Reliability of the Bible

Bible

Have you ever heard or thought something like this: “As the Bible was compiled, organized, translated, and transcribed, many errors entered the text” ?

The statement challenges the reliability of the Bible, Old Testament or New.

Perhaps my reader has played the party game “Telephone.”  The first person in line whispers a perfectly intelligible sentence, like “You know, I heard Skinner say that teachers will crack any minute.”  The message gets passed along to a number of listeners and the outcome sometimes bears little to no resemblance to the original sentence: “Skinner says that teachers will crack any minute purple monkey dishwasher.”

Some skeptics think that the text of the Bible was subject to corruption similar to the game of telephone above.  After all, they may reason, there were no printing presses, no recording devices, and no Internet to proliferate numerous copies of the originals.  It’s only reasonable to assume that the Bible would be plagued with numerous contradictions and omissions.  Is there any way to check to see if this is so?  This is the subject of Biblical reliability. And, yes, there are ways to check to see if the Biblical texts we have today have been reliably passed down to us or if they have undergone significant changes.

When we look at the reliability of the Bible, we enter the world of textual criticism.  According to Merriam Webster, textual criticism is “the study of a literary work that aims to establish the original text” (Textual-criticism).    In biblical textual criticism, we are concerned primarily with finding versions of the Bible that are as close to the original as possible, assuming there is one, and in discovering errors that may have occurred in transmission.  We will look at the evidence of reliability for Old Testament and New Testament separately. 

Old Testament

One way to understand the reliability of the Old Testament is to know something about the process that the ancient scribes used when copying the sacred texts.  Transmission of the sacred texts in ancient times was accomplished by the Talmudists (100 A.D. –500 A.D.) and the Masoretes (500 A.D. –900 A.D.).  Both groups treated the written form of the Hebrew Bible that they received with extraordinary reverence and a devotion to accurate transmission.

The Talmudists had quite an intricate system for transcribing synagogue scrolls. The length of each column must not extend over less than 48 or more than sixty lines and the breadth must consist of 30 letters. Between every consonant the space of a hair or thread must intervene. The rolls in which all of the regulations were not observed were condemned to be buried in the ground or burned (McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict: Historical evidences for the Christian faith, 1972, pp. 56-57). 

The Masoretes also were extraordinarily disciplined in their approach to transmission.  Their techniques included a great deal of counting and precision.  They counted, for example, the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurs in each book. (McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict: Historical evidences for the Christian faith, 1972, p. 58)

The Dead Sea Scrolls: With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now can see that the remarkable discipline and care the Talmudists and Masoretes used in transmitting their scriptures paid off handsomely in extraordinarily accurate transcriptions.  We now are able to compare the accuracy of transmission over a very long time span.  When we consider that all of the reproductions of the Hebrew scriptures were hand copied, the process of creating accurate copies is pretty mind-boggling.  The Scrolls represent 1,100 documents and more than 100,000 fragments.  Amazingly, in these ancient Scrolls “so far, a representative of every book of the Old Testament has been found, with the exception of Esther” (Price, 1997, p. 278). 

The Scrolls, discovered only recently by biblical standards, date from about the third century BC to about the time of Jesus (Dead-Sea-Scrolls) and show us the amazing reliability of the Hebrew scriptures. 

When I saw a traveling exhibit of the Scrolls in San Diego, I was struck by the size of the script.  The scrolls were much smaller in dimension than I thought they would be and the script itself, as pristine as computerized contractual fine print on paper, astonished me with its clarity and precision.  While the Dead Sea Scrolls are not the only evidence of the high degree of reliability of the Old Testament documents, they are pretty conclusive.  I have trouble imagining better evidence of the reliability of the Old Testament than to compare manuscripts separated by 1,000 years of transmission and finding them almost identical. 

New Testament

While the reliability of the Old Testament is established through comparing manuscripts with a 1,000-year gap, the New Testament’s reliability is established through a multiplicity of ancient manuscripts and their antiquity, which far exceed any document in the non-Christian world. 

Extant manuscripts

The sheer number and antiquity of ancient fragments and manuscripts of the New Testament far exceeds any other document in ancient history.  Remembering that the ancient manuscripts were hand copied, the more manuscripts we can examine, and the older they are, the better we are able to establish the likely authentic readings of the original ancient documents. 

The number and antiquity of the New Testament documents far exceed anything in the rest of the ancient world.

In the secular documents, the time span between the date of writing and the date of the extant copies is at least 750 years at best and typically over 1,000 years.  The most copies we have number 200, and that is all from one copy.  Typically, the numbers are 10 to 20 copies. 

The number of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament is hundreds of times that of the other ancient texts.  The number of non-Greek manuscripts is 18,130.  I hope it is obvious to my reader that the there is no comparison between the wealth of evidence for the reliability of the New Testament and any other ancient, classical writer. 

Further, the text of the New Testament can almost be reconstructed from the references and quotes in the early church fathers who lived shortly after the first century, such as Justin Martyr (100-165), Irenaeus (c. 125-202), and Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215).

Clearly, the New Testament was penned very early, likely during the first century, as its authors and Christian tradition claim.  Clearly, too, we can have high confidence that the text of the New Testament in our possession today in the 21st century bears a strong resemblance to the text in the first century. 

This blog post is an excerpt from my recently published book, Is Jesus Real? available on Amazon in print and Kindle. My book contains many data and tables about the numbers of ancient biblical copies.