Is The Bible Trustworthy?

Since none of the original Bible manuscripts have survived, how do we know that the Bible is reliable? The Jewish scribes were devoted to accurately copying the Old Testament scriptures. They guarded against scribal mistakes by intricate counting methods.

They numbered the letters and words of each book. They counted the number of times a letter was used within each book. They counted the middle letter and middle word of each book. They numbered just about anything that could be counted and used these counting systems as a means of error checking.

The scribes looked upon the sacred text with an almost superstitious reverence. Any manuscript copied with errors or worn out from use were buried. Their motive was to ensure that the material upon which the sacred name of God was inscribed was of superb quality.

Because of their meticulous quality control, the scribes were not concerned about having a paper trail of ancient copies to compare against. They considered any manuscript that had been carefully copied and carefully checked to be as authentic as any other manuscript, regardless of its age.

Because the scribes did not retain worn out copies, the oldest Old Testament manuscripts available in modern times dated only as far back as about 900 AD. However, in 1947, ancient Hebrew manuscripts were discovered in caves near the Dead Sea.

These manuscripts were at least 1 ,000 years older than any previously known and contained portions of every Old Testament book except one. When the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls were compared with the newer manuscripts, the textual variations were almost non-existent.

Likewise, the New Testament manuscripts have proven to be remarkably accurate. When comparing all the Greek manuscripts with each other, the accuracy rate is found to be at 99 .5%. The 0 .5 of textual variations are mostly composed of spelling and grammatical differences.

Amazingly, these textual variations are so insignificant that they do not alter the message in any meaningful way. There are over 10 ,000 manuscript copies of the Old Testament and more than 5 ,600 manuscripts of the New Testament with an accuracy that is unrivaled amongst other literature from the ancient world.

If we compare the number of Bible manuscripts to other ancient literary works, the Bible far outweighs them in both quantity and quality. The Bible manuscripts are a superb collection of ancient documents from which our modern Bibles are translated.