A reminder of where we left off:
God wants us to be sure that His word really tells us about Him—to be so confident about His perfect book that we dare to put into action all that it teaches us. So it makes sense that he gave us a book that can stand up to the same important questions we can ask about any other book in the world:
a) Do the facts inside the book add up? (discussed in part 1)
b) Was the book passed down without mistakes?
c) Do facts from outside the book back it up?
B. Passed down without mistakes.
You know how stories change as they are told (remember playing gossip?). One person tells another person something, and that person tells someone else, and so on and before you know it, the story is wildly different from the original.
Even the newest books of the Bible were written almost 2,000 years ago—way before printing presses or computers. Copies then had to be written by hand. Over time, the ink faded and the books wore out, so new copies had to be made—or the book would be lost forever. They wrote on clay tablets, sheepskin, paper made from tall weeds, and calfskin. These were carefully protected in clay pots, caves, and churches so they would last a long time—hundreds and thousands of years! God promised that the word would last forever (1 Peter 1:25a), but it seems like all this copying and recopying could lead to a lot of mistakes. Words left out, new ideas added, etc. So how can we be sure? You can’t look back at the originals because they aren’t around anymore. However, there are two tests that can be used to see if any old book has been copied without getting messed up. These are:
1) How many copies of the book are there?
2) How much time has passed between when the book was first written and the earliest copy that exists?
The more copies you have of a book—and the older those copies are—the more you can be sure that you are getting the real story. After all, if you had several copies of a book and they all had glaring differences, you would have a hard time determining which one was true to the original without the original in front of you.
There are many old copies of the Bible—almost 25,000 ancient copies of the New Testament alone! Some are only small pieces of Bible books, but most contain pieces from all 27 books of the New Testament. This is truly a sign that God watched over His Word, because there are far more old copies of the Bible than of any other ancient book. For example, there are only 643 early copies of Homer’s Iliad, and just 10 old copies of Julius Caesar’s famous book, Gallic Wars.
Even more amazing, the copies we have of the New Testament are really old. We have pieces of the book of John that are only 50 years older than John’s very first copy! We have thousands of copies of the whole New Testament that were made only 200 years after they were written.
That seems like a long time, but the oldest copies of the Iliad are 400 years older than the first writing, and the oldest copies of Gallic Wars are more than 1,000 years older.
What about the Old Testament? The people who copied the Old Testament (scribes) followed very special rules. Before they started, they washed their whole body and put on special clothes. When they began writing the name of God, they could not stop until the entire name had been written—even if a king entered the room. They wrote in columns exactly 30 letters wide, putting a space the size of a thread between every letter. They couldn’t copy anything from memory, not even the shortest word. Everything had to be copied letter by letter. When a scribe finished copying a book, he had to count how many times each letter of the alphabet appeared to see if it matched the original. If the new copy had even one mistake, the scribe had to throw it away! Because we have copies of the Old Testament made over a span of 2,000 years, we can check the work of these special scribes—they did a great job!
Next time, we'll look at the third test: Do facts from outside the book back it up?
Scriptures are quoted from the New International Version, ©2011
a. 1 Peter 1:25 “but the word of the Lord endures forever.”
quoted by the Apostle Peter from Isaiah 40:8b
Some of the references I’ve used include Josh’s “The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict” and “Beyond Belief to Convictions” (he references many others in these books), as well as “The Apologetics Study Bible”—an excellent resource with articles from many noted apologists.
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