Is the Bible textually Reliable? Or has it been corrupted?

Textual Criticism and the Bible

What is the Most Recent Manuscript Count for the New… | Sean McDowell
Ancient Bible Manuscripts

In our scientific and educated age we question many of the non-scientific beliefs that earlier generations had.  This skepticism is especially true of the Bible.  Many of us question the reliability of the Bible from what we know about it.  After all, the Bible was written more than two thousand years ago.  But for most of these millennia there has been no printing press, photocopy machines or publishing companies.  So the original manuscripts were copied by hand, generation after generation, as languages died out and new ones arose, as empires changed and new powers ascended. 

Since the original manuscripts have long been lost, how do we know that what we read today in the Bible is what the original authors actually wrote?  Perhaps the Bible has been changed or corrupted, maybe by leaders in the church, or priests and monks who wished to change its message to suit their purposes.

Principles of Textual Criticism

Naturally, this question is true of any ancient writing.  The timeline below illustrates the process by which any ancient writing has been preserved over time. It shows an example ancient document written 500 BC (this date picked randomly).  This original however does not last indefinitely, so before it decays, is lost, or destroyed, a manuscript copy of it is made (1st copy).  A professional class of people called scribes did the copying work.  As the years advance, copies are made of the copy (2nd copy & 3rd copy).  At some point a copy is preserved so that it is in existence today (3rd copy).  In our example this existing copy was written 500 AD. 

Timeline of our example document

Manuscript Time Intervals

Therefore, this means that the earliest that we can know of the state of the document is only from 500 CE onwards.  Consequently the period from 500 BC to 500 CE (labeled x in the diagram) is the period where we cannot make any copy verifications since all manuscripts from this period have disappeared.  For example, if copying errors (intentional or otherwise) were made when the 2nd copy was made from the 1st copy, we would not be able to detect them as neither of these documents are available to compare against each other.  This time period predating the currently existing copies (the period x) is thus the interval of textual uncertainty. 

Therefore, a principle used to address questions about textual reliability is to look at the length of this time span.  The shorter this interval (‘x’ in the diagram) the more confidence we place in the accurate preservation of the document to our modern day, since the period of uncertainty is reduced.

The number of existing manuscripts

Of course, usually more than one manuscript copy of a document is in existence today.  Suppose we have two such manuscript copies and in the same section of each of them we find the following phrase:

The original author had either been writing about Joan OR about John, and the other of these manuscripts contains a copy error.  But which one has the error?  From the available manuscripts it is very difficult to determine.

But suppose we found two more manuscript copies of the same work, as shown below:

Now it is easier to deduce which manuscript has the error.  It is more likely that the error is made once, rather than the same error repeated three times, so it is likely that manuscript #2 has the copy error, and the author was writing about Joan, not John.

This simple example illustrates a second principle used to verify manuscript integrity. The more existing manuscripts available, the easier it is to detect and correct errors as well as to assess the content of the original.

With this we have two evidence-based indicators used to determine the textual reliability of ancient documents:

  1. measuring the time between original composition and earliest existing manuscript copies, and
  2. counting the number of existing manuscript copies. 

Textual Criticism of Classical Greco-Roman writings compared to New Testament

Since this indicators apply to any ancient writings let us now compare the manuscripts of the Bible with other ancient manuscripts that scholars accept as reliable. This Table lists some well-known ones (1)..

AuthorWhen WrittenEarliest CopyTime Span
Caesar50 BC900 AD95010
Plato350 BC900 AD12507
Aristotle*300 BC1100 AD14005
Thucydides400 BC900 AD13008
Herodotus400 BC900 AD13008
Sophocles400 BC1000 AD1400100
Tacitus100 AD1100 AD100020
Pliny100 AD850 AD7507
Manuscript data of well-known ancient writers accepted as reliable

* from any one work

These writers represent the major classical writers of antiquity. Their writings shaped the development of Western civilization.  On average, they have been passed down to us only by 10-100 manuscripts that are preserved starting about 1000 years after the original was written.   From a scientific point-of-view this data can be considered our control experiment since it comprises data (classical history and philosophy) that are accepted and used by academics and universities world-wide.

New Testament Manuscripts

The following table compares the New Testament writings along these same criteria (2).  This can be considered our experimental data which will be compared to our control data, just like in any scientific investigation.

MSSWhen WrittenDate of MSSTime Span
John Rylan90 AD130 AD40 yrs
Bodmer Papyrus90 AD150-200 AD110 yrs
Chester  Beatty60 AD200 AD20 yrs
Codex Vaticanus60-90 AD325 AD265 yrs
Codex Sinaiticus60-90 AD350 AD290 yrs
Textual Data of the earliest New Testament manuscripts
18 Ways The Bible Has Changed Since It Was First Written
Old Bible Manuscript

This table gives just a brief highlight of some of the existing New Testament manuscripts.  The number of New Testament manuscripts is so vast that it would be impossible to list them all in a table. 

Testimony of the Scholarship

As one scholar who spent years studying this issue states:

“We have more than 24000 MSS copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today… No other document of antiquity even begins to approach such numbers and attestation.  In comparison, the ILIAD by Homer is second with 643 MSS that still survive”

McDowell, J. Evidence That Demands a Verdict. 1979. p. 40

A leading scholar at the British Museum corroborates this:

“Scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers … yet our knowledge of their writings depends on a mere handful of MSS whereas the MSS of the N.T. are counted by … thousands”

Kenyon, F.G. (former director of British Museum) Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts. 1941 p.23

New Testament Textual Criticism and Constantine

Significantly, a large number of these manuscripts are extremely ancient.  Consider the introduction of the book transcribing the earliest Greek New Testament documents. 

“This book provides transcriptions of 69 of the earliest New Testament manuscripts…dated from early 2nd century to beginning of the 4th (100-300AD) … containing about 2/3 of the new Testament text”

Comfort, P.W. “The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts”. p. 17. 2001

This is significant because these manuscripts come before Roman Emperor Constantine (ca 325 CE) and the rise to power of the Catholic Church. Sometimes critics accuse either Constantine or the church of altering the biblical text.  We can actually test this claim by comparing the texts from before Constantine (since we have them) with those coming later.  When we do we find that they have not changed because the texts from 200 CE are the same as those that come later.  Thus, neither the Catholic Church, nor Constantine changed the Bible.  That is not a religious statement, it is one based solely on scientific data.  The figure below illustrates the timeline of manuscripts from which today’s New Testament comes from.

New Testament manuscripts from which modern Bibles derive

Implications of Bible Textual Criticism

So what can we conclude from this?  Certainly at least in what we can objectively measure the New Testament is verified to a much higher degree than any other classical work.  The verdict to which the evidence pushes us is best summed up by the following:

“To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no other documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament”

Montgomery, History and Christianity. 1971. p.29
The New Testament Books: What You Need to Know

What this academic is saying is that to be consistent, if we decide to doubt the reliability of the preservation of the Bible we should discard all that we know about classical history in general – and this no informed historian has ever done.  We know that the Biblical texts have not been altered as eras, languages and empires have come and gone because the earliest existing MSSs pre-date these events.  For example, we know that no overly zealous medieval monk added in the miracles of Jesus to the Biblical account, since we have manuscripts that pre-date the medieval monks and all these pre-dated manuscripts also contain the miraculous accounts of Jesus.

What about translation of the Bible?

But what about the errors involved in translation, and the fact that there are so many different versions of the Bible today? Don’t many version show that it is impossible to accurately determine what the original authors actually wrote?

What About Bible Translations? - Bible Gateway Blog
The Bible is translated into many different languages

First, let us clear up a common misconception.  Many think that the Bible today has gone through a long series of translation steps, with each new language being translated from the previous one. So they imagine a series something like this:  Greek -> Latin -> Medieval English -> Shakespeare English -> modern English -> other modern languages. 

In fact, linguists translate the Bible into the diverse languages today directly from its original language.  So for the New Testament the translation proceeds Greek -> modern language, and for the Old Testament the translation proceeds Hebrew -> modern language (further details here).  But the base Greek and Hebrew text is standard.  So the differences in Bible versions comes from how linguists choose to translate phrases into the receiver language.

Translation Reliability

Due to the vast classical literature that was written in Greek (original language of the New Testament), it has become possible to precisely translate the original thoughts and words of the original authors. In fact the different modern versions attest to this. For example, read this well-known verse in the most common versions, and note the slight variance in wording, but consistency in idea and meaning:

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (New International Version)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (New American Standard Version)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (New Living Translation)

You can see that there is no disagreement between the translations because they say exactly the same thing with only slightly different word usage.

Conclusion

To summarize, neither time nor translation has corrupted the ideas and thoughts expressed in the original Biblical manuscripts to hide it from us today.  We can know that the Bible today accurately reads what the authors actually wrote back then and it remains textually reliable.

But it is important to realize what this study does and does not show.  This does not prove that the Bible is necessarily the Word of God.  It can be argued that though the original ideas of the Biblical authors have been accurately conveyed to us today that does not prove or indicate that these original ideas ever were correct to begin with (or even that they are from God). 

But understanding the textual reliability of the Bible provides a start-point from which one can start seriously investigating the Bible to see if some of these other questions can also be answered, and to become informed as to what its message is.  Since the Bible claims that its message is a blessing from God what if there is a chance this is true?  Perhaps it is worth taking the time to learn some of the important events of the Bible.  Why not start in the beginning?

1. McDowell, J. Evidence That Demands a Verdict. 1979. p. 42-48

2. Comfort, P.W. The Origin of  the Bible, 1992. p. 193

The Final Countdown – Promised in the Beginning

We have looked at how mankind fell from their first created state. The Bible tells us God had a plan based on a Promise made at the beginning of history.

The Bible – Really a Library

First, some facts about the Bible.  The Bible is a collection of books, written by many authors.  It took more than 1500 years for these books to all be written from start to finish.  This makes the Bible  more like a library and sets it apart from other Great Books. If the Bible was written by just one author, or a group that knew each other we may not be surprised at its unity, but the authors of the Bible are separated by hundreds and even thousands of years.  These writers come from different countries, languages, and social positions.  But their messages and predictions connect with each other and the facts of history recorded outside the Bible.  The oldest copies of the Old Testament books (the books before Jesus) that still exist today are from 200 BC.  Existing copies of the New Testament are dated from 125 AD and later.

The Gospel Promise in the Garden

We see at the very beginning of the Bible an example of how the Bible predicts into the future. Though it is about the Beginning, it was written with the End in mind.  Here we see a Promise when God confronts Satan (who was in the form of a serpent) with a riddle just after he brought about the Fall of mankind.

“… and I (God) will put enmity between you (Satan) and the woman and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

You can see that this is prophetic by ‘will’s in future tense.  There are also five different characters mentioned. They are:

  1. I = God
  2. you = serpent or Satan
  3. The woman
  4. The offspring of the woman
  5. The offspring of serpent or Satan

The Promise predicts how these characters will relate in the future. This is shown below:

Relationships between the characters depicted in the Promise
Relationships between the characters in the Promise

It does not say who ‘the woman’ is but God will cause both Satan and the woman to have an ‘offspring’. There will be ‘enmity’ or hatred between these offspring and between the woman and Satan. Satan will ‘strike the heel’ of the woman’s offspring while the offspring of the woman will ‘crush the head’ of Satan.

Who is the Offspring? – a ‘he’

We have made some observations, now for some conclusions. Because the ‘offspring’ of the woman is a ‘he’ we can discard some possibilities.  As a ‘he’ the offspring is not a ‘she’ and is not a woman.  As a ‘he’ the offspring is not a ‘they’, so it is NOT a group of people or a nation.  As a ‘he’ the offspring is a person and not an ‘it’.  The offspring is not a philosophy, teaching, political system, or a religion – since these are all ‘it’s. An ‘it’ like these would have been our preferred choice to fix the corruption since people are always thinking up new systems and religions. God had something else in mind – a ‘he’- a single male human.   This ‘he’ would crush the head of Satan.

Notice what is not said. God does not say that this offspring will come from the woman and the man, but only from the woman. This is especially unusual since the Bible almost always records only the sons coming through fathers.  Some see the Bible as ‘sexist’  because it just records fathers of sons. But here it is different – there is no promise of an offspring (a ‘he’) coming from a man. It says only that there will be an offspring coming from the woman, without mentioning a man.

A much later Prophet builds on that Promise

Hundreds of years later, an Old Testament prophet added the following:

the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’). (Isaiah 7:14, 750 BC)

More than 700 years after Isaiah, Jesus was born (the New Testament says) from a virgin – fulfilling Isaiah. But is Jesus being foreseen even this early – right at the beginning of human history? This fits with the offspring as a ‘he’, not a ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘it’. With that perspective, if you read the riddle it makes sense.

‘Strike his Heel’??

But what does it mean that Satan would strike ‘his heel’? One year I worked in the jungles of Cameroon. We had to wear thick rubber boots in the humid heat because the snakes lay in the long grass and would strike your foot – your heel – and kill you.  After that jungle experience it made sense to me.  The ‘he’ would destroy Satan, the serpent, but ‘he’ would be killed in the process.  That does foreshadow the victory gained through the sacrifice of Jesus.

‘The woman’ – a Double Meaning

So, if this Promise at the Beginning concerns Jesus, then the woman would be the virgin woman who gave birth to him – Mary.  But there is a second meaning.  Notice how another Old Testament prophet refers to Israel.

O Israel, … I will make you my wife forever, … I will be faithful to you and make you mine, and you will finally know me as the Lord. (Hosea 2:17-20.  800 BC)

Israel, in the Bible, is referred to as the wife of the LORD – a woman.  Then, the last book in the Bible, describes a conflict which this woman will have to go through with her enemy

I saw a woman clothed with … a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant, and she cried out because of her labor pains and the agony of giving birth.

Then …I saw a large red dragon … in front of the woman as she was about to give birth, ready to devour her baby as soon as it was born.

She gave birth to a son who was to rule all nations with an iron rod. …

This great dragon—the ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, the one deceiving the whole world—was thrown down to the earth with all his angels…

When the dragon realized that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child… And the dragon was angry at the woman and declared war against the rest of her children…  (Revelation 12:1-17, 90 AD)

Since Jesus was a Jew, he is at the same time the offspring of Mary, the woman, and Israel, the woman.  The Promise came true both ways.  The ancient serpent is in enmity with Israel, ‘the woman’, and has declared war on her.  This explains the unique troubles that Jews have suffered through their long history, and it was predicted in the very beginning.

The offspring of the Serpent?

But who is this offspring of Satan?  In the last book of the Bible, many pages and thousands of years after the Promise in Genesis, predicts a coming person. Note the description:

The beast you saw was once alive, but now it is not. However, it will come up out of the bottomless pit and go away to be destroyed. The people who live on the earth will be amazed when they see the beast, because it was once alive, is no longer living, but will come again. These are the people whose names have never been written in the book of life since the beginning of the world.

“You need wisdom to understand this.

(Revelation 17:8-9; written by John ca 90 AD)

This describes a fight between the offspring of the woman and Satan’s offspring. But it is first revealed in the Promise of Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, with the details filled in later. The countdown to a final contest between Satan and God started long ago in the Garden.  It could almost make you think that history is really His-Story.