Is the Bible Reliable?

People often wonder whether the Bible is reliable. How can we be sure that a collection of documents written many centuries ago has been faithfully and correctly transmitted to us today? This is a good question. Fortunately, we don’t need to rely on the myth of ‘blind faith’ to answer it. We apply the same tests to the biblical documents as we would to any other ancient writing.

The Old Testament

There are more than 14,000 existing Old Testament manuscripts and fragments copied throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the European regions that agree dramatically with each other. In addition, these texts agree with the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which was translated from Hebrew to Greek sometime during the third century BC. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in Israel in the 1940’s and 50’s, also provide phenomenal evidence for the reliability of the ancient transmission of the Jewish Scriptures. The Hebrew scribes who copied the Jewish Scriptures were highly trained and meticulously observed, counting every letter, word, and paragraph against master scrolls. A single error would require the immediate destruction of the entire text.

The New Testament

We have found copies of numerous ancient manuscripts written by different authors. They have discovered 643 copies of the writings of Homer, which have a 95% accuracy rating. Other ancient writings by Herodotus (8 copies), Euripides (9 copies), Plato (7 copies), and Aristotle (5 copies) have been discovered. In these cases, there are not enough ancient copies to reconstruct the original. Therefore, scholars are unable to determine an accuracy rating.

More than 5,300 known ancient copies and fragments of the New Testament exist in the original Greek. These texts have a 99.5% accuracy rating.

As previously stated, apart from the New Testament, the only other ancient writing which has any level of accuracy associated with it is Homer. And yet the New Testament has a far higher degree of accuracy than Homer. Scholars universally accept the copies of Homer’s writings as being accurate. It is undeniable, then, that the New Testament is by far the most accurately reconstructed ancient document in existence.

Tertullian, an early church leader, stated that by 150 AD, the Church in Rome had compiled a list of New Testament books matching our list of today. We have 32,000 quotes from before 325 AD, from Irenaeus (182-188 AD), Justin Martyr (before 150 AD), Polycarp (107 AD), Ignatius (100), Clement (96 AD), and many other second and third century fathers. All but eleven verses of the New Testament could be reconstructed through their writings alone.