Glad you asked – after 2000 years you don’t really think your Bible is anything like the original do you?

Glad you asked – after 2000 years you don’t really think your Bible is anything like the original do you?

Some of the most common questions and queries about Christianity revolve around the Bible.  How can we trust it?  Is it true?  How can such an old book be relevant today? 

An important sub-set of these questions regards whether the copy we have today is in anyway similar to the original version that were written.  In the case of the New Testament there has been 2000 years of time for it to transition through, and even longer for the Old.  Surely, like some millennial long game of Chinese whispers, distortion and alternation will creep in.

This query is only heightened when our modern Bible’s flag up seeming alterations.  There are a number of individual words with a query over their exact original meaning, and two slightly longer New Testament sections in John 8 and Mark 16 which are now seen as later additions.

Why did these variations appear?

The printing press was invented in 1500s.  Until then copies of the Bible were hand produced – a long, complex process.  So for the first 1500 years of the New Testament’s existence it was a handwritten document, transcribing complex Greek.  Slight errors crept in. 

Alongside this a number of running doctrinal battles meant, to the church’s shame, attempts to add or adjust the Bible to fit one party’s agenda were made.  The Mark 16 variation is the only underhand attempt to win one of these battles that made it in.

More positively there were also hundreds of true stories about Jesus and teaching by the Apostle’s that circulated alongside the Bible.  John 21:25 says this directly.  The John 8 variation seems to be a well-motivated addition of one of these vivid, true stories.

The staggering reality of the sheer volume of manuscripts we have.

All this would be a problem if we had few copies to work from.  It there existed just two copies of John then discerning which John 8 version was correct would be near on impossible.

But we don’t.  In fact the sheer volume of manuscripts we have is astonishing.  322 uncial versions, 2907 minuscule versions, 2445 lectionary versions, and 127 papyri versions according to the ‘Institute of New Testament Textual Research’ in Germany.  That equals 5807 copies. 

No ancient book of the same time, considered as an accurate record today, is even within range of this:

Julius Ceasar’s Gallic Wars from around 50BC: 10 manuscripts.

Livy’s Roman History from around 40AD: 20 manuscripts.

Tactitus Histories from around 100AD: 2 manuscripts.

History of Thucydides from around 400BC: 8 manuscripts.

Outweighing all documents from the same period thousand fold the sheer extent of the manuscript copies of the New Testament makes it a relatively simple process to identify and correct errors.  Hence a good modern version of the Bible unashamedly signals these variants and identifies which is accurate, leaving in the alternative for precision and integrity’s sake.

Glad to be asked

So there is a good answer to questions about the Bible’s ‘preservation’.  The sheer weight of copies and the relatively small number of variants which are easily ironed out through the quality and quantity of manuscripts points to God’s preservation of this material in a unique and purposeful way.  It points toward the Bible’s divine authorship.

FF Bruce, probably the leading scholar in this area concludes: ‘the margin of doubt left in the process for recovering the original wording is…in truth remarkably small…and affects no material question of historic fact or Christian faith and practice.’  (The New Testament Document)