The reliability of the Bible

From: Rose , Posted Date: Jan 7th, 2011

The Reliability of the Bible

by Charles F. Stanley

Is the Bible the Word of God? If we want to be intellectually honest, we will study the evidence. Just like a jury weighs the evidence and then decides on a verdict, we can investigate the historical evidence and determine if the Bible is reliable.

You might know that most modern translations of the Bible are based on ancient manuscripts (documents written by hand) in the original languages, not on a translation of a translation, as people often believe. (Some paraphrased Bibles are exceptions to this generality.) In a study of historical manuscripts, reliability is determined in part by 1) the date they were written, 2) the origin, and 3) the condition of the manuscripts.

This is true in studying any historical document, whether biblical or not. During the first century, two important Romans wrote history. The first was Caesar, who wrote during the first century. But his writing was not discovered until 900 years after it was written. We have only 10 copies of it.

Caesar’s book is quoted in other history books. No one doubts its authenticity, even though there are few copies and many years between the writings and their discovery.

The other writer of Roman history, Tacitus, wrote The Annals about the battles his father-in-law fought. Virtually nothing is known about these battles other than what Tacitus wrote.

We don’t even have all the letters or manuscripts. We only have 20 copies, about 60 percent, and those copies, too, are dated about A.D. 900 or 950. Even though we do not have a lot of copies and even though there is a significant amount of time between the writing and the finding of the writing, no one doubts the authenticity of this man’s work.

How does the Bible compare to the writings of these two men? A copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John was found together in one volume in A.D. 250. In Egypt, historians discovered a copy of the gospel of Luke, just as it appears in our Bible, dated A.D. 175. A fragment of John is dated A.D. 150. Apparently, soon after the gospel events, people started distributing copies in Egypt, not just in Jerusalem. Scholars believe Jesus Christ died in A.D. 30, so there is a relatively small time span between His death and the oldest copies of the writings.

By A.D. 350, there were five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. This is incredible evidence that the news needed to get out to the whole world. In light of the test of the date, origin, and condition of the manuscripts, the New Testament evidence is more reliable than ancient history.

Although we don’t have the originals of any of the ancient manuscripts, we do have copies. The earliest manuscripts we have were written on papyrus, which is made out of a water plant that grew in Egypt. Papyrus isn’t very durable. It became brittle with age or rotted with dampness and soon wore out. We can see why copies were necessary. But this is true of all ancient documents. For instance, it is true of the writings of Homer—of which, by the way, there is not a complete known copy dated earlier than A.D. 1300.

The New Testament writers, often poor and relatively unknown, had their writings better cared for than the powerful, influential Roman Empire. Could it have been that the Story itself was so powerful? Although the Romans were very interested in getting their story spread throughout the world, the followers of Christ had Someone orchestrating the distribution of their manuscripts.

Because there were so many manuscripts, those working on the canon of Scripture took the manuscripts and compared them. There were some differences, but the differences were minimal. Many were grammatical, such as a plural noun in one manuscript, but a singular noun in another. The substantial variations make up only 1/1000 of the New Testament. This is about one quarter of one page of the Greek text.

Let me give you an example in English of how most of the variations look. Suppose you receive a telegram that reads, “You inherited a million.” You probably would not say, “A million what? I don’t like this telegram.” The next day, you receive another telegram that reads, “You have inherited a million dollar.” You probably would not complain that the s is missing on the word dollar. The next day, you get another telegram: “You’ve inherited a million dollars.” You probably would not say, “Okay, which is it: You or you’ve? Dollar or dollars?”

These are “variant texts” telegrams. But comparing one with another doesn’t make you doubt your good news. Suppose you had 5000 telegrams with only that little variation. You would probably believe you had inherited a million dollars! Those are exactly the types of minute variations in the Biblical manuscripts. All those manuscripts, spread throughout the world, copied over and over, still bear no significant discrepancies that affect the truth.

The New Testament gets an A+ when we apply the tests of the date, origin, and condition of the manuscripts. If we do not accept the biblical manuscripts, we need to throw out all of ancient history. Other historical manuscripts, which are so widely accepted, do not pass the tests with flying colors like the biblical texts.

It stands to reason that God loves us enough and loves His Word enough that He watched over every writer and scribe so that we would know the greatest love story ever told.

--Adapted from Charles Stanley’s Handbook for Christian Living. 1996. pp. 187-191.