(Note: Due to the length of this article, I am dividing it into two separate posts. This will be part one of the article. Part two will be posted later this week, Lord Willing)

Introduction

In the past few decades, one of the staple arguments used by those who seek to discredit the authority of the Bible has been to allege that the scriptural text has become lost due to corruption. This may have happened over the course of the centuries, or during a decisive period in the history of the Christian church.And this kind of attack can come from almost any angle. Anybody who has encountered Islamic apologists, for example, will undoubtedly have heard the charge that the Bible (which was inspired by God in its original form) has been changed. The level of knowledge these apologists actually have, of course, varies. Some are absolutely clueless regarding the textual history of the bible, and are merely repeating canards taught to them by their imams. Others are a bit more sophisticated, and may rely on liberal scholarship to substantiate their point.

But how well does this argument stand when the claims in question are actually examined? It is well worth going over the textual history of the bible and the manuscripts that have come down to us over the centuries in order to see whether we still have the bible that God originally revealed to us, or whether it has been “lost in transmission” during the course of time.

Counting the Manuscript Evidence

The Bible did not always exist as this book with a leather cover, gold-gilded pages and thumb-indexing that one can simply buy at any bookstore today. Like any other ancient document, the Bible has a textual history. It has been handed down to us through generations of constant copying. The result of this is that we have thousands of manuscripts of the bible. As Drs. Norman Geisler and William Nix put it in  their General Introduction to the Bible,

The fidelity of the New Testament text rests on a multitude of manuscript evidence. Counting Greek copies alone, the New Testament is preserved in some 5,656 partial and complete manuscript portions that were copied by hand from the second through the fifteenth centuries.[1]

And yet we did not always have this wealth of manuscripts. Back in the 19th century, we did not have as many manuscripts available to us. They have been accumulated over the past two centuries by various persons who have worked hard to locate these ancient manuscripts. In The Text of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger recounts the story of how the 19th century textual scholar Constantin Von Tischendorf discovered one particularly important biblical manuscript from an old monastery:

In 1844, when he was not yet thirty years of age, Tischendorf, a Privatdozent in the University of Leipzig, began an extensive journey through the Near East in search of Biblical manuscripts. While visiting the monastery of St. Catharine at Mount Sinai, he chanced to see some leaves of parchment in a waste-basket full of papers destine dto light the oven of the monastery. On examination these proved to be part of a copy of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, written in an early Greek uncial script. He retrieved from the basket no fewer than forty-three such leaves… The forty-three leaves which he was permitted to to keep contaianed portions of I Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther… In 1846 he published their contents…

A second visit to the monastery by Tischendorft in 1853 produced no new manuscripts because the monks were suspicious as a result of the enthusiasm for the MS displayed during his first visit in 1844. He visited a third time in 1859, under the direction of the Czar of Russia, Alexander II. Shortly before leaving, Tischendorf, gave the steward of the monastery an edition of the Septuagint that had been published by Tischendorf in Leipzig.

Thereupon the steward remarked that he too had a copy of the Septuagint, and produced in his cell a manuscript wrapped in a red cloth. There before the astonished scholar’s eyes lay the treasure which he had been longing to see. Concealing his feelings, Tischendorf casually asked permission to look at it further that evening. Permission was granted, and upon retiring to his room Tischendorf stayed up all night in the joy of studying the manuscripts… He soon found that the document contained much more than he had even hoped; for not only was most of the Old Testament there, but also the New Testament was intact and in excellent condition…[2]

Of course, this was not the end of the story. The manuscript came into the hands of the Soviet Union, and remained in their possession until England bought the manuscript for one hundred thousand pounds.[3] Today, this manuscript is known as Codex Sinaiticus, and is one of the most valuable early witnesses we have of the bible.[4]

And Codex Sinaiticus is just one of many important manuscripts on which we base the text of our bible. As was already explained earlier, we have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, some of which actually go back to within mere decades of the writing of the originals. K.A. Kitchen puts it this way in The Bible and Its World:

Among works of classical (Greek and Latin) literature, the writings of the New Testament–4 gospels, 21 letters, the history of Acts and visions of Revelation–have a manuscript attestation second to none, and superior to most. No one blinks an eyelid at depending for the Latin text of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Composed within 58-56 BC) upon manuscripts all of which are 900 years later than Caesar’s time, only nine or ten of the manuscripts being good textual copies. No-one doubts that we still read the real text of the works of Herodotus or Thucydides (450 BC), even though the oldest available full manuscripts (only eight or so) date from 1,300 years later!

For the New Testament, how different and how vastly superior is the manuscript evidence. Some 5,000 Greek MSS (whole or fragmentary) are known, not a mere eight or ten. The most notable MSS are the Codexes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus of c. 350 AD–only 250 years after the end of the New Testament period (100 AD), not 900 or 1,300 years! Older still are the Chester Beatty and Bodmer biblical papyri, including six new Testament MSS of the second and third centuries AD, only 150 years after the New Testament period.

Further back still, there is a Rylands fragment from a manuscript of John’s Gospel [containing John 18:31-33, 37ff] datable by its script to about 130 AD–little more than a generation after the New Testament period itself. As this fragment came from Egypt, it is evident that John’s gospel had been composed, recopied and begun to circulate well beyond Palestine before 130 AD. Hence, on this evidence alone, it must have been composed (at latest) by 90/100 AD, and more probably earlier.[5]

To the modern mind, a few decades may seem like a long period of time, but when we are talking about ancient times, this time period is just a blink of an eye. This is primarily because of the culture of memorization and the strong emphasis on accurate transmission of tradition that existed in ancient Middle Eastern cultures. In the words of Sir Frederic Kenyon (as quoted by the late F.F. Bruce):

The interval between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.[6]

And we have similar documentation for the Old Testament. This is demonstrated by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dating to as early as 250 B.C.E., these scrolls are centuries earlier than the next earliest manuscript of the Old Testament that we have, which is the Nash papyrus (a papyrus that contains portions of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and dates to around the second century C.E.).[7] The Dead Sea Scrolls are a remarkable testimony of God’s promise to preserve His Word. As the Royal Ontario Museum explains it,

The Dead Sea Scrolls are widely considered among the greatest archaeological finds of the past century. They include the earliest written sources for the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament), as well as other less well known writings. Many of the ideas and beliefs contained in this collection of ancient parchments have resonated through the centuries and remain influential today. Indeed, they reflect the foundations of important religions such as Judaism and Christianity and have influenced Islam.

Dating from around 250 Before Common Era (BCE) to 68 Common Era (CE), the Scrolls include some 207 biblical manuscripts representing nearly all of the books in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament). Approximately 900 Scrolls were discovered; some almost entirely preserved and others in fragments. Together, they comprise one of the most important collections of writings ever discovered. The Scrolls are a collection of biblical writings, apocryphal manuscripts, prayers, biblical commentary and religious laws. Prior to the discovery of the Scrolls, the oldest known copies of biblical texts were written 1,000 years later.[8]

When we compare the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the ninth century Masoretic texts on which our modern Old Testaments are based upon, the amount of preservation that has taken place is quite remarkable. Apart from some minor variations in the text, the only real significant difference is the inclusion of vowel markers to the Masoretic text (which were not yet invented during the first century) to make recitation easier. Richard Deem of Evidence for God remarks,

How do we know the Bible has been kept in tact for over 2,000 years of copying? Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, our earliest Hebrew copy of the Old Testament was the Masoretic text, dating around 800 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls date to the time of Jesus and were copied by the Qumran community, a Jewish sect living around the Dead Sea. We also have the Septuagint which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament dating in the second century B.C. When we compare these texts which have an 800-1000 years gap between them we are amazed that 95% of the texts are identical with only minor variations and a few discrepancies.[9]

In other have more copies of the Bible than we do for any other document that has ever been written prior to the invention of the printing press. In the words of renown textual scholar Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, what we have here is an “embarrassment of riches.” But now comes another question: Do these manuscripts accurately preserve the words of the Bible for us, or are they all hopelessly flawed due to edits? Some people would allege that these manuscripts are no good because they have been changed beyond recognition, and it is to this claim that we turn our attention next.

Wholesale Editing?

Back in 1982, a popular conspiracy book entitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail, was released by three authors: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. This book was popular amongst conspiracy theorists due to its rejection of “mainstream” historiography in favour of a revised version of history (Here is an interesting side note: This is the same book that Dan Brown would use to come up with his own conspiracy thriller The Da Vinci Code two decades later. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have actually sued him for this). In particular, the authors attack the authenticity of the Bible by alleging that it is the product of the fourth century:

In AD 303, a quarter of a century earlier, the pagan emperor Diocletian had undertaken to destroy all Christian writings that could be found. As a result Christian documents—especially in Rome—all but vanished. When Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, it enabled the custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their material as they saw fit, in accordance with their tenets. It was at this point that most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made and Jesus assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since. The importance of Constantine’s commission must not be underestimated. Of the five thousand extant early manuscript versions of the New Testament, no complete edition pre-dates the fourth century. The New Testament, as it exists today, is essentially a product of fourth-century editors and writers—custodians  of orthodoxy, “adherents of the message,” with vested interests to protect.[10]

Of course, this is a bogus claim. First of all, Diocletian only managed to destroy manuscripts of the bible in certain portions of the Roman Empire. At this time, Christianity was already so widespread that no amount of persecution can get rid of all copies of the Scriptures. Second, even if Diocletian did somehow manage to wipe out all Christian writings throughout the Roman Empire, that would still not touch the Christian communities and their Scriptures that have been established in other lands such as Ethiopia, Persia, Armenia, etc. And finally, in order for the “custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit and rewrite” anything, one would have to presuppose that they had access to the Scriptures in the original form. And if this original form had been lost, as Baigent et. al. would have us believe, then we have no way of actually proving that the copy of the Bible that we have now was edited back in the fourth century.

Also, it is just highly misleading to say that no complete edition of the New Testament did not exist prior to the fourth century. Every book that makes up the modern New Testament was already written by the end of the first century. However, because of the difficulties faced by the early church, it took centuries before all of these books can be gathered into a single codex. The process was gradual, with the books first being arranged into collections before finally being gathered into a single document. As renowned textual scholars Kurt and Barbara Aland state,

It is probable that by the third century the Gospels were circulating as a single corpus rather than separately, and the Pauline corpus even earlier. Acts, however, was probably at first associated with the Gospels (cf. P45, and also Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis). Then in the fourth century, when Acts began to be grouped with the Catholic [i.e. General] letters, this meant bringing manuscripts together from different sources; even if the Catholic letters were already in circulation as a single group, they must have been brought together from manuscripts of different origins when the group was first formed.[11]

So we see that rather than a single event in history, the canonizing of the New Testament was a gradual process that culminated in various provincial synods in the late fourth century (not the Council of Nicaea, as many historical revisionists would like to claim). Even then, these provincial synods did not invent a biblical canon out of thin air, but were expressing the long-established beliefs of those provinces where these synods took place.

That being said, we do have an interesting papyrus known as the Muratorian Canon which dates back to 170 C.E. and mentions the existence of four gospels (two of which are explicitly named) plus many other books that appear in the New Testament.[12] Also, as has been pointed out before, we actually have many manuscripts that predate the fourth century. The Chester-Beatty papyrii, for example, date to around the second and third centuries and contain several portions of the Old and New Testaments, plus the apocryphal book of Enoch and an early Christian homily.[13] And finally, we have the John Rylands Papyrus (otherwise known as manuscript P52). Why is this little papyrus so important? It would be well worth noting the details behind this manuscript:

This small fragment of St John’s Gospel, measuring less than nine centimetres high, is one of the collection of Greek papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. On one side it contains parts of verses 31-33, on the other side parts of verses 37-38 of the eighteenth chapter of John’s Gospel.

It was originally discovered in Egypt, and may come from the famous site of Oxyrhynchus (Behnesa), the ruined city in Upper Egypt where Grenfel and Hunt carried out some of the most startling and successful excavations in the history of archaeology; it may be remembered that among their finds of new fragments of Classical and Christian literature were the now familiar “Sayings of Jesus”.

The importance of this fragment is quite out of proportion to its size, since it may with some confidence be dated in the first half of the second century A.D., and thus ranks as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language.

It provides us with invaluable evidence of the spread of Christianity in areas distant from the land of its origin; it is particularly interesting to know that among the books read by the early Christians in Upper Egypt was St John’s Gospel, commonly regarded as one of the latest of the books of the New Testament.

Like other early Christian works which have been found in Egypt, this gospel manuscript was written in the form of a codex, i.e. book, not of a roll, the common format for non-Christian literature of that time.[14]

Now, if Baigent et. al. are right about the claim that the Bible was edited wholesale during the early fourth century, then we should be able to compare this “revised” Bible with the early copies of the scriptural books that predate this revision and see what the “original” Bible really looked like. Now, if we look at these pre-fourth century manuscripts, we find that the contents of the Bible have remained largely intact. In fact, even if we didn’t have these early manuscripts, we can still verify the contents of the Bible as having been preserved for us, since we have the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, who quote hundreds of thousands of times from the Scriptures and verify for us that their reading has been preserved.[15] All of these things testify against the allegation that there had been any kind of wholesale editing that has been performed on the Scriptures. With that out of the way, it must be pointed out that the allegation of textual corruption still exists. This allegation comes not from conspiracy theorists but from recognized scholars who provide us with a more subtle and nuanced argument against the textual reliability of the Bible. This shall be tackled in part two of this article, but for now, we shall end our examination here.

End Notes

1. Geisler, Norman L. Aand William E. Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible. Chicago IL: Moody Press, 1980. p. 385.
2. Metzger, Bruce Manning. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. pp. 43-44.
3. Dailey, Timothy J., Ph.D. Mysteries of the Bible: Exploring the Secrets of the Unexplained. Lincolnwood IL: Publications International, Ltd., 1998. p66.
4. Today, Codex Sinaiticus may be viewed online at The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts: <http://www.csntm.org/Manuscript/View/GA_01>.
5. Kitchen, Kenneth Anderson. The Bible and Its World. Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977. p. 131.
6. Bruce, Frederick Fyvie. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980. p. 20.
7. Adair, James R., Jr. Nash Papryus. Religion and Technology Centre, Inc. <http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/extras/Nash.html>.
8. Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World. Archdiocese of Toronto. <http://www.archtoronto.org/events_news/scrolls.html>.
9. Deem, Richard. Is Our Copy of the Bible a Reliable Copy of the Original? Evidence for God. <http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/bibleorg.html>.
10. Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. New York: Dell, 1983. pp. 368-369.
11. Aland, Barbara and Kurt Aland. The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism (Second Edition, Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes). Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995. p. 50
12. Marlowe, Michael D. The Muratorian Fragment. Bible Research. <http://www.bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html>.
13. Bruce, Frederick Fyvie. “The Chester Beatty Papyrii.” The Harvester (11) 1934: 163-164. p. 163.
14. St John Fragment: A fragment of the fourth gospel. The John Rylands University Library. <http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/specialcollections/collections/stjohnfragment>.
15. The writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and the scripture passages they cite from are widely available online. The best source for their writings would be the Christian Classics Ethereal Library: <http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html>.