Since our Bible is the basis of our faith in God and His will for us, we must have confidence that we have an accurate copy of God’s word. There are many reasons we can believe that our copy of the Bible can be trusted. “Church Fathers” were men who lived in the second and third century and who were well acquainted with the New Testament writers. They wrote many letters in which they quoted most of the New Testament. From their writings all the New Testament could be reproduced except for eleven verses.
We do not have any original books of the Bible, but we have thousands of manuscripts from which the New Testament can be reconstructed. There are 5,000 Greek manuscripts, 8,000 Latin manuscripts and 13,000 partial manuscripts. By contrast to other ancient documents the Illiad is the best attested ancient book and there are only 143 manuscripts available from which to construct that work.
The time between the original work being written and the manuscripts from which our Bible is constructed is significant. John’s gospel was written about 90 A.D. Part of that gospel was found in Egypt and dates from 115. Most of the major manuscripts from which the Bible is produced are from the fourth century. That seems like a long time between the original and the manuscripts which produced the Bible, but compared to other ancient work that is pretty recent. Sophocles was an ancient Greek playwright from the 5th century B.C. We have seven of his plays and the manuscripts from which they are constructed are 1,400 years after they were written.
We can trust our New Testament. We have an accurate copy of it. Again, a comparison. The New Testament has about 20,000 lines, but only 40 of them are challenged. In comparison the Illiad consists of 15,600 lines, but there are 764 lines called into question. The forty lines that are questioned contain about 400 words. Even though there are this many words, there is not a doctrine that is involved in them Wescott and Hort, two Greek scholars say that there is less than one-tenth of one percent of the New Testament can be questioned. That would be less than a half a page in a normal size Bible.
We should be thankful that through God’s providence, we have a good accurate copy of the Bible. The challenge now is not to just believe that we have God’s word, but to live it daily.
Wayne Burger