I didn’t use to think that I needed to take the Bible too seriously. I assumed that its message had gotten passed down through the centuries a little bit like the telephone game. That’s where everyone lines up and whispers a message from one person to the next down the line and when the last person says what they’ve heard, we all laugh at how garbled the message got along the way. Once I had done some investigation, I realized how different the Bible’s transmission was to the telephone game, over the years, I’ve talked to so many people with the same assumptions about the Bible I had, that I wanted to address how them.

1. The Bible wasn’t passed down by people whispering in each other’s ears.

The first difference is perhaps the most obvious: The Bible wasn’t passed down by people whispering in each other’s ears. Before the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, people called scribes spent their careers meticulously making copies of important writings. In the Medieval Period, for instance, there were assembly lines of monks, cloistered away in libraries with supervisors checking their work for accuracy. How funny would the telephone game be if everyone wrote down the message and copied it for the next person? The whole point of the game is that we miss what we hear. The opportunity for mistakes is completely different when we write. And scribes would typically work with the oldest manuscript they possessed so they weren’t just writing down what the person next to them wrote.

2. The Bible didn’t come to us from a single chain of manuscripts.

The Bible also didn’t come to us through a single chain of manuscripts. With the telephone game, you only see the result of one or two lines of people passing along a message. But the Bible didn’t come to us by just one line of manuscripts. Today, there are more than 5700 Greek copies of the New Testament, for instance. But there are another 10,000 copies in Latin and many others in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. So there are more than 25,000 hand-written copies of the New Testament from different parts of the world and branches of the church. The more manuscripts there are, and the more diverse the chains of manuscripts are, the more material there is to compare and discern where errors may have crept in.

3. What we know about the Bible doesn’t just come from manuscripts.

Having a collection of 25,000 manuscripts to compare is remarkable. But what’s even more amazing is that if every single one of them had been destroyed before the printing press was invented, we would still know what the New Testament said. That’s because there are over a million quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the early church. In fact, we have so many commentaries, sermons and writings from the early church leaders, that based on their quotations of Scripture alone, scholars would be able to reconstruct almost the entire New Testament.

4. What we know about the Bible doesn’t just come from the last link in the chain.

Recreating the original message in the telephone game is difficult because you’re only listening to the person at the end of the line. But what we know about the Bible doesn’t just come from the last link in the chain. For the last 500 years, scholars known as “textual critics” have been studying and comparing manuscripts of various ages to give us the most accurate picture possible of the original text. An English Bible is translated directly from what is agreed to be the best Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available.

5. The Dead Sea Scrolls dispel the myth of the telephone game.

If you’re still not impressed with the reliability of the text of the Bible, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls should settle all doubts. In 1946, three teenage Bedouin shepherds were tending their flocks on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. One of the shepherds threw a rock into an opening in the side of a cliff and heard the sound of something shattering. He ran into the cave and found a collection of clay jars with leather and papyrus scrolls. Archaeologists descended on the site and unearthed tens of thousands of scroll fragments, representing almost 900 manuscripts that were upwards of more than 2,000 years old. Among the scrolls, they found 19 copies of the Book of Isaiah, for example. One of them which was almost completely intact was dated around 100 BC, more than 1000 years older than any previously known manuscript of the Book of Isaiah. Now there would be an opportunity to test how reliably the Bible had been passed down through the centuries. The results were astounding! The text had been incredibly well preserved. It gave archaeologists and scholars confirmation that the text of the Bible that we have today is essentially what was originally written.

If you’re not confident that the Bible has been faithfully passed down, the temptation is to deny the parts you don’t like and say, ‘This was probably added in somewhere along the line.’ With 25,000 hand-written manuscripts that have been meticulously studied and compared for over 500 years, you and I don’t get to make those kinds of statements. You might not like the Bible, but you can’t say that we don’t have what was originally written.

In awe of Him,

Paul