Premise 1 : The Old Testament is the most accurately documented book from before the time of Christ
Did you know that archaeologist have found literally tens of thousands of manuscripts or fragments of the Bible, and some of the fragments date as early as 600 B.C. (3,525 years from 2022) The Bible is the most textually verified ancient book in the world by a huge margin.
For instance Plato’s work Tetralogies has 210 manuscripts. It was written 408-310 B.C. with the earliest copy dated 1200 years after the original in A.D. 900. The Dead Sea Scrolls by themselves contain 900 Old Testament Manuscripts by themselves. The Cairo Geniza Scrolls found in 1864 contain over 250,000 manuscript fragments of the Old Testament.
Here are just some of the most famous manuscripts that have discovered and researched to compose our modern Bible translations today
Name | Date Of Copies | Bible Books |
Dead Sea Scrolls | 250 BC-AD 68 | 900 biblical manuscripts from every book of the Old Testament except Esther |
Isaiah Scroll A | 150-100 B.C | Complete Copy of the book of Isaiah |
Rylands Papyrus 458 | 150 BC | Contains Greek portions of Deuteronomy 23-28 |
Nash Papyrus | 150 BC-AD | Portion of the Decalogue (Exodus 20); Deuteronomy 5:6-21; Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) |
Peshitta | AD 100-200 | Entire Old Testament in Syriac |
Codex Vaticanus | AD 325 | Entire Greek Old Testament except portions of Genesis, 2 Kings, Psalms |
Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus | AD 345 | Contains Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon |
Codex Sinaiticus | AD 350 | Half of the Old Testament in Greek |
Latin Vulgate | AD 390-405 | Entire Old Testament in Latin |
Codex Alexandrinus | AD 450 | Entire Old testament in Greek |
Codex Cairensis | AD 850 | Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi |
Aleppo Codex | AD 900 | Complete Hebrew Old Testament |
Codex Leningradensis | AD 1008 | Complete Hebrew Test Of Old Testament |
Samaritan Pentateuch | 10th-11th Century AD | Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy |
Remarkable Facts About The Thousands Of Ancient Old Testament Manuscripts That Have Been Found:
- They were written in a whole range of nations (Syria, Egypt, Rome, Israel, Africa, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, China)
- They were written in the most common languages of the day such as Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Slavic, and Gothic.
- There are copies from every century since 250 B.C. to 1 A.D
The Most Remarkable Fact Of All Is The Textual Accuracy Of The Copies
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of over 900 manuscripts that were discovered in 1947 in caves near the Dead Sea in Israel. Before their discovery, the earliest complete Old Testament manuscripts were the Masoretic Text dated A.D. 980 A.D. 1008.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls allowed scholars to see how much the biblical text had changed in over 1000 years of transmission. They discovered that very little had changed and that the Hebrew Bible had been transmitted with incredible accuracy over a millennium.
It is a matter of wonder that through something like a thousand years the text underwent so little alteration
FF Bruce: British Biblical Scholar; Cambridge University
Discussion Question 1: Did you know there was so much archaeological data from ancient times to compare the textual accuracy of the Old Testament with?
Premise 2 : The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work
Paleographers are specialized historians who study ancient texts including the over 25,000 manuscripts New Testament manuscripts.
These ancient manuscripts and artifacts are housed in the Vatican, Smithsonian, Bodmar Library of World Literature and many other respected museums and libraries around the world.
The New Testament have been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work. There are over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages, such as Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. Wikipedia this does not include numerous uncatalogued manuscripts contained in private collections around the world.
According to historians, surviving manuscripts of the New Testament date between the early second and fifteenth centuries AD.
This is remarkably close in time to the when the originals were written considering that the original documents of the New Testament were most likely written between 50 AD and 95 AD while actual witnesses of the events were still alive to corroborate them.
The Bible is uniquely authentic among ancient literary works in terms of the number of ancient manuscripts found and the smallness of the time scale between when the work was first written and the oldest extant manuscript
Brian Edwards: Nothing But The Truth
Most other ancient books date from 500 to 1500 years after the original. And the amount of ancient copies are very limited in number compared to the Bible.
The next closest book to the New Testament in terms of manuscript support is the Illiad of Homer, which is attested to by 643 manuscripts, the oldest of these was made 500 years after the original
Author | Ancient Title | Date Of Original | Earliest Manuscript | Time Gap From Original | Manuscript Copies In Existence |
Plato | Dialogues | 4th Century BC | AD 900 | 1,250 years | 20 |
Homer | Iliad | 9th Century BC | 400 BC | 500 years | 643 |
Aristotle | Assorted Works | 4th Century BC | AD 1100 | 1,400 years | 5 |
Thucydides | History Of The Peloponnesian Wars | 460 to 400 BC | AD 900 | 1,300 years | 8 |
Aristophanes | Assorted Works | 448 to 385 BC | AD 900 | 1,300 years | 10 |
Sophocles | Assorted Works | 496 to 406 BC | AD 1000 | 1,400 years | 193 |
Julius Caesar | The Gallic Wars | 58 to 44 BC | AD 900 | 950 years | 10 |
Tacitus | Annals of Imperial Rome | AD 58 to 120 | AD 1100 | 1,000 years | 20 |
Pliny the Younger | History of Rome | AD 62 to 113 | AD 850 | 750 years | 7 |
Suetonius | The Twelve Caesars | AD 70-140 | AD 950 | 900 years | 8 |
New Testament | New Testament Manuscripts | AD 45 to 100 | AD 117 to 325 | 30-300 years | 25,000 plus |
To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament
John Warwick Montgomery: Lawyer, Professor, Theologian
In addition to the 25,000 manuscripts of the New Testament total, all 27 books of the New Testament are addressed and validated by the writings of the early Church Fathers.
Here is a chart showing the number of quotes from each writer and the books of the Bible early church fathers directly quoted:
Writer | Date | Gospels | Acts | Pauline Epistles | General Epistles | Revelation | Totals |
Justin Martyr | 100-165 A.D | 268 | 10 | 43 | 6 | 266 | 330 |
Iraneus | 130 A.D | 1,038 | 194 | 499 | 23 | 65 | 1,819 |
Clement | 1,017 | 44 | 1,127 | 207 | 11 | 2.406 | |
Origen | 254 AD | 9.231 | 349 | 7,778 | 399 | 165 | 17,922 |
Tertullian | 160 A.D | 3,822 | 502 | 2,609 | 120 | 205 | 7,258 |
Hippolytus | 236 A.D | 734 | 42 | 387 | 27 | 188 | 1,378 |
Eusebius | 265 A.D | 3,258 | 211 | 1,592 | 88 | 27 | 5,176 |
Totals | 19,368 | 1,392 | 14,035 | 870 | 664 | 36,289 |
All other ancient works have only 932 total copies in existence, yet historians universally approve them as accurate to the originals after comparing those copies. Paleographers have had over 25,000 ancient copies of New Testament manuscripts, and over 32,000 direct quotations from early church fathers to help verify faithful transmission.
Discussion Question 2: Did you realize there were so many ancient Bible manuscripts and that they are preserved at the world’s finest libraries and museums?
Premise 3 : The Bible is the most textually authenticated piece of literature from the ancient world.
Virtually all the texts that have survived from ancient times have survived only through later copies. Therefore every book, or document from sources such as; Shakespeare, Chaucer, Plato, or Homer can only be have their accuracy tested by comparing copies since there is no original.
This process of comparison is called the bibliographic test. It is the primary way historians verify the textual accuracy of ancient documents.
The bibliographic test looks at the ancient manuscripts of the Bible and asks whether the text of the Bible we have today is the same as the original?
Of just the 5,800+ Greek New Testament manuscripts, there are more than 2.6 million pages.
No book has undergone more extensive bibliographic testing than the Bible. No ancient book has more copies to compare or more paleographers or historians to apply the bibliographic test. Not even close!
Scholars, historians, paleographers, and theologians have had centuries to analyze this enormous trove of Scriptural content to confirm the accuracy of our English editions of the Old and New Testament. Using the latest technology, large manuscript databases and direct quotations have been able to verify the accuracy and trustworthiness of the transmission of biblical text.
There are 3 main factors that give scholars confidence in the text of the Bible
- The vast number of manuscripts is hugely advantageous when trying to determine the original reading of the Bible
- The Bible surpasses the Bibliographic Test far more than other Ancient Works
- Scribal errors or (variants) after systematic analysis by un-competing experts do not overturn any narrative or doctrine of the Bible
The importance of the sheer number of manuscripts and early patristic quotations of Scripture cannot be overstated. As with other documents of ancient literature, there are no known extant original manuscripts of the Bible. Fortunately, however, the abundance of manuscript copies makes it possible to reconstruct the original text with virtually complete accuracy.
Norman Geisler and William Nix: A General Introduction To The Bible
Discussion Question 3: Does it help increase your confidence in the Bible that so much time, effort and textual scrutiny by experts has been made over the centuries to assure the reliability of Bible translations?