Is Today's Bible Like The Original?

    It is obvious that we do not have any of the original autographs of the Bible writings. (By "autographs" we mean the actual letters written by the hand of Matthew, Luke, Paul, Moses, Isaiah, etc.) Therefore, the question arises as to the accuracy of our copies. How do we know that they are like the original?

    Textual criticism is the field of study which is devoted to examining this issue. Thousands of volumes have been written about this scholarly area of investigation. At the risk of oversimplification, let us illustrate how the process works:

1. Joe writes a letter to Sam.

2. Sam decides that others need to read Joe's message.

3. Having no copy machine available, Sam sends hand-written copies to Jack, Fred, and Bill, while keeping the original himself.

4. Later, Joe (the original letter-writer) dies and the original letter is inadvertently destroyed.

5. At this point, how can Jack be sure that his copy of the letter is true to the one originally written by Joe?

6. There is only one way: He can compare his copy to the ones held by Fred and Bill. If all three are identical, then Jack can conclude with a fair degree of certainty that his copy is accurate. Obviously, the level of confidence increases with the number of copies available for comparison. This is how textual criticism works.

    We should be impressed that there are thousands of manuscripts and early versions of the Bible which are available for the kind of comparison we have just explained. (Manuscripts are copies written in the same language as the original letters, and versions are the translations of the original text into other languages.) Concerning the New Testament alone, there are over 5,000 manuscripts and 10,000 documents of versions. These provide abundant evidence for the purposes of textual criticism. Some of these date to the second century A.D., reducing the time period when any errors might have crept into the text.

    The writings of secular authors who quote and make reference to the inspired writings help us in this search to determine the accuracy of our Bibles. Men who lived in the same time as the apostles, or very shortly thereafter, wrote documents which quote the New Testament books and confirm their accurate transmission to us today. Some of the best known of these include Clement of Rome (A.D. 30-100), Justin Martyr (A.D. 100-165), and lrenaeus (A.D. 125-192?).

    When all of the evidence has been examined, what conclusion can be made concerning the accuracy of our Bibles? Listen to these experts:

John W. Haley: "...there is reason to believe, that no work of antiquity has descended to the present age so free from alteration, as the Hebrew Bible" (Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, p. 44)

Sir Frederic Kenyon (Director of the British Museum): "The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that what he holds in it is the true word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries" (quoted by Neil Lightfoot, How We Got The Bible, p68).

Henry C. Theissen: "It is some times asked, to what extent we may trust the present critical text to be the true text. It should be emphasized therefore, that concerning the great bulk of the words in the New Testament there is complete agreement among textual critics" (Introduction to the New Testament, p.77).

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