- About the Bible -
Jesus answered:
"I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me."
John 14:6
The
Reliability Of The Bible Manuscripts
Non-Christians, (skeptics like New Agers or Mormons) claim that in
the process of copying Scripture the text of the Bible was corrupted.
Is this really true?
Suppose
you wrote an essay and asked five friends to copy it.
Each of them in turn asked five more friends to do the same kind of
like a chain letter. By the fifth generation, you would have approximately
four thousand copies. Now, obviously, in the process, some people
are going to make some copying errors. The first five people to copy
it would make mistakes, and then most of the people who copy from
them
will make some more mistakes. Eventually youd have thousands of
copies and all of them flawed.
Sounds
pretty bad, right? But hold on. Your five friends might make mistakes,
but they wouldnt all make the same mistakes. If you
compared all of the copies, you would find that one group contained
the same mistake while the other four did not which of course, would
make it easy to tell the copies from the original. Not only that,
but most of the mistakes would be obvious things like misspelled words
or words that
were accidentally omitted. Anyone looking at all four thousand copies
would have no trouble figuring out which was the original.
Thats
essentially the same situation with the Bible. Weve got thousands
of copies of the Bible in its original language, and scholars who
have
studied them have been able to classify them into groups and in most
cases determine what the original documents actually said. The few
cases which are still debated by scholars really dont affect the
basic message of the Bible at all.
In
fact, interestingly enough when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered
at Qumran, they predated the earliest extant text the Masoretic text
by almost one thousand years yet in spite of this vast span of time,
there
was no substantive difference at all..In fact, in looking at Isaiah
53 there were only 17 changes between the Masoretic text and those
found at Qumran 10 involved spelling, 4 style and 3 involved the Hebrew
letters for
the word light in verse 11. However, none of these differences were
substantive God has indeed preserved His Word.
