Do We Have an Accurate Copy of the Bible Texts?

Many years ago I was asked by a thoughtful young man, "Since we don't have the original manuscripts of the Bible documents, how is it meaningful or useful to claim inerrancy in only the original manuscripts?"
As you may know, even the most conservative scholars do not claim inerrancy for the copies of the Bible documents that we have today, but only for the originals. This raises the question, "How is that helpful? Who cares if the originals are inerrant if we don't have them?"

Regrettably, I simply replied, "I don't know", and moved on. I didn't offer to look into it, I didn't follow up with this young man despite seeing him daily for the next several months, and I didn't give it a second thought until I found out this was one of the reasons he doesn't take the Bible seriously today. I regret my response then, but this is how I would answer now.

First, inerrancy isn't necessary in order for Christianity to be true. When some eyewitnesses said the Titanic broke apart and then sank, and others said it sank in one piece, no one doubted that the Titanic really sank. Similarly, whether certain extraneous minutiae of the gospel accounts are exact or not, the significant events and teachings remain consistent and reliable. And if Jesus claimed to be God, died, and rose from the dead, then Christianity is true and we can reserve discussions on inerrancy for conversations with committed believers.1 Therefore, what we need to determine is whether or not the gospel accounts are historically reliable.2

Second, although we don't have the originals, we are able to reconstruct them with tremendous accuracy due to the extremely large number of manuscripts that date back to within a very short time of the originals. In fact, the New Testament documents have more manuscripts, earlier manuscripts, and more abundantly supported manuscripts than the best ten pieces of classical literature combined.3 Anyone who is unwilling to trust its reliability based on insufficient extant manuscripts would be forced likewise to reject all of what is known from ancient history because no other account from all of ancient history compares to the New Testament manuscripts in quantity and time gap from the events they record.4 Furthermore, even if all of these manuscripts were lost, we would still be able to reconstruct much of the New Testament from quotes left to us by the early church fathers.5 So what do we have?

As of January 2017, the official count of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTTR) included 5,856 handwritten Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.6 This constitutes more than 2.6 million pages of writings,7 and does not account for the "literary tsunami" of new discoveries of Greek biblical manuscripts made in recent years, or the hundreds more that are believed to be held in private, unpublished collections.8 Not only that, but there are more than 18,130 early New Testament manuscripts in other languages, including Syriac, Slavic, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian, for a total of 23,986 New Testament manuscripts.9 This quantity is extraordinary! The next ten most attested works of ancient literature combined don't come close to the attestation we have for the New Testament.10

Not only are the New Testament manuscripts abundant, but they are also early. That is, they date to very near the time of the original writings. The oldest undisputed manuscript, from the Gospel of John, dates to between 117-138 A.D., and is housed today at the John Rylands library in Manchester, England.11 Even earlier than the Rylands fragment are nine disputed fragments found with the Dead Sea Scrolls which date from 50-70 A.D. These appear to be parts of the New Testament books of Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, 2 Peter, and James; however, some scholars resist this conclusion, most likely because it would undermine their claims that the New Testament was not written that early.12

In addition, we also have complete New Testament books from about 200 A.D., a near-complete New Testament, including all of the gospels, from 250 A.D., and a Greek manuscript of the entire Bible that dates to 325.13 It is called Codex Vaticanus because it belongs to the Vatican collection in Italy, but an exact replica can be seen at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.14 In addition, there are several complete Bible manuscripts from the fourth century which contain spelling and punctuation characteristics that suggest they are part of a family of manuscripts which can be traced back to 100-150 A.D.15

Such manuscripts have been found all over the Middle East and North Africa, and yet have remarkable uniformity. While the later copies contain some spelling and grammar errors, a few added sentences, and even a couple of added paragraphs,16 no significant Christian doctrine is affected by any of these inconsistencies, and experts have had no trouble discerning which documents are earliest and therefore most reliable.17

Now, imagine you wrote down a message of utmost importance and then asked 30 anal retentive adults chosen for their attention to detail (aka scribes) to hand copy with careful precision this very important message onto a piece of paper. You then asked them to send the message to reliable copyists living in other places to make five copies of their own and continue this practice until there were 24,000 copies. If you were to get rid of the original message, and even the earliest copies, do you think you would be able to reconstruct the message accurately? Of course you would! There would be spelling errors, a rogue comma here and there, and a missing word every now and then. Maybe a few copyists, seeking to be helpful, would add an extra sentence to clarify the meaning for future readers. One or two copyists might even add an event that they believe never should have been omitted from such an important record. Yet because of the number of copies, the ability to date those copies, the number of copyists, and the diversity of places involved, you would most definitely know what was original and what was added later.18

Because we know that some minor and insignificant copy errors were made in the past, it is only wise to allow for the possibility that similar errors may have occurred in the first copies as well. However, there is no reason to doubt that the earliest extant manuscripts, from which our Bibles are translated today, represent the original documents with near-perfect accuracy. Therefore, any claims we make about the originals can also be made of our Scriptures today with an extremely high degree of confidence.

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[1] Romans 10:9

[2] In addition to the two sources cited below, I also recommend Craig Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2014).

[3] Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017), chapter 3; Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 226.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Geisler and Turek, 224

[6] McDowell & McDowell, 47

[7] McDowell & McDowell, 53

[8] McDowell & McDowell, 48

[9] McDowell & McDowell, 52-53

[10] This includes Homer's Illiad, which has around 1900 manuscripts, followed by 473 manuscripts for Livy's History of Rome, 444 for Demosthenes' Speeches, 251 for Caesar's Gaelic Wars, 238 for Plato's Tetralogies, 226 for Sophocles' Plays, about 200 for Pliny the Elder's Natural History, 188 for Thucydides' History, 106 for Herodotus' History, and 36 for Tacitus' Annals (McDowell & McDowell, 55). When we include Old Testament manuscripts, the numbers are even more extraordinary, as we have more than 42,300 Old Testament manuscripts, for a total of 66,286+ biblical manuscript evidences (McDowell and McDowell, 53).

[11] Geisler and Turek, 225; McDowell and McDowell, 47

[12] Geisler and Turek, 225

[13] Ibid.

[14] I had the privilege of visiting the Vatican in 2017 and the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. in 2018, and I strongly encourage others to visit one or both if possible

[15] Geisler and Turek, 227

[16] The account of the woman caught in adultery and the ending of the Gospel of Mark were later additions. This is footnoted in all modern Bibles.

[17] McDowell and McDowell, chapter 4.

[18] For time and space considerations, I have somewhat simplified the process, but the additional complexities only serve to give us even greater insight and certainty as to what the original documents said.