Page 46 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible Student Textbook

F. F. Bruce said, “The new evidence confirms what we had already good reason to believe—that the
Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with the
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utmost fidelity”.

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We have in excess of 5,600 ancient manuscripts of the Bible some dating back to the 2 century, 10,000
Latin manuscripts, and 9.300 manuscripts in various ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic,
Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian. 99.5% of all the manuscripts agree 100%. That means that the copyists
were careful not to change the text throughout the ages of time. Also, there are only 400 variants
(differences) that affected the sense of the passage, and only 50 of these have doctrinal significance. By
comparing the various manuscripts and the age of the manuscripts, we can pretty much see when a
variant was introduced and why. This science of comparison is called textual criticism. It provides for
us a means to know that the copies of the Bible we have today are 100% reliable, and while we cannot
say our copies are inerrant or that the very words are inspired, we can say that God’s Word has been
preserved and we can trust it as reliable.

We have to remember the inspired words were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. We possess
translations of those original languages and therefore the words in our translation are not the words
God originally penned when writing the Scripture. Scholars seek to carefully select words in our
language that best reflect the meaning of the original words.

We will study more about textual criticism in the future in this course. At this point, we need to
understand that the copy of the Bible we have today is totally trustworthy.

Are there Errors in the Bible?

17 F. F. Bruce, Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 61-62
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