How Faithfully Has the Bible Been Transmitted to Us?

Many cultures have a version of the game Telephone, in which a message becomes garbled by sharing it from person to person multiple times. Critics maintain that a similar process was at work when the stories of the gospel were propagated, first orally, allowing for exaggerations, myths, and errors to creep in. The original stories would be further corrupted by repeated copying, and the same would have happened to the other books of the Bible. There are, however, very solid reasons to believe that the content of the Bible’s teachings has not been altered over time.

The Old Testament was transmitted by Jewish scribes who undertook the task of copying Scripture with extreme care: the whole process was set out in great detail to minimize any possibility of error. Second, tattered or unusable scrolls were ceremonially buried. Consequently, at the turn of the 20^th century, the earliest complete copy of the Old Testament was from around the 9th century ad.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, brought to light Old Testament books dating from as early as the second century bc. The Great Isaiah Scroll (ca. 125 bc), a complete copy of Isaiah, when compared to manuscripts that are a millennium older, demonstrates the astonishing accuracy of copyists over that period, as it proved to match our present Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent. The remaining 5 percent were mainly variations of spelling and slips of the pen, none of which affected the meaning of the text.¹

The New Testament was written in its entirety by the end of the first century. The writers of the books were eyewitnesses to the events of the gospel or people who were in close contact with the apostles. As these books started circulating, Christians became particularly fond of communal reading of the gospels and epistles, so much so that people learned these books by heart. If mistakes had crept up in new copies, even a single word, people were very likely to pick it up.²

In addition, the New Testament is widely considered, even by skeptical scholars, as the best attested document of antiquity. Today we have about 5,300 NT manuscripts in Greek, around 9,300 manuscripts in other languages (Syriac, Coptic, etc.), and 32,000 quotations from the writings of the early church fathers (before ad 325), so that virtually all of it could be reconstructed from these.

Some New Testament sources are astonishingly early. For instance, the John Rylands fragment (P52) of John’s Gospel dates from around ad 120. Since the Gospel of John was written probably between ad 90–95, it means that only around 35 years lapsed between the original composition and this early fragment. The Bodmer Papyrus (P66), containing large portions from Matthew, is dated ad 175–225, and the Chester Beatty Papyri from around ad 250. The Codex Sinaiticus, which has a complete Greek New Testament, dates from ad 350. The time span for most New Testament books is less than 200 years from their composition to the earliest manuscript. This is remarkable for such ancient manuscripts! In comparison, other classical works from antiquity have far fewer copies (most are fewer than ten); the time lapse between the original composition and the earliest copy is on average 1,000 years, and yet these ancient works are accepted as credible.

Copying the New Testament was extremely popular, which explains why so many copies have been found. While a number of unintentional scribal errors have surfaced, as well as intentional corrections, only a small number of these differences affect the meaning of the passage, and only a fraction of these are of any real consequence. Because of the multitude of manuscripts, these few variant readings are flagged in most modern translations.

Sir Frederic Kenyon was right when he said, “It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.”³