By H. Lynn Gardner
ABOUT THIS SERIES:
January 20″”God”s Word Written. How did God communicate through prophets and Scripture writers?
Last Week””God”s Word Collected. What is the canon and how can we be sure our Bibles contain the right books?
Today””God”s Word Preserved. How close to the original are the Bible manuscripts we have today?
Next Week””God”s Word Translated. How true to God”s Word are the English words available for us to read?
My pharmacist asked, “Lynn, how do we know the words in my Bible are the words Jesus spoke?” We need to know how accurately the Bible text has been copied through the centuries.
The original writings of the Bible books, called autographs, have been lost. We rely on copies of copies for our access to the written Word of God. While this may seem alarming, it is common for original documents of ancient writings to be lost. Available evidence reassures us. It demonstrates that the biblical text has been preserved carefully and accurately through the years.
The Copying of Manuscripts
Before the invention of printing (1450s), every copy of a document had to be made by hand. In biblical studies, manuscript indicates a document in the original language. Early books were rolls or scrolls. Appearing in the second century, the codex (book form) had pages written on front and back and attached at the side. More convenient than the roll, a codex could be carried easily, was handy for reference, and contained more material.
An individual scribe could produce a manuscript by copying letter for letter and word for word from an examplar, the book being copied. Multiple copies could be made in a scriptorium where a reader would read aloud from his text with several scribes each producing a manuscript.
Some copyist errors found their way into the texts. A few variations were intentional”” where the scribe tried to improve the text. Most variants were unintentional””alternate spellings, substitution of a synonym, or repeating or omitting a word or a line. Comparing all the evidence, textual scholars have been able to recover and reconstruct almost exactly the original text of the Bible. In evaluating manuscript evidence, the earlier reading is preferred. Being closest to the original makes it less susceptible to copyist variations.
The Preservation of the Old Testament Text
Early manuscript evidence of the Old Testament text is limited. While attacking Jerusalem, armies of the Babylonians (586 bc), the Assyrians (167 bc), and the Romans (ad 70) destroyed scrolls of Hebrew Scriptures. Hebrew scribes buried old and worn-out biblical texts to avoid defilement by pagans””another reason for the absence of early manuscripts.
Jewish scribes” passion for accuracy helps compensate for the lack of early manuscripts. Between 100 bc and ad 400 Jewish scribes developed specific rules for copying synagogue rolls to help the scribe to be exact and reverent in his work.
The standard Old Testament text resulted from the work of scribes called Masoretes (ad 500-900). The most famous of these scholars worked in Tiberias, in Galilee. The Hebrew alphabet has only consonants, so the Hebrew text originally had no vowels. Because the Hebrew language was not commonly spoken in their time, the Masoretes added vowel points to aid pronunciation.
The Masoretes copied the Scriptures with meticulous and painstaking care. They developed rigorous methods for avoiding copyist errors, including detailed counting. Neil Lightfoot explains:
They numbered the verses, words, and letters of each book. They counted the number of times each letter was used in each book. . . . They calculated the middle letter, middle verse of Psalms, the middle verse of the entire Hebrew Bible, and so forth. In fact, they counted almost everything that could be counted. With these safeguards, and others, when a scribe finished making a copy of a book, he could then check the accuracy of his work before using it.1
The fact that today we call the Hebrew text the Masoretic Text testifies to the quality of their work.
The earliest Hebrew manuscripts date from ad 900 to 1000. The Leningrad Codex (ad 1008) is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible. The Aleppo Codex (ad 925), though missing a portion, is considered one of the most important of Hebrew manuscripts. Valuable as these texts are, they were copied up to 2,000 years after the autographs.
The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (dated 250 bc to ad 60), extended our textual evidence back a thousand years. The Dead Sea Scrolls included every book of the Old Testament except Esther. They provide evidence of a standardized Hebrew text.
Mark Norton states,
These ancient witnesses only confirm the accuracy of the Masoretic Text and the care with which the Jewish scribes handled the Scriptures. Except for a few instances where spelling and grammar differ between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text, the two are amazingly similar. The differences do not warrant any major changes in the substance of the Old Testament. . . . [We have] strong assurance that the Word of God has been transmitted in accurate and dependable form.2
The Preservation of the New Testament Text
The New Testament books were written on papyrus, a writing material made from crisscrossing strips from the pith of reeds that grew along the Nile River in Egypt. Papyrus sheets were attached together making scrolls or rolls. A short book like Philemon would have been on one sheet. A long book like Matthew, Luke, or Acts would be a roll more than 30 feet long.
Relatively few papyrus manuscripts have survived. We have 118 papyrus manuscripts containing at least one or more passages or books of the New Testament. Copied soon after the autographs, they provide evidence of the text beginning within 30 years after the close of the New Testament.
One of the earliest copies of New Testament text, John Rylands Fragment (ad 110-125), contains five verses from John 18. Scholars discovered it in Egypt in 1920, far from Ephesus where John probably wrote the Gospel. This papyrus text was copied within 30 years after the Gospel was written.
The Chester Beatty Papyri, discovered in 1930, contains the four Gospels and Acts, much of eight of Paul”s letters, Hebrews, and Revelation. Three manuscripts make up this collection usually dated around ad 200. Philip Comfort says that one of these texts containing “all of Paul”s epistles, except the Pastorals, has recently been dated in the late first century. If this dating is accurate then we have an entire collection of Paul”s epistles that must have been made only twenty to thirty years after Paul wrote most of the Epistles.”3
Of the three manuscripts in the Bodmer Collection (ad 200), one contains most of John”s Gospel, another has 1 and 2 Peter, and the third large portions of Luke and John.
By the fourth century, parchment became the preferred writing material for manuscripts and continued in this use for a thousand years. Parchment was a durable writing material made by processing the skins of calves, sheep, goats, and other animals.
The Vatican Manuscript (dated 300-350) contains most of the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is on vellum (the finest parchment) with the original ink still quite readable. Textual scholars generally recognize the Vatican Manuscript as the most important witness to the text of the New Testament.
Biblical scholar Tischendorf discovered the Sinaitic Manuscript (dated 320-350), “the pearl of all my researches,” in St. Catherine”s Monastery at Mount Sinai. Adventure and drama characterize the story of his first seeing a few pages of the manuscript in 1844 until his persistence paid off in seeing the whole manuscript in 1858. Agreement of the Vatican and Sinaitic manuscripts is considered strong evidence of the original text.
The lectionary, Scripture passages arranged for reading in public worship, provides another kind of manuscript. The earliest lectionaries date from the fourth century. Carefully copied, they represent an early witness to the New Testament text.
A change in Greek writing style occurred during the ninth century. Before this, Greek was written in block capital letters called uncials. They were written without spaces between words and without punctuation. Uncials gave way to small, connected letters called miniscules.
We have 5,746 manuscripts of the New Testament. The great value of having so many manuscripts copied in various geographical areas is that scholars can cross-check them to ascertain the reading in the original text. We have copies dating within 30 to 100 years from the writing of the originals. In other ancient books this time lapse is several hundred years. (See chart).
We also have more than 24,000 manuscripts of translations of the New Testament into Latin and other languages. Biblical scholar Bruce Metzger says that if we lost all Greek manuscripts we could reproduce the contents of the New Testament from either the early translations or the quotations in early Christian literature.4
Even with all available evidence, scholars cannot completely resolve a few of the textual variations in the biblical text. These do not affect any fact of the gospel or any doctrine of the faith. We can have confidence that when we read the Bible we are reading almost exactly the original text.
We are indebted to the scribes, guardians of the text, who faithfully and accurately preserved the Scriptures. It would take as much as 10 months to produce one handwritten copy of the entire Bible. A scribe exclaimed, “The end of the book””thanks be to God!”5
Our deepest gratitude is due to God for giving us his Word and for his providential care in preserving it through the centuries. We must not take this gift lightly.
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1Neil Lightfoot, How We Got the Bible, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 132.
2Mark R. Norton, “Manuscripts of the Old Testament,” in The Origin of the Bible, ed. by Philip Wesley Comfort (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1992), 162, 177.
3Philip W. Comfort, “Texts and Manuscripts of the New Testament,” in The Origin of the Bible ed. by Philip Wesley Comfort (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1992), 179.
4Quoted in Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 59.
5Lightfoot, How We Got the Bible, 31.
H. Lynn Gardner is retired after serving many years on the faculty and as academic dean of Ozark Christian College, Joplin, Missouri.
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