Can I trust the words in the Bible?

Can we trust the words we're reading in our English Bibles? This is an important question for us as Christians to know the answer to. When people ask this question, it often refers to one of these questions:

1. Have the words been accurately transmitted to us over time?

2. Have the words been edited in particular to aid groups of people (e.g. the Romans, or even the early church)??

Here are some key ways we can be confident in trusting the words of the Bible:

1. All of the New Testament books were written by 90-100 AD. This means that it was all written less than 70 years after Jesus' death! As a comparison the first biography we have of Alexander the Great was around 120 years after his death.

   1. The significance of this is that these books/letters were written while eyewitnesses to Jesus' life were still ALIVE. They could have easily disputed these writings. In fact the Gospels in particular seem to invite this kind of criticism by including places and people into their accounts. The fact that we don't have any works disputed these accounts means that generally people accepted them as truth.

   2. Since only 10-15% of the population at that time were literate, often oral tradition was relied on to pass key stories and lessons down the generations. The fact that the early church decided that to pen these documents showed how significant they thought it was to preserve these teachings and accounts. Also remembering that written documents would have cost a fair bit to produce in those days, this was a significant investment by the early church.

2. We have a huge number of New Testament manuscripts - around 5,500! Having so many manuscripts show that the early church copied and distributed these documents, again highlighting their importance. The vast number of manuscripts also allow us to compare them to see how different they might be. Even non-Christian scholars note that the differences are inconsequential and do not change the meaning and ideas of the text.

3. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and amongst them were manuscripts of the Old Testament that were over 1000 years older than the ones we had. Scholars compared them and found that they were 95% similar! After over a thousand years, the differences between the manuscripts were absolutely minimal!

4. The books of the Bible were more or less decided on before 200AD. We could see lists of the books of the Bible listed by Church Fathers by that time. The significance of this is that the Roman Empire only LEGALISED (not adopted) Christianity in 313AD. These lists were not influenced by any political authority, but were simply what the church had recognised as authoritative works. The main way this was decided was that these books/letters were written by the Apostles who had followed Jesus, or were very close associates of the Apostles.

5. We have many translations of the Bible because language shifts and changes. For us to fully understand what was written in Hebrew, or Greek, or Aramaic, different translations use different perspectives to create a readable translation. For example, some translations try to keep to a word-for-word translation, while others use a thought-for-thought translation. Either way, translations are often done over time with a big team (e.g. the NIV was translated by a team of over 100 scholars over 10 years). No single person was directly influencing the words in our Bible.

All of these points show that the words in our Bible are extremely close the original text, and any differences are inconsequential. There were no political bodies that were influencing the words that we read. We can have high confidence when we read these words that they are the ones that God intends for us to read!

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