Do we have a corrupted text?Is our Bible true to the original text? Since the Bible was written centuries ago in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, our English Bible are translations of copies of prior copies. How do we know that the text we have has not been corrupted in this lengthy, complicated process? None of the original Old Testament writings remain — they disappeared for two reasons. First, ancient Jerusalem was twice destroyed and the Jews deported. Those violent events made it nearly impossible to preserve written materials. Second, the Jews had such reverence for their Scriptures that when a copy began to wear out, they disposed of it with a ritual burial. The lack of ancient copies would seem to hinder today’s scholars’ efforts to reconstruct the exact wording of the original. But the text we have is amazingly accurate because it was preserved over the centuries by the ancient scribes’ meticulous copying rules. We can verify their accuracy by comparing the Dead Sea Scrolls, from about 250 B.C. to A.D. 50, with the later Masoretic text, from which our Old Testament comes. The scribes’ procedure included the following: nothing was written from memory, not even one letter. They counted the number of verses, words and letters in each book and in the Pentateuch, and then noted the middle verse word and letter of each. They kept detailed records to compare their counts to those of previous scribes. This demanding process almost guaranteed that any copying errors would surface which could then be corrected. Nothing was left to chance. The issues surrounding New Testament transmission are different, but the resulting text is no less accurate. Like the Old Testament, no originals of the New Testament exist today. But we do have thousands of copies including fragments dating to a generation or two after the original. It is not out of the question to suggest that these earliest fragments may have been copied directly from the original. Also at our disposal are the writings of the early church fathers who quoted so much of the New Testament that some scholars believe we could reconstruct it entirely if we lost all our copies. Such a wealth of documents gives textual experts a great advantage in reconstructing the exact wording of the originals. As we might imagine when working with thousands of documents, we find variations in the copies. But the number of differences is exceedingly small — smaller than the variations among our English translations. Most are spelling differences, and none affects any significant doctrine. The result of such research is that we have no doubt about the exact wording of more than 99 percent of the original New Testament. What we have today, both old and New Testaments, is what God wrote long ago. We can trust it, learn it, memorize it, and live it with confidence.
