Bible Q & A

I know we don't have the original Bible manuscripts - are the copies we have reliable?

Yes. In fact, the copies we have are so accurate it can only be credited to divine intervention.

Many Bible skeptics contend that the Bible has been changed over the centuries. If this were true, one would expect to find vast differences in Bible manuscripts separated by distance and time. An example of this would be the Masoretic and Yeminite copies of the Torah (Old Testament). Over 1,000 years ago, these two groups of Jews separated. One group went to Europe while the other stayed in the Middle East. Both groups had a copy of the Torah as it was 1,000 years ago. For 1,000 years since their separation, each group proceeded to copy and recopy their version of the Torah. According to Bible skeptics, if one was to look at these two separate versions of the Torah, copied many times over the centuries, one would expect to find vast differences. Especially given the fact that, typically, every time a Jewish scribe copied a manuscript, after painstakingly verifying that the copy was exact, the one he copied from was destroyed.

What does one find, after 1,000 years of separation? Only 8 letters out of 304,805 letters of the two respective Torahs differed. Only 8 letters! And none of those differing letters change significantly any word meanings. This is nothing short of miraculous considering that languages themselves change considerably in 1,000 years. If you don't believe me, try to read a photo reproduction of an old English document. After about 400 years, it's very difficult to make heads or tails of such a document. And don't forget that the two Torahs were hand copied over the centuries. No photocopy machines or printing presses existed back then.

For a document to change so little over 1,000 years from natural catastrophes alone is nothing short of miraculous. Not to mention a document's survival in the face of looting, vindictiveness and many other factors.

The New Testament writings are just as reliable as the Torah. They have been copied thousands of times and circulated throughout the known world in many languages. To change the New Testament, one would have to change all of those copies. There was no central repository for these scriptures. Also, 98% of the New Testament can be reconstructed through quotations of it by nonBiblical sources.

Some Bible skeptics might claim that the Roman Catholic Church controlled the scriptures in the middle ages. Not only is this untrue but one must remember that the translation of the Bible into English was a major factor in breaking the hold the Catholic Church had on the whole of Europe. Why? One of the reasons is because the Bible showed that the Catholic Church doctrines were in direct conflict with the Bible.

Every few years archaeologists find older and older manuscripts of the New Testament. A number of manuscripts even date back to the first century AD. When these new finds are compared to much younger copies, they match almost exactly! This causes great consternation in skeptic and anti-Bible "scholar" camps. In fact, they continue in their disbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence the Bible is the Word of God. No other religious book or ancient writing even comes close to the Bible in reliability.

For more information on this subject, see the WWCW Book Reviews section. Much of the above information was taken from the book The Signature of God by Grant R. Jeffrey.

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