Can You Trust the Bible?

How can you know that what we have in our Bibles is what they wrote way back then?

In my last post, I talked about the first reason I believe we can trust the Bible.  I believe the evidence of the places and people the Bible speaks of speaks loudly to the credibility of our scriptures.

But here’s the second reason…

2 // The Manuscripts.

The second reason I believe you can SEE Jesus in scripture and that what we have is what they wrote is because of the number and dates of the manuscripts we have.

This is an important point because there are variations in the manuscripts that we have today. You need to know this.

Some people say that the Bible cannot be trusted because we have no original copies and there are so many variants within the texts. So you can’t trust anything the Bible says.

Other people go to the other extreme and say we can absolutely trust every word in the Bible beyond a shadow of a doubt because we have exactly what they wrote.

Those are two extremes. The fact is there are a lot of variants in the manuscripts we have. And we probably don’t have exactly what was originally written. But we can have confidence that what we have is a trustworthy witness.

So how many textual variants are there?

Experts like Dan Wallace say that there are approximately 140,000 words in the Greek New Testament. Actually, he says there are exactly 138,162 words in the Greek New Testament.

How many textual variants? They say there are 400,000 textual variants. That’s about 2.5 variants for every word!

Our critics would say, how in the world can you trust the Bible when:

A. You don’t have even one original manuscript.
B. You rarely have a complete copy of any one letter or book. What you have are mostly fragments or partial documents.
C. What you do have is filled with an enormous amount of variance.

What our critics don’t say is that the reason there are SO MANY variants is because we have SO MANY manuscripts.

In fact, it’s often been said that we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the sheer number of ancient documents we have containing scripture.

In fact, compared to what we have in terms of other ancient manuscripts that people don’t question… the Bible actually wins in a landslide.

Other Ancient Writers

For example…

1// Illiad by Homer:

Most people don’t question the authenticity or the accuracy of the Illiad written by Homer. Homer lived in the 9th or 8th century BC. The Illiad, like much of scripture, was written on papyri. A thin reed that was hammered into thin sheets and used to write on. Papyrus, as you might expect, didn’t last long. After time it would disintegrate. Amazingly, some had lasted through the centuries. In fact, there are currently estimated 1800 manuscripts of the Illiad. That’s the most of any ancient classical writing of its kind.  The earliest manuscript we have is dated 400 BC.

2// Herodotus

How about Herodotus who was an ancient Greek historian and is known as the Father of History. He lived between 484 – 425 BC. We have about 100 copies of his writings.  The earliest manuscript we have from Herodotus is from the 1st Century AD.

3// Plato

How about Plato. You probably know about Plato. We have 210 copies of his writings.  The date of the earliest copy we have of Plato’s writings is from 895 AD.

4// Julius Caesar

We have 251 copies written by Julius Caesar, the earliest dating to the 9th century.

5// Livy

We 100 copies from Levy, who wrote a history of Rome and from which we’ve taken most of what we know about ancient Rome from his writings and no one questions those.  The earliest copy we have from Levy is dated from the early 5th Century.

6// Tacitus

The same is true of Tacitus who also wrote about Rome. We have 31 copies of his writings from around 1100 AD.

Take all of those and with the exception of Homer’s Iliad, we rarely have more than 250 copies of any ancient manuscript. And, for most of those the time gap between when they were written and the first copy we have is SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS.  In fact, the average time gap for these six examples is 875 years!

The New Testament

NOW… take all that and compare it to what we have in regards to the Bible.

We have 5,838 copies of Green New Testament Manuscripts.

We have 18,524 copies of Greek New Testament Early Translations.

Altogether we have nearly 25,000 copies of your New Testament!

And the time gap between the earliest copy of a manuscript we have and when it was originally written is only 50 years!

The reason we have so many variants is because we have SO MANY copies to compare.

Think about it this way…

If you were to stack up the writings of the average Classical Writer, you would get a stack of pages about four feet tall.

If you were to stack up the pages of the writings of the New Testament manuscripts we have today, we have over 2.6 million pages, it would be 1 mile high! If you add to that the manuscripts we have for the Old Testament, it would be 2.5 miles high!!

The Variants

But let’s talk about those variants for a moment. Those variants typically fall into 4 groups.

4 Groups of Variants:

1— Spelling Differences

70% of the differences in the copies of the Bible that we have fall into this category. It’s the difference between spelling the word John as “John” or “Johnn.”

2 — Alterations that can’t be translated into English

In English, we almost always put the words into the same order. Subject, verb, object.
In Greek, you can put the words in any order you want. You can put the definite article wherever you want. But in English, we have to make a decision and put them in a specific order.

3 — Then there are variants that are meaningful but not viable

In other words, it does affect the meaning but no one believes it is accurate. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 2.7, Paul says, “we were gentle among you.” One 14th century manuscripts says, “we became like horses among you.” A slight change in the Greek word. But no one believes that is the correct translation. And it doesn’t change anything we believe!

Those 3 categories make up 99% of the variants in your Bible and none of them change our theology. None of them affect what we believe about Jesus.

4 — Meaningful and Viable

1/5 of 1% of the variants in your Bible fall into this category.

In Mark 9.29, Jesus is teaching his disciples about casting out demons. They tried to cast a demon out of a boy and they couldn’t do it. Jesus did. And they were asking about why they were unable to do it. Jesus said… This kind can only be cast out by prayer and fasting. Some MSS don’t have fasting. But if you’re working on delivering someone from demon possession, I would say go ahead and pray AND fast! This doesn’t change what we believe about Jesus.

Another example is Revelation 13.18 – Some say, “let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”

Some say, “616.”

The Longest variance is 12 verses.
If you look in your Bible at the end of Mark 16, you’ll probably see a footnote about the ending of Mark. The original ending of Mark didn’t have Jesus appearing after the resurrection. No one saw the resurrected Jesus. And it ends with his closest followers being afraid and silent. Well, later on, the scribes who were copying Mark didn’t like that ending at all! So they took parts of Matthew and Luke as well as other tradition passed down and created another ending for Mark.

If you open to John 8 you’ll read my all-time favorite story about Jesus, when a woman caught in the act of adultery was brought before Him. You’ll see a footnote in your Bible there, too, telling you that this story isn’t in our earliest Manuscripts. Did that story happen? Probably. Was it in John’s original gospel? Probably not.

So, can you trust the Bible?

Are there variants? Yes.

Do any of them change what we believe? No.

If anything, the incredible accuracy of what was copied and lack of any major variance throughout the centuries gives us incredible confidence that what we have is what they wrote!