Critics
often attack Christianity by attacking the integrity of the Bible.
As is the case with any written work from antiquity, we no longer
have the original writings of biblical authors. Critics point out
that all we have are copies of copies transcribed over centuries and
not all the copies agree with each other. They say the Bible has
been copied, translated, and edited until we can no longer have any
certainty about what it originally said. Have you heard any of this
before? Well, I'm going to explain why we can have confidence in the
integrity of the Bible in amazingly easy terms.
Trying
to determine the original wording of a document is called, textual
criticism. Here's a reading exercise. Below are five sentences that
were copied from a single sentence. (OK, they weren't really copied,
but let's pretend they were.) Each one contains an error.
The
book si heavy
A
book is heavy
The
Bible is heavy
The
book is hard
The
book is not heavy
My
question is this: if you only had these five sentences as a
reference, do you think you could reconstruct what the original
sentence was? Let's look at it word by word.
Four
of the sentences say, “the” but only one says, “a.”
Therefore, I would guess the first word in the original sentence was,
“the.”
Four
sentences say, “book” and one says, “Bible.” I happen to
know that “Bible” is the Greek word for “book” so the person
who copied that might have thought “Bible” when he saw the word,
“book.” The second word in the original sentence was probably
book.
Four
of the sentences say, “is.” The fifth sentence says, “si”
which is not an English word. It probably is simply a misspelling of
the word “is” so the third word is probably, “is.”
One
sentence says, “not” but none of the other ones do so I suspect
“not” wasn't in the original sentence.
Finally,
the last word in four of the sentences is “heavy.” One sentence
says, “hard.” Both words start with “h” so it's possible the
transcriber misread the original word “heavy” and wrote, “hard.”
I think the fourth word in the original sentence was, “heavy.”
So,
having compared every sentence and considered the differences, I
believe the original sentence was, “The book is heavy.” Wouldn't
you agree? I would be confident in that conclusion even though none
of the sentences above actually say, “The book is heavy,” because
there are enough similarities in just these five to justify that
conclusion. Of course, if I had 10 sentences to compare, I would
have even more confidence. If I had 100 or 1000 sentences to
compare, there would no longer be any room for doubt. In this same
way, we can have confidence in the integrity of the Bible – by
comparing the manuscripts.
Now,
suppose I'm a scribe and it's my job to make copies of the sentences
above. But, for the sake of argument, I'm not a very dutiful scribe
and I take it upon myself to change what the text originally said to
what I think it should have said. I think it should say,
“Reading the Bible is not hard.”
That could be a problem. How would anyone reading my copy know I
copied it faithfully? Well, there are still the 5 sentences above
that could be compared against my copy. My edit is different enough
from earlier copies that it would be easily identified as a fake.
None of the earlier sentences even have the word, “reading,” for
example. Of course, if I were especially nefarious, I could make 5
or 10 copies, hoping that the number of edited copies would overwhelm
earlier copies. That might work if there were only 5 earlier copies.
However, as was the case before, the more copies that exist, the
harder it becomes to add intentional edits later. If there were 100
or 1000 earlier copies that did not resemble my edited copy, they
would bear more weight than all of my later copies.
So
you can see, the integrity of the Bible hinges upon the number of
early manuscripts we have. The more manuscripts that we have to
compare, the greater confidence we can have in determining what the
originals said and the harder it becomes for forgers to edit the text
later. How many manuscripts do we have of the New Testament, then?
Greek
scholar, Daniel
Wallace, tells us the following:
As
far as Greek manuscripts, over 5800 have been catalogued. The New
Testament was translated early on into several other languages as
well, such as Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, etc.
The total number of these versional witnesses has not been counted
yet, but it certainly numbers in the tens of thousands. At
the same time, it should be pointed out that most of our manuscripts
come from the second millennium AD, and most of our manuscripts do
not include the whole New Testament. A fragment of just a verse or
two still counts as a manuscript. And yet, the average size for a NT
manuscript is more than 450 pages. At the other end of the data pool
are the quotations of the NT by church fathers. To date, more than
one million quotations of the NT by the church fathers have been
tabulated. These fathers come from as early as the late first century
all the way to the middle ages.... NT scholars face an embarrassment
of riches compared to the data the classical Greek and Latin scholars
have to contend with. The average classical author’s literary
remains number no more than twenty copies. We have more than 1,000
times the manuscript data for the NT than we do for the average
Greco-Roman author. Not only this, but the extant manuscripts of the
average classical author are no earlier than 500 years after the time
he wrote. For the NT, we are waiting mere decades for surviving
copies.
I've written before that we have more evidence for the historicity of
Jesus than any other person of antiquity. All we know about ancient
people is what has been written down about them. The number of New
Testament manuscripts dwarfs any other ancient writing. If we know
anything at all about history, then we can be as certain of the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus as any other event in history.
