How Do We Know the Bible Hasn't Been Changed?

In this regular feature Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call.  Here is this week’s question.  “Dear Dave and Tom, I enjoy your program; I also like your enthusiasm for the Bible.  One question that I have been wrestling with is this: How can we be confident that the Bible we have today is true to books of the Bible that were written thousands of years ago?”

T. A. McMahon:

Dave, we really want people because, again, the program we want to encourage them to search God’s Word and there are some things, some thoughts that, if they knew what information was available would be a great encouragement to them and this question tripped the guy up.  But the information is overwhelming that the book they are reading today is indeed, God’s Word, no big qualifications.

Dave Hunt:

There are many good books out there written on this.  It’s actually a science.  For the New Testament alone, we have almost 25,000 manuscripts and partial manuscripts and as you go back and you compare how this verse reads in this manuscript as against that one and that one and that one, you can very accurately get back to what the original manuscript was without having a copy of it, which obviously we don’t because they wore them out reading them and then they would copy and recopy and so forth.

T. A. McMahon:

Dave, in terms of fragments, you talked about fragments of manuscripts, the last book of the New Testament was probably written around 98, between 90 and 100 A.D.  And, we have finds of manuscripts that are 125 A. D. so the proximity is very close.

Dave Hunt:

Yeah, that’s The New Testament.  Now, The Old Testament, Jesus quoted from it, the apostles quoted from it and so forth.  There seemed to be no question in the mind of Jesus that The Old Testament manuscript which they had was the proper one.  We have a Greek manuscript going back to about 200 years before Jesus.

T. A. McMahon:

The Septuagint.

Dave Hunt:

Right.  Now, they have thought well, the expanse of time and recopying and so forth.  When they dug up the Dead Sea Scrolls they found a copy of the whole book of Isaiah, I think, almost the whole thing which, if you go to Israel today you have the Isaiah Scroll.  It’s all laid out around and if you could read Hebrew, that’s the same as modern Hebrew today.

T. A. McMahon:

Now, they have dated that about 125 B. C.

Dave Hunt:

Right.

T. A. McMahon:

So, we were talking about the book of Isaiah.  Isaiah was written in 650 B. C. right around that time.  So, even with that distance, as you said, wouldn’t that have been when Jesus sat down to read from the scroll in the introduction of His ministry He read from the book of Isaiah?  Now, He didn’t have any problems with it, did He?

Dave Hunt:

Jesus had no problem with any part of The Old Testament but, you know, the oldest manuscript prior to that time was about 800 A. D.  So now when they came up with an Isaiah scroll that was 900 plus years older than the oldest one we had, they thought, wow you’re going to see a lot of changes in this.  In fact, there weren’t any changes, maybe one or two little nuances.

T. A. McMahon:

Well, differences in the way letters were formed slightly but nothing in terms of content.

Dave Hunt:

No.  I think in In Defense of the Faith I go into this a bit.  I quote a professor from Princeton, the leader, I mean; this man was fluent in over 40 Semitic languages.  He spent 45 years of his life examining every page, every letter in The Old Testament and he gives you so many proofs and he makes the statement that you could be absolutely certain that every page, every letter, every word in The Old Testament is exactly as it was written.  Now, I don’t know of anyone who can stand up against his credentials and the years that he spent on it.  Now furthermore Tom, without being scholarly, without investigating, as we read the Bible, it bears witness in our hearts, it’s continuity from Genesis to Revelation.  The same Holy Spirit who inspired the writers indwells the believers today.  As I read the Apocryphal books, for example, 1st and 2nd Macabees or some of these things—

T. A. McMahon:

These were written after the year 400 B. C. and it was the time between The Old Testament and The New Testament.

Dave Hunt:

It does not bear witness in my spirit but as I read the Bible, as Christians read the Bible, and it was the—there was no council.  It was not until nearly 400 A. D. that the Third Council of Carthage made its first declaration on the books of The New Testament—but by consensus the Christian community recognized this is the Word of God.

T. A. McMahon:

Dave and this is what you would expect.  We have been talking about the Bible.  We have been talking about how it’s God’s Word.  If we don’t have God’s Word all we have is man’s opinion, so God is not only going to give us His Word through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but He is going to see that it is maintained, that it is His Word and it’s going to be effective for all of us.

Dave Hunt:

Amen.