Does the Modern Bible Accurately Reflect the Original Text?

that's a great question it's a very important in our day so let me give you a resource if you want detailed discussion from an apostolic perspective i've written a book on this very subject it's called god's infallible word available at pentecostalpublishing.com so i can only give a very brief answer now but there there is a lot of historical information and even statistical information that will back up what i'm saying so if you really want that go to god's infallible word uh but let me try to give you a brief answer uh the old testament is written in hebrew with a few passages in aramaic we only have a few manuscripts complete manuscripts of the old testament and they only come from about a d 1 000.

so at first thought you might say well how in the world would we know because of course in the days before printing all the ancient bibles had to be copied by hand and so how did we know errors didn't creep in and since they're so much later than the original how do we know there weren't changes over the centuries that we can't trace well for the old testament there are two basic answers the first is the hebrew scribes took what we might call fanatical care if you study what they did they would copy a portion of the text and they would count every single letter and then they will record how many letters on that portion of the scroll or what we might say that column or that page and then they would identify what is the middle word or the middle letter and they would come up with all these little statistic measurements and they would put them so that when you go back to copy that you would check those and if the if it was off then you knew there was a mistake and then you go back and fix your mistake so it's almost unimaginable for us today because we're not used to this kind of detail but scribes have spent their whole life doing this and it might take years to copy you know one scroll so they would take the time and they were theologically motivated this is the sacred word of god i mean before they would do this they would they would take a bath they would wash they would change their clothes because it was so sacred and holy and so they took this extreme care to it wasn't just like sloppily copying they made sure that it was accurate so that's one reason why we can have a high degree accomplish the old testament the second one isn't a dramatic experiment that you could not duplicate but as i said the oldest manuscripts that we had of hebrew were about a thousand a d so you could say well surely in a thousand years or two thousand years there had to be many many errors that crept in and we have no way of knowing and that's what many scholars said especially liberal scholars well then there was the dramatic discovery of the dead sea scrolls in the 1940s and subsequently they found these scrolls in the judean desert that are dated back to the time of christ in some cases a century or two before the time of christ so in one moment you could leap back from ad1000 to you know bc a thousand years so you had a dramatic experiment okay what if we had a set of manuscripts and then another manuscript a thousand year later how many errors would creep up in a thousand years now we actually had evidence and the perhaps the the clearest was the entire book of isaiah called the isaiah scroll so we can compare these two scrolls a thousand years apart and guess what we found basically no differences and the difference that existed didn't affect content but were mostly spelling or you know minor changes of the way things were written but not changing the meaning at all so the dead sea scrolls dramatically vindicated that the old testament text we have really is accurate now the new testament's a very different story because we did have many scribes on an individual basis some manuscripts of obviously lesser quality than others but the good thing about the new testament we have over 5 000 greek manuscripts of the new testament that's far more than for any other ancient book and we have at least fragments going back to the beginning of the first century just a few years it's the gospel of john so the gospel of john might have been written the 80s or 90s and we have a fragment from about 115.

so just a few years and then we have partial manuscripts and complete manuscripts within about 200 years and and again that is dramatically closer to the originals than any other ancient book but the the key of the new testament having so many manuscripts you can compare them so even though no manuscript may be perfect let's say you have a hundred manuscripts of a certain text well um if a hundred of them are exactly the same then you know that's got to be original but chances are somebody made a mistake among those hundred one of the scribes probably made a mistake but you still would have 99 or 98 so you can say okay 98 say one thing two say another which do you think is right obviously the 98 well that's a simplified illustration but that's what's called textual criticism so what you do when you have so many manuscripts you compare them all and you cancel out errors you can obviously see well this one is wrong on this word this one is wrong on that word maybe no one is perfect but you put them all together you can reconstruct the original with near certainty now people like to magnify the differences because there are some differences among the major manuscripts and therefore there are some differences among the various translations but from a theological perspective there really are no doctrinal differences the major differences that we find even where there's a phrase or a few cases of verse maybe it's omitted from one person's preferred text or uh translation but the same phrase will be in another place so you're really not arguing whether this is the word of god but is it in the right place or did it get copied somewhere else you're not really there really is no doctrinal issue at stake among the remaining variations and in most cases again it's very small like should it be this word or that word and either word would fit the context so we're not sure a hundred percent which one it is so so we're in most cases you're not really talking about a doctrinal issue and where you are talking about a significant difference you can find the same phrase or the same teaching in another place so you're not really arguing whether this is a biblical concept you're just arguing should it be this place and that place or this place or that place it's more of a technical scholarly discussion but just to give you so the the the the new testament texts can be vindicated by the large number of ancient greek manuscripts that you can compare and through the process of textual criticism you can arrive at the original text but just to give you an illustration most of our knowledge of greek history comes from a few historians so herodotus his history we only have eight manuscripts and these manuscripts are over thirteen hundred years later than herodotus plato's a famous um that we get a lot of our understanding of greek uh philosophy from him well one of his works we only have seven copies 1300 years later than what he wrote caesar garlic war julius caesar obviously he's a famous uh person we get a lot of our knowledge from roman history from what he wrote we only have 10 manuscripts of his book there are 900 years later than when he wrote well i could go down the list so we have a high degree of confidence that we know greek history that we know roman history that we know greek philosophy but we're getting it from a handful of manuscripts that are thousands 1500 years later but still we we feel we've got a pretty accurate text we can you know expound all day on greek and roman history and philosophy and we know what we're talking about well the new testament and this was some years ago when i wrote this 5 366 manuscripts a fragment from 30 to 50 years most of the new testament 150 years all the new testament 250 years so if we say the new testament unreliable then we've got to say everything we know about greek roman philosophy uh greek roman history is all bogus we don't know anything about ancient history obviously we do know and and so the bottom line is we can have a high degree of confidence that yes the new testament texts and the old testament texts we have is what god gave to us and then theologically the book of psalms and other places talks about god's truth is preserved forever god's word is preserved forever and we believe that since god inspired the word surely he would have preserved it for us today now i'm not saying any particular manuscript is perfect that there are no scribal errors there are that there are no translation errors there are that there are no printing errors there are and if you doubt that well just just copy the book of matthew as fast as you can and see if god miraculously preserve your hand from making error or see if there's any error obviously there can be errors but the point is those errors are not in the original text that was inspired to us and through a process of careful study we can reconstruct the original text humanly speaking if we can't say 100 certainly certainty theologically speaking and also by practical study we can say there is no text that would undermine any apostolic doctrine that we hold today we can have absolute confidence that the word god gave the message god gave is what we have today