How We Got the Bible · Page 6 of 6
Can we trust the text?
No originals, many copies, and a thousand-year test: how the text was carried, and what the differences between copies actually are.
Two questions are usually tangled together here. Translation asks whether your English Bible faithfully renders the old languages; that work is done today, from the oldest copies, by teams who publish their reasoning. Transmission asks the historical question: between the apostles and us, was the text copied faithfully, or did it drift? This page answers the second question, and keeps it separate from the first, because almost every confusion in this area comes from mixing them.
Copies, and what differs between them
No original manuscript of any biblical book survives; for ancient books, originals never do. What survives is the copies, copied by hand for well over a thousand years. Where copies differ, the difference is called a variant, and variants are not a scandal whispered about by critics: they are printed in the notes of modern editions for anyone to inspect. Bruce Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, whose handbook on the text is the standard one, describe the great majority of variants as differences of spelling and word order that do not change the sense. A smaller number do change the sense of a sentence; those are the ones the footnotes in a study Bible point out, with the evidence on the table.
The thousand-year test
For the Old Testament the test can be run directly. Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts dated from the Middle Ages. Between 1947 and 1956, eleven caves near Qumran, on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, gave up a library of scrolls dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE, left there by a Jewish community of that age. Among them was the Great Isaiah Scroll, copied about 125 BCE and containing all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah. The Israel Museum, which holds it, describes it as about one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known before the discovery. Set the two side by side and the point makes itself: the same book, chapter for chapter, across a thousand years of copying. The scrolls were not hidden by Christians; they predate the church. And they are not hidden from you: the Museum publishes the Great Isaiah Scroll online, column by column.
Translations and quotations: two more trails
The New Testament left other trails besides its Greek copies. Within its first centuries it was translated into Latin, Syriac and Coptic, and a translation cannot be quietly rewritten everywhere at once: the versions check the Greek text, and the Greek checks them. The early Christian writers also quote the New Testament constantly, in sermons, letters and arguments, so the text is echoed piece by piece across centuries of other books. A change smuggled into one trail would show against the others. That is why the answer to the monk question is not faith in monks. It is arithmetic: too many copies, in too many places and languages, quoted in too many other books, for the text to be remade without the joins showing.
The honest summary
The text of the Bible has been carried by human copying, and the copies show it: in spelling, in word order, and in the small number of places where the footnotes earn their keep. What the evidence does not show is a different Bible underneath, a purer original that somebody hid. The books the churches received are the books we have. Checking that is not an act of blind trust. It is work, and the sources named below let you repeat it.
Sources
- Metzger and Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament (2005)
- Israel Museum, The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.