We don’t have the original handwritten documents of any of the books of the Bible. The scrolls and parchments naturally wore out over time and would have to be copied to be preserved. In many cases duplicates were encouraged to be made from the start so that more people be exposed to God’s Word.
So, if what we have today are copies of copies of copies wouldn’t it mean that our Bible today must be full of mistakes? After all, we’ve all played that game “telephone” or “gossip” where you whisper a phrase in someone’s ear, then it goes around the circle until finally the last person whispers it back to your own ear. And it’s always very different!
Additionally, since we must translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English or other modern languages, how can we know we have God’s written Word today?
Let’s take this last question first. We translate our modern English and other versions directly from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts so that is not a major issue. It is not as if it were going from Greek to Arabic to Polish to English. And humans are excellent at understanding translations.
Greg Gilbert observes that if a man’s grandson said,“Yo, it’s chill bro!” Pops may not immediately understand. But if someone translated, “Hey, it’s OK friend!” or even, “Hey, it’s cool man!,” or “your grandson is saying to his friend that the situation is fine and he is not bothered by it” all of these are completely understandable. The same is true for translation between languages.
But what about the fact that we don’t have the actual original piece of paper, parchment, or vellum that the Scriptures were written on? Is that even important? Not really. We don’t have the original handwritten manuscript for most literary classics. Should we say we have no idea what Shakespeare wrote because not a single original manuscript of his plays exists? We only have the orginal handwritten lyrics of one Beatles song, Help! Does that mean we have no idea what the "original" lyrics were of all their other songs? Of course not.
But in the case of the Bible, what we do have is amazing! For the New Testament there are around 5400 ancient Greek manuscripts (compared to just 1000 of Homer), some containing the entire New Testament, or a whole book of the Bible, while others were partially destroyed so they are just fragments of one book. Of these partial copies, many go back to the second century and possibly even the first century, less than 100 years after the originals (Why Trust the Bible, Greg Gilbert, p. 45).
We are able to compare these copies. They come from many different regions of the ancient world. In each region (Egypt, Palestine, Babylon, Italy, etc.) different schools of scribes or individuals made hand copies of the manuscript they possessed. Rarely if ever did they see copies from other parts of the world.
This is important because if one scribe made an mistake, such as writing a word twice, that mistake was limited to that “family” of manuscripts. We can look at copies from other parts of the world and compare. If they don’t also duplicate the word then it is obvious what the original was.
To illustrate, imagine if a 3rd grade class wrote the White House and the President replied with a letter. The teacher decided it would be a good exercise to dictate the letter and have each of her 25 students write his or her own copy. Imagine the original letter then got lost! We could confidently reconstruct the words or the original even if Jennifer misspelled “White” or “President” and Jeremy omitted the word “thank” from the phrase “thank you.” How? By comparing all the letters! If one letter had the President saying he was from Mars we can be sure that it was Billy playing a prank. Or, if 24 of 25 did have the President saying he was from mars, then, strangely, that is what he must have written! Just as importantly, the original is contained in the 25 letters even though there are variations.
How significant are the variations between copies?. Nearly all are very minor, as we said, writing a word twice or omitting an obvious word. Basically typos that don’t change the meaning at all. There is also what is called embellishment. For example, if a one passage in Paul’s letters just had “Jesus” originally sometimes a scribe would inadvertently write the more common “Jesus Christ.” None of these affects any doctrine however, because Paul uses Jesus Christ in many other places.
Here is another fact: no miracle or important doctrine hangs on any of the variants. The biggest variations in the New Testament include the ending of Mark, where the oldest manuscripts stop at Mark 16:8, right after the announcement of Jesus’ resurrection. But everything else in vv. 9-20 is taught elsewhere in the Bible. In fact, it seems to be a quick summary of later events drawn from other books of the Bible. The other sizable variation is the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, which later manuscripts include. But everything in this incident fits the teaching and actions of Jesus elsewhere.
What is amazing is how consistent the manuscripts actually are regardless of what region or century there were written in.
Less than a tenth of one percent (1392 of 138,020) of the words in the New Testament have any variants at all in any of the thousands of manuscripts. And nearly all of these are trivial.