More Reliable than Ever

The Manuscript Evidence for the Bible Accumulates

Some critics charge that the Bible has been altered or corrupted to the extent that the Bible we have today bears little resemblance to the original writings. Even readers inclined to take it at face value can stumble at editorial notations about certain passages not appearing in “the earliest and most reliable manuscripts.” What does that mean, and does it undermine the reliability of contemporary Bible translations?

To answer those questions, it helps to first trace the origin of the English Bible, especially the New Testament.

The First European-Language Bibles

The Latin Vulgate was the most commonly used Bible in the West from c. 400–1530. It had been translated from the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic by St. Jerome in the late fourth century at the request of Pope Damascene I, who wanted an official Bible in Latin, the language of the common people of the Christian realm at that time.

By the 1500s, the European common people no longer spoke Latin. They spoke English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian, etc. Europe was also divided at that time into Protestant countries and regions and Catholic countries and regions, and the different religious bodies held different interpretations of the Bible.

In 1515, seeing the advantage of the new printing presses in Europe, Catholic scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam decided to publish a Greek New Testament. In addition to a copy of the Latin Vulgate, Erasmus had only seven or eight Greek manuscripts at his disposal —and they did not add up to the entire New Testament. The Vatican Library had a complete copy of the Bible at the time, called Codex Vaticanus, which was the earliest-dated complete Greek manuscript at that time, but Erasmus did not have access to it, so he had to make do with what he had.¹ For some verses, he simply translated the Latin Vulgate text back into Greek.

Erasmus completed his project, and the first-ever printed Greek New Testament, later called the Textus Receptus(“received text”), was published in 1516. Only a few years later, in 1522, Martin Luther used Erasmus’s text to translate the New Testament into German. Then, William Tyndale, using Luther’s German New Testament and Erasmus’s Greek, began translating the New Testament into English, and the first English New Testament was published in 1526. And so, by the mid-1500s, the New Testament was getting out to the people.

The King James Bible

In 1535, Miles Coverdale published the first completeBible in English, and by 1600, the Geneva Bible, which had been published in 1560, was the primary English Protestant Bible. It was a good translation, but it was “unauthorized,” which made it illegal in England. One problem was that it had side notes added to the text. They were allegedly there to “explain the verses,” but some notes in later editions weren’t explanations of the text but were effectively a verbal proxy war on the Catholic Church. In the day, that amounted to incitement to violence.

So in 1604, King James I of England commissioned an authorized translation under the strict condition that it not have any footnotes or side notes —kings do tend to want peace in their realm. James I authorized it with the objective that the translation be accurate and neutral as far as the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants were concerned.

The Authorized King James Bible (KJV) was thus first printed in 1611. It was in Elizabethan English (the language of Shakespeare!), with its somewhat archaic vocabulary and style that pose some difficulties for modern readers. The KJV was a monumental work, completed by about 50 scholars from different theological backgrounds, a committee convened at Hampton Court at a crucial time in post-Reformation England. It was a magnificent achievement, the only masterpiece of English literature ever produced by a committee!

The KJV translators, top scholars of their day, had used the only primary Greek New Testament text that was available to them —the Textus Receptus, and so that was the basis for the KJV New Testament.²

Manuscripts & Fragments by the Thousands

Since the publication of Textus Receptus in 1516, thousands of ancient manuscripts, or fragments of manuscripts, have been discovered, and we now have an updated text known as the “Critical Text.” First published in 1881, this Greek text was based primarily on Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, which had been discovered in 1859 at a monastery near Mount Sinai. Both codices date to around the 4th century.

Presently, we have about 27,000 ancient manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament. The most important ones are in museums and universities, where they are made available to scholars. Some have now been digitized and put online (e.g., Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus). Some date as far back as the first, second, and third centuries.

By comparison, consider that in terms of manuscript evidence, the second-best-documented ancient work is Homer’s Iliad. Scholars generally believe that what we have today is an accurate representation of the original, even though the only known completed copy dates to the 10th century AD —that’s about 1,800 years after Homer wrote it (ca. 850 BC). Approximately 1,000 other Iliad manuscripts have been recovered, and scholars consider this an abundance for an ancient work. Skeptics who reject the much, much weightier documentation for the integrity of the Bible are applying different standards to the different works.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

The KJV is a wonderful translation, and while it does have some minor limitations, no doctrine of the Christian faith is in dispute, no matter which translation or manuscript one reads, for the simple reason that the teachings of the New Testament are repeated so many times that even if a scribe skipped a line while copying (it happened) or misspelled a word (which also happened), the text can still be easily recovered due to the sheer quantity and quality of available texts in other manuscripts, including many in other ancient languages. (Different scribes made different mistakes, so it is easy to spot the errors). To make careful comparisons, we need an abundance of manuscripts to compare, and we have that. Ancient scholars copied the Bible at a time when it was a tedious undertaking; they did so because the Bible, and especially the New Testament, was revered and painstakingly studied.

There are, however, about 40 lines that are in dispute. In the New International Version (NIV), for example, when a well-known passage of the KJV is in dispute (such as the ending of the Gospel of Mark or the story of the woman caught in adultery), the NIV and other translations bracket those verses off with a footnote noting that, “these verses do not appear in the earliest and best manuscripts.” Other differences are minor, such as one manuscript version which uses the word “your” where another one uses “our,” but the variations do not ultimately affect any Christian doctrine.

Contrary to what the skeptics say, the modern Bible has only become a more accurate representation of the original as more ancient-manuscript discoveries have come to light. Today, we know what the original words of the Bible are to the highest degree of accuracy. The critics are misinformed. We have great evidence for the reliability of the texts we call “the Bible,” and that is especially true of the New Testament. Read it with confidence.

Notes
1. A codex is an ancient version of a book.
2. They used the third edition of Textus Receptus, as corrected and published by Stephanus (French name Estienne).