letters of any given letter of the alphabet than there should have been, that manuscript was discarded and burned because of its unreliability to the original text.^164/89

*The Oldest Biblical Manuscripts & Inscription

What kind of proof do we have of just how meticulous they did protect the accuracy of a copy from the original? Up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls dated 150-200 B.C., the most recent manuscript that we had of the Old Testament was dated A.D. 980.

What about the Dead Sea Scrolls? These Scrolls are made up of some 40,000 inscribed fragments. From these fragments more than 500 books have been reconstructed. They were first found in February or March of 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd boy by the name of Muhammad in a cave on a cliff on the west side of the Dead Sea about eight miles south of Jericho. They had been placed there around 68 A.D. by the Qumran religious community.^167/48-49

The value of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSC) were that the oldest most recent Hebrew MSS we possessed up to this discovery was 980 A.D. Because this was true, until the discovery of the DSC we had no way of knowing that what we had was an accurate transmission since the time of Christ. The Hebrew Text of Isaiah was dated at 125 B.C., more than 1000 years older than the Hebrew Text of Isaiah we possessed. When our most recent copy of the Hebrew Text of Isaiah was compared with the DSC MSS, it was found to be more than ninety-five percent identical, and the five percent of variation consisted mainly in slips of the pen and variations in spelling.^163/10 The variations that existed in no way changed the meaning or communication of the text.

Gleason Archer in his book, Survey of the Old Testament, comments that despite the fact that these manuscripts were a thousand years apart, that "they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text."^163/25 He further commented that the five percent variation in the texts consisted only of slips of the pen and variations in spelling, not in what was written or taught in the text which means that the teachings of the manuscripts weren’t altered at all.

Dr. Robert Dick Wilson, formerly professor of Semitic philology at Princeton Theological Seminary who mastered more than 35 languages of ancient orient, commented in his book, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, that in over 144 cases of transliteration from Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Moabite into Hebrew and in 40 cases of the opposite that for more than 3,400 years proper names of the Hebrew Bible had been transmitted with absolute minutest accuracy. He states, "that the Hebrew text should have been transmitted by copyists through so many centuries is a phenomenon unequaled in the history of literature." ^166/71 These proper names consist of forty kings that lived from 2000 B.C. to 400 B.C. Confirmed by history these names occur in the Old Testament in absolute chronological order. The probability of such close conformity to correct philological principles and accuracy is 1 chance in 75 x 10²².^166/71 Concerning this accuracy, Wilson concludes:

"The proof that the copies of the original documents have been handed down with substantial correctness for more than 2,000 years cannot be denied. That the copies in existence 2,000 years ago had been in like manner handed down from the originals is not merely possible, but, as we have shown, is rendered probable by the analogies of Babylonian documents now existing of which we have both originals and copies, thousands of years apart, and of scores of papyri which show when compared with our modern editions of the classics that only minor changes of the text have taken place in more than 2,000 years and especially by the scientific and demonstrateable accuracy with which the proper spelling of the names of kings and of the numerous foreign terms embedded in the Hebrew text has been transmitted to us." ^166/85

Continued on pages 2, 3
Bibliography & Notes
Section 7 Chapters

Top of Page