Manuscript Evidence of the Bible
A manuscript is a hand-written copy of an ancient document that predates the invention of the printing press in 1455. It can be in the form of a scroll, a book or in codex format. Because scribes copied and translated the Scriptures by hand in those days, many people today argue that the Bible has been corrupted through the centuries. When we examine the evidence, we find conclusively that the Bible can be trusted and we can be confident that the Bible we have today is faithful to the original manuscripts.
“The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever.”
- Isaiah 40:8
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.”
- Matthew 24:35
- Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament. There are more than 24,970 partial and complete manuscript copies of the New Testament available for inspection which has a time gap of no more than 50 to 225 years after the original. Compared to any other ancient manuscript, the New Testament far surpasses them in numbers (ie. Homer’s Iliad is second with only 643 copies) and in their closeness to the original (ie. Homer’s Iliad: 400 years).
- The Variants in the New Testament manuscripts are minimal. Scholars have discovered that there are some 150,000 variants, out of which 99% hold virtually no significance whatsoever (ie. a missing letter in a word, reversing the order of two words or the absence of one or more insignificant words). Most of the manuscript variations concern matters of spelling, word order, tenses, and the like and no single doctrine is affected by them in any way.
- Support for the New Testament from the Church Fathers. In addition to the many thousands of New Testament manuscripts, there are some 86,000 quotations from the early church fathers (Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Tertullian, Polycarp, etc.) and several thousand Lectionaries (worship books). There are enough quotations from the early church fathers that even if we did not have a single copy of the Bible, scholars could still reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament from material written within 150 to 200 years from the time of Christ.
- Manuscript Evidence for the Old Testament. Even though the quantity of Old Testament manuscripts does not equal that of the New Testament, the number of manuscripts available today is quite astounding and of very good quality. The most remarkable of these are the Dead Sea Scrolls (a collection of 931 documents dating from 300 BC to AD 40) that were discovered at Qumran (West Bank, Israel) in 1947. These scrolls prove, with undeniable evidence, the accuracy of the transmission of the Bible as well as the fact that the Old Testament text in our Bible today is the same as it was when originally inspired by God. Before the discovery of the scrolls, the oldest known complete Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament was a Masoretic text (Ben Asher Codex AD 1008).
- The Variants in the Dead Sea Scrolls are minimal. The Dead Sea Scrolls include a complete copy of the book of Isaiah and some forty thousand fragments of every book of the Old Testament, except the book of Esther. These scrolls proved to be more than 95% accurate with primarily spelling alterations and stylistic changes, such as conjunctions in the 5% variation.
After examining the overwhelming manuscript evidence of both the Old Testament and the New Testament, you have to come to the conclusion, as numerous Christian and secular scholars have, that the text of the modern Bible has not undergone corruption. We can trust, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Bible is trustworthy and historically reliable.
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Knowing the Bible 
