Textual Reliability

Has the Bible been changed over the years? It’s a fair question and it deserves a straight answer. The answer is in the manuscripts. We have thousands of ancient copies of the New Testament, and the Dead Sea Scrolls let us check the Old Testament against copies a thousand years older than what we had before.

Compare that to other writings from the ancient world. The New Testament has over 5,800 handwritten Greek copies, the earliest within about a century of when it was written. The next best, Homer’s Iliad, has roughly 1,800. Most famous ancient writings, like the histories of Tacitus, survive in only a few dozen copies at most, and the earliest is often about a thousand years after the author lived. Yet we rarely question that we have what those authors wrote.

Now compare it to other religions. The Hindu Vedas and the Buddhist Pali Canon were passed down mostly by memory and recitation, with writing coming later. The oldest surviving copies of the Rigveda are about a thousand years old, though its hymns are dated to more than 3,000 years ago, and the oldest surviving Pali manuscripts are from the 15th century. The Quran’s earliest manuscripts are fragmentary too. The largest early find, at Sana’a, was about 926 fragmentary manuscripts, none of them complete, and Muslims point to memorization and God’s promise to protect it as the guarantee of the text. In my opinion, that is a weakness. It is much harder to check a memory than it is to lay ancient copies side by side. The Bible’s evidence is written down, and anyone can examine it.

Don’t take my word for it. These videos and articles walk through how the Bible was copied and collected, from people who study it for a living.