Rediscovering The Truth About Creation

Before ending this analysis about the validity of God's Word, the final part of the analysis involves taking a quick look at the copying standards which were employed by the faithful copiers of Scriptures. Like all of the other pieces to this saga, those who once had a job to do did it without fail, and as one might expect, they accomplished their work in a very meticulous fashion. The criteria for certifying the quality of that copying will be, first, to consider the number of copies which have survived through the Ages relative to the number of other historical works. Obviously, the more plentiful the copies, the more reliable is the text. Then, the second criterion will be to evaluate the accuracy of those copies when compared to each other.

What can one say concerning the number of original manuscripts of the Bible? The answer is plenty! According to Mr. Charles Leach, in his book Our Bible. How We Got It., counting the Greek manuscripts, the Latin Vulgate, and the other early versions, there are more than twenty-four thousand manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament [1]. By comparison, the second most plentiful historical work is the Iliad written by Homer, for which there are only six hundred and forty-three copies. Mr. S. E. Peters, in The Harvest of Hellenism, points out that no other work in history was copied more frequently in antiquity than the Christian New Testament, and certainly the number of surviving copies would suggest that his comment is correct [2].

Concerning the Old Testament, not as many copies are available as with the New. Besides that, the date of the oldest version, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, had been 916 A.D. After the discovery of the scrolls, the oldest version became about 125 B.C., which was over one thousand years farther back in time. Not only was the accuracy of the copying process verified by evaluating these two separate copies, but also a copy became available to mankind which could be placed over one thousand years closer to the original!

Since the writing of the Old Testament was completed around 400 B.C., the Dead Sea Scrolls successfully put the new oldest copy to within a few hundred years of the original. Therefore, the strength of the Old Testament comes not so much from the number of copies as from the nearly exact copying procedures which were undoubtedly used over that span of years. The early scribes who had had to write out those words by hand were very conscientious and devoted to their work. While they did make some occasional copying errors, their work for the most part was still very meticulous and nearly precise.

The second criterion for evaluating the copying process is to examine the accuracy of the copies. It is one thing to reproduce an original manuscript, but if there are numerous errors in the resulting copy, then any confidence in that copy will be small.

The quality of copies of the Old Testament has already been established by the earlier analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For the New Testament, Misters Geisler and Nix wrote about a separate comparison which was done on both the copies of the Iliad and also on those of the New Testament [3]. According to these gentlemen, only forty lines of the New Testament, which in all contains a total of about twenty thousand lines, caused any concern to analysts. This number of possible discrepancies is only two-tenths of one percent of the whole Testament, meaning that those copies were found to be approximately 99.8 percent pure. By comparison, seven hundred and sixty-four lines of the Iliad, with its fifteen thousand six hundred total lines, caused similar concern. This error statistic is about 4.9 percent, making that secular work in antiquity still good, but only about 95.1 percent pure.

The conclusion of this comparison is simple! There are many more copies of the New Testament, yet far fewer errors than those found in the second most prevalent ancient work. If one chooses to accept the second manuscript, the Iliad, as reliable, then one should also accept the first, which is the New Testament. Not only is there no reason to reject the Bible as God's Word, accurate and well preserved, but there is actually every reason to accept it as truth and also as a genuine copy of the original.

In providing evidences to this generation for the reliability of Scriptures, God has not left any stones unturned. He has carefully laid a solid framework from which the Apostles and other writers of Scriptures were taken. He has been detailed to the point of having most of those writers corroborate one another. He has made sure that there would be plenty of evidence for archaeologists to uncover. He has caused those involved to be very competent in their copying methods. He has preserved plenty of information for those who would actually analyze the copies. Lastly, He has wrapped His whole case around the historically factual Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As a result of all this genuine, easily verifiable data, one is left wondering why faith is even a factor in this debate. Based on ALL the evidence, how much faith does it really take to accept the Bible? The answer, in my opinion, is either none or very little. This Book proves itself and all of the accompanying data which exists in nature supports that proof. Not one piece of evidence has yet been found which can successfully challenge the validity of the Bible!