When we realize that the Bible did not get bound, sealed, and delivered directly from God to our local Christian bookstore, it can be a little unsettling. We like easy answers. I sometimes think that it would be better if the Bible was revealed all at once, recognized by everyone as God’s inerrant word, and never a subject of questioning. But God had a different plan, and over time I have come to see the beauty of what God did instead. With this in mind, let’s take a look at how God’s word was preserved for God’s people.
Regarding the transmission of manuscripts, this may get uncomfortable for some of us, for this is the area where most attacks are aimed. Critics will say the text was changed, that the copies are unreliable, or that there is no way to know what the authors originally wrote. How then do we handle these objections?
The Old Testament copying process was rigorous. The scrolls were often copied letter by letter, for the copies needed to be as perfect as possible. The primary source of Hebrew texts we have is the Masoretic Text, which was copied between AD 500 and AD 1000. We also possess the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in 1946. The scrolls are dated to the first century, but when compared to later manuscript copies such as the Masoretic Text, the contents were the same in every major way. The Old Testament seems to have been settled and established very early, with copying so thorough that few scholars are able to poke holes in it. Critics thus focus their attacks on the New Testament.
The twenty-seven books were written by several different authors to many audiences who lived in a variety of contexts. The New Testament was copied by anyone who could get an opportunity, a practice that seems to have been encouraged by the apostle Paul himself (Col. 4:16). Many people would hear of works from the apostles, and when they met someone who possessed a copy, they would copy it down for themselves. The prolific copying of the books of the New Testament caused an explosion of manuscripts in the early church, with copies of New Testament writings found in Western Europe, Greece, and Egypt. Noting the sheer amount of textual evidence for the New Testament, biblical scholar F. F. Bruce writes: “The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt. It is a curious fact that historians have often been much readier to trust the New Testament records than have many theologians.”
The process of looking through all of these texts to determine the original content written by the apostles is called textual criticism. Do not be afraid of this term. It does not mean being critical toward the Bible; rather, it is the process of attempting to determine what the original text said, often by scholars who love the Lord. At the same time, if you or someone you know goes to a college and takes a typical New Testament course, textual criticism will come up, and it will likely be presented in a way that casts doubt on the Scriptures (even at some “Christian” colleges). In this context, textual criticism is not being done honestly, for it denies the reality of the great number of manuscript witnesses to the text of the New Testament.
When thinking about textual criticism, we do have to address the existence of textual variants. A variant is when two manuscripts do not perfectly align with one another. Depending on your method of counting, approximately 400,000 variants exist. With only 138,000 words in the NT, there are a huge number of variants! However, with many manuscripts come more variants, so this is not unexpected since we have over 5,700 New Testament manuscripts. However, well over 99% of these variants are completely inconsequential, consisting of differences in spelling or word order. The rest of the differences can be resolved by careful study with relative certainty. As one of my professors put it, if we purposefully took the worst possible choice for every debated variant in the New Testament (i.e. most manuscripts say “God,” but one says “horse”) every single time, no major doctrine of the New Testament would be affected.
The beauty of how God preserved his word is in this variety. The thousands of manuscripts that have been uncovered over the past 2,000 years match to an astonishing degree. We should expect to see discrepancies all over the place in the New Testament text. However, we have staggering unity in the text we have received. By allowing these manuscripts across multiple continents to be found in this way, God has preserved his truth for us in a manner that even the most ardent opponents have difficulty disputing. It is a marvelous thing to see how God used his people in this way to preserve his word.
Read it. Trust it. Treasure it.
Nathan Hunter (BA, Maranatha Baptist Bible College) serves as a lay elder of Oak Park Baptist Church.