Reliability Of The Bible Manuscripts
Non-Christians, (skeptics like New Agers or
Mormons) claim that in the process of copying Scripture the text of
the Bible was corrupted. Is this really true?
Suppose you wrote an essay and asked five
friends to copy it. Each of them in turn asked five more friends to
do the same - kind of like a chain letter. By the fifth "generation,"
you would have approximately four thousand copies. Now, obviously, in
the process, some people are going to make some copying errors. The
first five people to copy it would make mistakes, and then most of the
people who copy from them will make some more mistakes. Eventually you'd
have thousands of copies and all of them flawed.
Sounds pretty bad, right? But hold on. Your
five friends might make mistakes, but they wouldn't all make the same
mistakes. If you compared all of the copies, you would find that one
group contained the same mistake while the other four did not - which
of course, would make it easy to tell the copies from the original.
Not only that, but most of the mistakes would be obvious - things like
misspelled words or words that were accidentally omitted. Anyone looking
at all four thousand copies would have no trouble figuring out which
was the original.
That's essentially the same situation with
the Bible. We've got thousands of copies of the Bible in its original
language, and scholars who have studied them have been able to classify
them into groups and in most cases determine what the original documents
actually said. The few cases which are still debated by scholars really
don't affect the basic message of the Bible at all.
In fact, interestingly enough when the Dead
Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran, they predated the earliest extant
text - the Masoretic text by almost one thousand years - yet in spite
of this vast span of time, there was no substantive difference at all…..In
fact, in looking at Isaiah 53 there were only 17 changes between the
Masoretic text and those found at Qumran - 10 involved spelling, 4 style
and 3 involved the Hebrew letters for the word light in verse 11. However,
none of these differences were substantive - God has indeed preserved
His Word.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
CRI suggests Is the New Testament
Reliable? (IVP) by Paul Barnett (B335/$13), and The Text of the New
Testament by Bruce Metzger (SB660/$27). These resources are available
through CRI. For shipping and handling information, please refer to
our Resource Listing. To place a credit card order, call toll-free (888)
7000-CRI. To receive a free copy of our Resource Listing, call, fax
or write us with your request (information below and at the top of this
page).
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