Good Copies: The Inerrancy of Scripture | Part I
I) Intro
When you’re talking about the infallibility of Scripture, you’re discussing something that goes beyond the mere academic evaluation of the Bible’s integrity. Ultimately, it’s about the way you’re either embracing its content from a mental posture that is both reverent and humble, or you’re asserting a philosophical superiority that subordinates the Bible to whatever seems reasonable. In other words, you’re either a student of God’s Word or a critic. A student benefits, a critic sneers.
II) Good Copies
When it comes to the way in which the Bible measures on the scales used to authenticate the credibility of ancient texts, it is second to none. Two questions are generally asked:
- How many years lapsed between the original writing and the first handwritten copy?
- How many handwritten copies do we currently have that we can check for consistency when compared with one another?
A) The New Testament
The New Testament was written between 40 and 100 A.D. The oldest copy of the book of John is dated 125 A.D. – a mere 25 years later. There are over 24,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament and with the exception of differences in spelling and grammar; the essence of its content is consistent. Compare those figures to Homer’s Iliad – considered to be the most widely read work of antiquity. It was originally written in 900 B.C. and the oldest handwritten copy is 400 B.C. – a gap of 500 years.
We have only 643 original handwritten copies and where there are over 764 lines that appear inconsistent with one another in terms of their content, in the New Testament, only 400 words are questioned, but only in the context of their grammar, not in their meaning.1
B) The Old Testament
The Old Testament is not as easy to verify, simply because the original text was completed around 400 B.C. and the oldest handwritten copy is dated around 900 A.D. resulting in a gap of some 1,300 years. In addition, the strict rules surrounding the way in which scribes were to lay aside older copies of the Law result in a situation where you don’t have as many copies to compare with one another.
That problem was remedied, however, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. Dated over 1,000 years earlier than the earliest Hebrew manuscript, this discovery gave scholars the opportunity to verify the authenticity of the Old Testament using a document that predated their other metrics by a full millennium. As far as the consistency noted between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the other manuscripts that existed, Dr. Gleason Archer is uniquely qualified to comment.
Dr. Archer served as Assistant Pastor at Park Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts from 1945 to 1948. He then became a Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California from 1948 to 1965 and from 1965 to 1986; he was Professor of Old Testament and Semitics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He had a PhD in Classics from Harvard University as well as a degree in law from Suffolk Law School.2 He writes:
Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling. Even those Dead Sea fragments of Deuteronomy and Samuel which point to a different manuscript family from that which underlies our received Hebrew text do not indicate any differences in doctrine or teaching. They do not affect the message of revelation in the slightest.3
So as far as textual criticism is concerned, the Bible is sound. Sir Fredrick Kenyon, British scholar and assistant keeper of manuscripts for the British Museum from 1898-1909 writes:
…the Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.4
Again, the bottom line is that the Bible has to be infallible in order for it to qualify as the Word of God. You can’t imply that God scored a 99% on His Final Exam or Jesus made a bad decision by choosing to quote from the Old Testament when He taught, given the flawed status of the document He was quoting. Either it’s the Inspired Word of God, or it’s not. That’s what makes the issue of Scripture’s inerrancy such a volatile subject. It’s the foundation upon which a Christian’s creed is based. Should it be revealed as defective, critics are validated and believers are undone.
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