Since we believe that our lives should be shaped in every aspect by this book, this is a great question. Many of us have played the game telephone where one phrase is whispered into the first ear, and at the end of the line the phrase was completely different. To wonder if this has happened to the word of God seems like a reasonable concern.

In 1947 a child in soon to be Israel was playing in the desert when he stumbled across a cave full of ancient writings. Little did he know just then how much of a treasure trove he had stumbled upon; a vast collection of 800-900 documents and 50,000 other fragments. He had found himself in an archeological dream. These documents are from around 200 BC and give us a nearly complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, what Christian’s more commonly call the Old Testament. What was found between these documents and our modern old testament was that it had not changed. We had the same Elijah, Abraham, and Jonah as they did two millennia ago.²

Even without this information, we know we have an accurate copy today of the Bible based on the plethora of copies and fragments we have from the first two centuries. There are many other classic works of which there are fewer copies, and their legitimacy is not questioned. In Hal Seed’s book The God Questions, he shares some of his research about how many copies we have preserved of classical works. We all know of Plato and Aristotle, but we only have 7 copies of Plato's ancient work and 49 of Aristotle. By number of copies, Homer’s Iliad comes closest to the number of copies we have of the New Testament with 647 copies. Further, the Iliad was written in 900BC, but our earliest copy is from 400BC, that is 500 years after the original copy. That is a lot of time for things to change, but scholars do not challenge or believe the text has changed. In comparison, the New Testament has roughly 25,000 copies dating to within 200 years of when Christ lived that have been discovered so far. There is no comparison between the New Testament and the Illiad! Our earliest copy dates back to within 25 years of the original copy.³ As far as accuracy to the original manuscripts, this is not an area for Christians to worry about. There are only a few small portions that we question the authenticity of, with the majority being found in a chapter in John and another in Mark. Most of the other majority of other changes are related to determining syntax and punctuation. None of the parts we question affect our understanding of the Bible or what it teaches. Whether we included or excluded the small fragments, Scripture still tells the same truths.

One last thought is that if God’s Word is accurate, infallible, and is the truth He has given for us to know Him and have salvation, then we should be able to trust that He is going to keep His word pure and available. This is how the Bible defines itself, and history has shown that it has remained unchanged or unable to be disproven. No other book or statement has been able to make a similar statement and stand by it.

“You don’t have to give up your intellect to trust the Bible. You have to give up your pride.” -R.C. Sproul