Over the past week, we have considered whether it might be plausible to trust the Bible's audacious claim: that it is the word of God.

The final response to the challenge is to address the reliability of the manuscripts. Can we trust that the Bible we have in our hands resembles the original writings of the disciples? Is it true, as Bart Ehrman said, that there are 400,000 errors in the early biblical manuscripts?

Let’s respond to this critical challenge.

Let me provide some explanation: the Bible was written by hand and then sent to the intended recipients via the Roman mail system. Let’s take the gospel of Luke, since we’ve previously read from the beginning of his gospel. Luke wrote out his account of Jesus’ life and then sent it to a man named Theophilus. Theophilus then read the gospel and was likely so amazed that he decided to have a scribe make copies of the letter to send to his friends so he could share the story with them. Copies of those manuscripts were made, and then copies of those copies, and so on. We don’t have any of the original manuscripts of the New Testament. We don’t have the first gospel that Luke wrote. But what we do have are many of the copies of a copy of the original.

How in the world can we trust the documents we have, then?

I want to give you some perspective on how many ancient manuscripts we have. If you look at other ancient manuscripts, you find that for many ancient documents we trust to give us ancient history, we only have a handful of manuscripts and we never have the original manuscript. Let’s take a look at this chart to provide us with a sense of the comparison.[i]

Outside of the New Testament, the ancient document with the most manuscript evidence we have is Homer’s Illiad. [ii] That means we are considerably more confident in the reliability of the wording we have in Homer’s Illiad than we are, say, of the Roman senator and historian Tacitus’s Histories. And yet that isn’t to say that Tacitus’s Histories aren’t trusted, they are trustworthy documents.

But then compare the number of these documents to the number of manuscripts we have in the New Testament. The number of New Testament manuscripts dwarfs the number of any other ancient document.

And look at how much closer the New Testament manuscripts are to the original document than any other ancient document. When you combine the number of manuscripts we have with how close those manuscripts are to the original we have the ability to get an incredibly accurate picture of what the original texts were.

The earliest manuscript of any other ancient document was five hundred years after the document. Like many of you, I read Pliny, Demosthenes, Euripedes, Tacitus, and others in my history classes in college. These are trustworthy sources even though they have twenty or fewer manuscripts, and our earliest manuscripts are roughly a thousand years later than the original writings.

Let’s pause and answer the question you might be asking: what are these manuscripts, and what do they look like? Let me give you a glimpse of two very different manuscripts. Our oldest manuscript is called the John Rylands manuscript, which is from around 130 AD. This manuscript is a tiny fragment from John 18.[iii] You can see it here:

The second manuscript is very different. The Chester Beatty Papyri (dated around AD 200) is much larger. This manuscript contains four parts which include 15 of the 27 New Testament books (part of a codex of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts as well as Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, and Revelation).[iv] In all, the four parts total over 200 leaves.[v]

You can see The Chester Beatty Papyri here:

Let’s return to Ehrman’s accusation that the ancient biblical manuscripts contain 400,000 errors. Ehrman is correct: you can count 400,000 errors collectively across all of the manuscripts. However, the vast majority of those errors are miniscule. In fact, there are only two sections of the Bible where more than a few words are in dispute (those are Mark 16:9-10 and John 7:53-8:11; both were included in earlier editions of the Bible, but manuscript evidence makes it pretty clear these were not included in the original manuscripts). And those two sections are noted in any modern translation. These sections also don’t impact core doctrinal matters.

But Ehrman dramatically misrepresents the trustworthiness of these manuscripts. Ehrman counts every misspelling, every slight variation in the 5,600 manuscripts as an error. And if you have a branch of manuscripts that all share the addition of the same word or the same misspelling, then he counts every one of those as an error.

One scholar went through Ehrman’s book where he made this accusation and counted the number of typos in Ehrman’s book. There are 16 typos. But because 100,000 copies of his book were sold, that means that, by Ehrman’s own math, his own book had 1.6 million errors.[vi]

That, of course, is as unfair to Ehrman as it is to the manuscripts. In reality, the manuscripts we have share over 99% of their content. They are, in fact, the most reliable ancient manuscripts that we have.

Let me share this as clearly and boldly as possible: Jesus of Nazareth is the most historically attested ancient human being that ever walked on earth. He is more attested than any of the Caesars, more than Socrates, more than Plato, Alexander the Great, or Attila the Hun.

If you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed, you have much less reason to believe in the existence of any ancient figure. Ask yourself: if you disbelieve Jesus, is it because of the evidence, or is it because of what his existence would mean for your life?

Our final post in this series will turn to the practical question: what does the Bible have to do with my life?

[i] https://slideplayer.com/slide/6375879/

[ii]

[iii] https://www.josh.org/8-manuscripts-validate-new-testament/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rylands_Library_Papyrus_P52

[iv] The NT canon was actually pretty much decided by around this time (200 AD) with very little differentiation of books being distributed among the churches. See here for more: https://www.theopedia.com/development-of-the-canon.

[v] Four parts: 110 leaves, 30 leaves, 2 leaves, 85 leaves, 10 leaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Beatty_Papyri