In this chapter we will investigate some of the most often-asked questions about the Bible. Where did it come from? Who decided what was going to be on the official list of accepted writings? How do we know if the Bible we read today is a reliable version of the original writings? Have any people or religious groups changed the Bible to reflect their own beliefs? Are all parts of the Bible equally reliable? Who wrote the books of the Bible, and how can I be sure about that? What about the different versions? If one can assume that the original writings are inspired, what about when we read translations?

These are questions that are bound to come up for any thinking person who reads the Bible much at all. Some would say asking questions such as these shows a lack of faith. “It says in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all scripture is inspired by God. For me that settles it. Why are you asking these annoying questions? Don’t you trust God?” Unfortunately such an attitude will not make legitimate questions go away. In fact, buried questions have a habit of resurfacing at the most inopportune times, when our faith is at its weakest. A better approach would be to keep a good record of all significant questions, and systematically, one by one, over a period of time, to seek for reasonable answers to these questions.

Many have claimed that the Old Testament contains a number of myths and legends that were created by Jewish writers in the two or three centuries before the time of Christ or soon thereafter. Others would claim that most of the New Testament was written well into the late second century ad by Christian apologists who were creating a Jesus very different from the historical person. They would claim that the gospels are not an eyewitness accounts at all. Another common claim is that the Catholic Church radically edited the original writings of the apostles in the period after the conversion of the Roman Empire to reflect Catholic doctrine. These people would claim that the doctrines found in the New Testament are very different from the original teachings of Jesus Christ. Still others will claim that there were additional gospels written by the apostles that were excluded by leaders in the early church because of their bias against certain teachings.

Do these claims have merit? What is the history of the authorship and of the collection of both the Old and the New Testament writings? How faithfully were the originals passed on? These questions will be answered in this chapter.

It may seem logical to consider the origin and history of the Old Testament before the New Testament for the obvious reason that it was written earlier. However, for several reasons, we will consider the evidence for the New Testament first. The New Testament was written over a shorter period of time. It will be considerably easier to trace the origin of the New Testament canon. Besides, the manuscript evidence and the different versions provide an easier evidence trail to follow with the New Testament.

Before considering the evidence for the origins of the New Testament, it will be helpful to define a few technical terms, some of which have already been used.

Manuscript

For the purposes of this discussion, a manuscript will be any ancient document that contains all or parts of either the New or the Old Testament. The word literally means handwritten. Manuscripts may be in the original language or they may be a translation from the original language. The manuscripts are the basic materials available that can be used to attempt to reconstruct the original biblical writings.

Canon

The canon of either the New or the Old Testament is the officially accepted list of books to be included in the scriptures. How the canon of the New Testament and of the Old Testament was arrived at is a very important question to be dealt with in this chapter.

Scroll

A long piece of material, usually leather, which contains a number of pages of writing in rows, arranged in columns, designed to be rolled up and stored. This was the principal form of manuscripts before the time of Christ (2 Timothy 4:13).

Codex

A long piece of either leather or papyrus, folded up in a format basically like a modern book. This was the most common form of manuscripts after about ad 200.

Papyrus

Papyrus is a reedy plant found mostly in the Nile delta. It was split open and rolled out. Horizontal and vertical layers were glued together to create a light and easy-to-use writing substrate. Unfortunately, papyrus is the least likely of the ancient writing materials to survive for long periods without disintegrating.

Vellum, Parchment

These are both specially prepared kinds of leather, which were commonly used as writing materials. Parchment was made of sheep or goatskins, while vellum was made of calf or antelope skins. When papyrus became scarce in the early centuries ad, vellum became the chief material for creating manuscripts.

These are manuscripts that are written using all capital letters. The oldest Greek manuscripts are uncials.

Cursive

These are manuscripts that use both capital and small letters, similar to a modern style of writing. The later manuscripts in Greek are usually cursives.

THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT

“All Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16 NAS), but how do we know that the words we read in our Bibles are the same as those penned by the writers of Scripture? Over the years, many have attempted to undermine confidence in the Bible by claiming that what we read bears only a very slender relationship to the original writings. These same people will often claim that many of the books of the Bible were written a number of generations and even hundreds of years after the events recorded, casting doubt on their historical accuracy.

In the case of the New Testament, some scholars have claimed that most of it was written in the second half of the second century bc. Others have pointed out that there are “over two hundred thousand errors” in the manuscripts that we use to reconstruct the Greek New Testament text, implying that we can only guess at the original writings. Still others have claimed that the Catholic Church made substantial changes to the Bible, especially in the fourth and fifth centuries to remove unwanted teachings and to add statements that would support their own peculiar doctrines. What is the history of the New Testament text, and is there any validity to these claims? Let us examine these questions.

First, one must remember that the original books of the New Testament were written in Greek.[1] Producing an accurate New Testament begins with restoring the original Greek text. Do we have the original Greek text of the New Testament or at least copy that is absolutely identical to it? The simple answer is no. The original letters of Paul, probably written on papyrus, have long since perished. The same can be said of the original gospel accounts. In order to give wider circulation of their teachings, the writings of the apostles were copied many times and widely circulated among the churches.

Therefore, the accuracy of our Greek text is dependent on how carefully the early Christians made copies. How can we be sure we have the original writings available to us? This question brings us to the manuscript evidence for the Greek New Testament.

The most famous English translation of the Bible is the King James Version. This translation was originally published in 1611. The group of scholars who produced the King James (or “Authorized”) version relied heavily on the translation made by William Tyndale about eighty years before. The full Greek text of the New Testament was only made available to the Western world by the work of the Dutch scholar Erasmus. His Greek New Testament was published in 1516. When Erasmus composed his text, he had only about five Greek manuscripts available to him, none of them older than the ninth century ad. It was certainly conceivable at the time that these manuscripts were significantly different from the original.

The case today is very much different. Scholars now have nearly ten thousand Greek manuscripts to work from in their efforts to reconstruct the original Greek text. This is to be compared to less than ten manuscripts available to Tyndale and Erasmus. Besides, some of these manuscripts are several hundreds of years older than the oldest available to the first translators of the Greek text into English. Consider a list of some of the most important Greek New Testament manuscripts.

1. The Codex Vaticanus, or Codex B. The Codex Vaticanus is a vellum codex on 759 pages in uncial script. The manuscript has been dated to around AD 350. It contains the entire New Testament, except Hebrews 9:13-end, I and II Timothy, Titus and Revelation. It also contains all of the Old Testament in Greek except the first few chapters of Genesis and several Psalms. The manuscript has been kept in the Vatican since at least 1481.

2. The Codex Sinaiticus, or Codex א. The Sinaiticus manuscript received its name because the biblical scholar Tischendorf discovered it at St. Catharine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai in 1844. It was found in a basket of old parchments that were about to be thrown into a fire. This manuscript is now in the British Library. Like the Vatican manuscript, it has been dated to around ad 350. It contains much of the Old Testament in Greek, but most significantly, it has the entire New Testament in Greek.

3. The Alexandrian Codex, or Codex A. This is a fifth-century codex, containing most of the Old Testament and all the New Testament except a few pages of Matthew, two from 1 John and three from 2 Corinthians. This manuscript was found in Alexandria in Egypt, but was given as a gift to the king of England in 1621. The manuscript is now located in the British Library.

4. The Washington Manuscript, or Codex W. This manuscript from the end of the fourth century contains the four gospels. It is especially significant, as it contains Mark 16:9-20, unlike the three manuscripts already mentioned.

5. The Chester Beatty Papyri (P⁴⁶). This is a collection of a number of papyrus codex fragments, most of which are located in the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin, Ireland. One of the papyri contains thirty leaves of the New Testament in Greek, which have been dated to the late second or early third century (i.e. around ad 200). Another includes 86 of 104 leaves of the letters of Paul from around from the early third century.

6. The Bodmer Papyri. This is a group of manuscripts housed in the Bodmer Library of World Literature in Oxford, England. Included are a complete manuscript of Luke and John dated to 175-225 bc, as well as a manuscript of over half of the book of John, which has been dated as early as ad 150.

7. The John Rylands Fragment. This papyrus fragment contains only John 18:31-33 and 37,38, which would make it an insignificant find except that it has been dated to ad 130. This fragment was copied within fifty years of the death of the apostle John.

Many other important ancient manuscripts could be mentioned as well.  Some fragments of Mark found in Egypt very recently have been tentatively dated as early as around 45 AD. The situation with the Greek New Testament today is very different from what it was when the King James Version was translated. We have available entire manuscripts of the New Testament from less than three hundred years after the original writings. Besides this, we have manuscripts of large portions of the New Testament from one hundred fifty years after they were written, and even fragments that were copied only about fifty years after the original was written—during the lifetime of some who had seen the original documents. Scholars who seek to produce a Greek text as close to the original as possible have thousands of manuscripts to compare.

Besides, the manuscripts are not the only evidence supporting the text of the Greek New Testament. In addition, there exists a large body of letters written by the early church “fathers” such as Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Iranaeus and others. These early Christian writers quoted extensively from every part of the New Testament. The letters known as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache and the Letter of Clement have all been dated from around ad 100. These authors quote from Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, Romans, I Corinthians, Ephesians, Titus, Hebrews, I Peter and others. The early church father Ignatius was martyred in ad 115. In a set of letters he composed on his way to his execution in Rome, he quoted from nearly every New Testament book. Such evidence puts to rest any claims that these books were written in the second half of the second century ad, as some have claimed.

One could continue by mentioning the much more extensive writings of Justin Martyr from around ad 150, and those of Iranaeus, from near the end of the second century. The list could go on and on. Experts have claimed that using quotes from early Christian writers in the first three centuries, one could reconstruct virtually the entire text of the New Testament.

 Being able to compare the oldest extant manuscripts with the quotes from the first two or three centuries allows scholars to reproduce the original New Testament text with even greater reliability. The relatively small number of passages in the New Testament about which there is some doubt (see below) can have their validity tested by examining the letters of the church fathers. The evidence for our Greek text of the New Testament is so strong that one can say with great confidence that we have a virtually exact copy of all the original Greek writings. It is worth quoting Sir Frederic Kenyon, one of the most noted scholars of the Greek text of the Bible.

The interval then 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.”[2]

As already mentioned, some have attempted to date some of the New Testament books to the second century. In general, this has been done in order to support a theory that many of the miraculous events recorded in its pages are later inventions. For example, F. C. Bauer, a German theologian from the nineteenth century, wrote a thesis in which he claimed that a number of the New Testament books were written after ad 160. Most likely he came up with such a late date, not because of any real evidence, but because of a philosophical presupposition against the miraculous. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century such a conclusion, although very questionable, was at least still conceivable based on the available evidence. However, to quote from Neil Lightfoot:

…the amount of such evidence available in our own day is so much greater and more conclusive that a first-century date for most of the New Testament writing cannot reasonably be denied, no matter what our philosophical presuppositions may be.”[3]

The exemplary evidence to support the text of the New Testament is made even more obvious when one compares it to the manuscripts available in support of some of the other significant writings of the ancient world. Those who have questioned the accuracy of the Biblical manuscripts are legion, yet few have raised significant questions concerning the authenticity of the ancient manuscripts available for such important works as Homer or Julius Caesar, Herodotus or Tacitus. The fact is that the manuscript evidence for these works is extremely thin when compared to New Testament manuscripts; both in terms of numbers and of age relative to when the originals were written.

For example, consider the most famous writing of Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, with its famous “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). This important historical piece was written between 58 and 50 bc. The oldest available manuscript in Latin (the original language) was produced around ad 850—nine hundred years after the original was penned. This is to be compared to the New Testament, for which we have some evidence only fifty years after the original, and significant manuscript support only one hundred and fifty years after the original was composed. In all, there are only about ten ancient manuscripts of Gallic Wars, compared to about ten thousand in the case of the New Testament.

As further examples, consider the writings of Livy, along with those of Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians. Livy lived from 59 bc to ad 17. Of his original 142 books, only thirty-five survive in any form at all in a total of only about 20 manuscripts. There is a fragment of Livy from the fourth century, but all the others are from hundreds of years later. In the case of Tacitus, who wrote for Roman emperors around ad 100, four and one-half of his fourteen Histories survive, while manuscripts of twelve of his sixteen Annals have been found. These are from a total of only two manuscripts, one from the ninth and one from the eleventh century. Yet, when Tacitus is quoted from, who questions the validity of these manuscripts?

The examples above are all Latin authors. What about ancient Greek writers? The Greek literature with the most manuscript evidence is the Iliad of Homer. This book was written around 800 bc. Over six hundred manuscripts have survived, including a fragment of the Iliad as old as 400 bc. However, the oldest complete manuscript to survive is from the thirteenth century—over two thousand years younger than the original. The two most important Greek historians were Herodotus and Thucydides. Both lived in the 400s bc. By an interesting coincidence, both historians’ writings survive in eight manuscripts. Each has as his oldest surviving manuscript one from around ad 900, over 1,300 years after the original composition.

Other examples could be mentioned, but the point is made. Unquestionably, the New Testament is by a very wide margin the best attested of all ancient writings in the world. Few question the accuracy of the text of these other ancient writings, yet in every case they are supported by far fewer manuscripts, which are much farther removed from the original date of authorship.

One can concede that it is only reasonable to put the Bible under a closer scrutiny than these other books. This is only fair because, unlike Caesar, Tacitus and Herodotus, the writers of the Bible claim that it has authority over human lives. Nevertheless, the current Greek text of the New Testament will pass the most rigorous possible test of its accuracy as a representation of the original writings of the New Testament.

Those who would question the integrity of the New Testament might interject at this point in the discussion to ask “But what about those two hundred thousand errors in the Greek manuscripts? How can you claim you have an accurate record of the original if it is riddled with errors?” This sounds convincing at first, but let us consider the nature of these hundreds of thousands of scribal mistakes.

First of all, this number is so large because there are so many manuscripts. Dividing two hundred thousand scribal errors by the well over five thousand manuscripts brings the number of mistakes into a more realistic perspective. And what is the nature of the differences between the available manuscripts? Do they reflect such differences as to draw into question the accuracy of our manuscripts compared with the original?

A page from a typical Greek uncial manuscript is pictured above. The text of an uncial contains all capital letters, with no spaces between the words, and with no punctuation. In this type of manuscript, if the end of a line was reached in the middle of a word, the copyist simply went to the next line, continuing with the rest of the word. For comparison, consider the passage below in uncial-like script.

With this type of script, it is easy to imagine even the most careful copyist making a minor mistake such as dropping off a letter, interposing two letters, repeating a line, or skipping a line. The vast majority of the supposed two hundred thousand mistakes in the Greek manuscripts are just such scribal slips of the pen. These errors are very easily detected and corrected by the scholars who study the Greek text of the New Testament. They have absolutely no effect on the integrity of the Greek New Testament.

By taking into account the large number of manuscripts and by eliminating very easily corrected slips of the pen from the list, the 200,000 mistakes are reduced to a couple of hundred variations between the manuscripts. What is the nature of these variations? These would include such minor changes as a single rather insignificant word such as an article being added or dropped by a copyist. The copyist either as a subconscious error or intentionally in an attempt on the part of the copyist to “improve” the text may have made these changes.

There are also some examples in which it would appear that a copyist detected a difference between parallel accounts, for example in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, and attempted to smooth the differences by making Matthew and Mark say exactly the same thing. Textual critics use some basic rules when comparing different manuscripts. For example, if the Greek manuscripts exhibit two variant readings of a particular passage in Matthew, and if one of the two readings is identical to a parallel passage in Mark, scholars will lean toward using the reading of Matthew that is different from that in Mark. They do this on the assumption that a scribe had tried to make the two passages identical in an unfortunate but well-intentioned attempt to “improve” the text.

Bear in mind that in almost every case like this, the differences are so minor that they have no significant effect on the meaning of the scriptures. For example, in Matthew 11:19, two slightly different readings are found in the Greek manuscripts. Some end with the phrase, “But wisdom is proved right by her children.” Others end with the phrase, “But wisdom is proved right by her actions.” In this case, the oldest and most reliable manuscripts, the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have “actions,” while most of the later manuscripts have “children.” Despite the fact that a majority of manuscripts have the alternative reading, because the earliest manuscripts have “actions,” most English translations use the word actions.

Whether one uses “actions” or “children” in Matthew 11:19, clearly this represents a very minor difference in the text of the New Testament. The saying of Jesus has the same meaning in either case. This minor difference is typical of the supposed errors in our New Testament.

When all the truly minor supposed mistakes in our received Greek New Testament are removed from consideration, the student of the Bible is left with only about a half dozen non-trivial variations in the Greek text. These would include the following examples.

1. John 7:53-8:11. The story of the woman caught in adultery. None of the earliest and most reliable versions include this passage. It is probably a very early tradition of the primitive disciples that was later inserted into John. Almost certainly it is a genuine story, but it was not part of the original book of John. This passage is not controversial because the story is so consistent with everything we know about Jesus.

2. Acts 8:37 and 1 John 5:7. These examples are listed together because the nature of the evidence is similar. In both cases, absolutely none of the earliest manuscripts include these passages. They are both rather transparent attempts by scribes to “improve” the text to support orthodox doctrine. They found their way into the King James Version because in 1611 only much later Greek manuscripts were available. None of the modern English translations include these passages, except in the marginal notes.  These variations are not controversial because no scholars accept them as a part of the original New Testament text.

3. Mark 16:9-20. This is an account of Jesus’ final words to his disciples. Virtually every Greek manuscript, including the Alexandrian, includes this passage. The problem with this is that the two exceptions are the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus codices. These two are universally considered the most authoritative manuscripts. Besides, the oldest version of the Syriac translation of the New Testament also does not include Mark 16:9-20. In the final analysis, one cannot say with absolute certainty whether this passage was in the original Mark or not.

A couple of other similar but less significant examples could be mentioned, but that is it! Of the four examples listed above, only the last one is actually controversial. Of the 200,000 supposed mistakes in the Greek New Testament, we are left with only one significant passage that is truly controversial. Count them…one! Of course, if the reader would like to check out this claim more carefully for herself by looking into a resource that covers this topic more thoroughly, that would be a great idea.[4] Sir Frederic Kenyon, the world famous Biblical scholar and former director of the British Museum for twenty-one years, sums up the evidence nicely.

The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hands 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.

THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON

Before moving on to considering the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, a few significant questions regarding the text of the New Testament remain. How were the actual books contained in the New Testament chosen? How can we know these books are inspired? Were there any other writings that were inspired, but which were not included in the New Testament? These questions are all related. They all concern what is known as the canon of the New Testament. The word canon comes from the Greek word kanon, which springs from the Hebrew word qaneh, which means reed or cane. The implication of the word is a measuring stick, standard or ruler. In other words, the canon of scripture is the standard list of books accepted by the main body of believers. In the case of the Old Testament, that would be the Jewish leaders in the centuries before the time of Christ, while in the case of the New Testament, it would mean the leaders in the early church.

Some have made claims that church leaders in the fourth or fifth centuries ad chose the New Testament canon. These same people have claimed that such spurious works as the Gospel of Thomas (a second century Gnostic writing) were removed from the official list of scriptures at a late date. These attempts to cast doubt on the authenticity of the New Testament scriptures have one problem. They are not supported by the facts.

The fact is that the authority of the letters of Paul, of the Gospels and the book of Acts, as well as the other books of the New Testament, was established in the early second century by acclamation of the church. The church as a whole chose the New Testament books on the basis of the fact that these particular books had apostolic authority. The data is conclusive that by about ad 150 a more or less fixed list of accepted writings was already circulating amongst the churches throughout the Roman world. There were minor differences in some of the lists, but these were worked out by about ad 200.

Writing in the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr described the customs of the church in his time. The “memoirs of the apostles” and the “writings of the prophets” were read to the people on the first day of the week. Apparently, a more or less fixed list of apostolic writings (“the memoirs of the apostles”) was already in existence at this time. For example, a small manuscript known as the Muratorian Fragment was found and published in the 1700s. It has been dated to the latter part of the second century, or around ad 180. It contains an early list of accepted scriptures. This fragmented list begins with Luke, but mentions it as the third gospel. The list mentions John, Acts, and all thirteen letters of Paul. In fact, all the letters in the New Testament are mentioned or implied except for Matthew, Mark, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter and 1 John. In the third century, the Christian leader Origen recorded the accepted list of letters. His list was identical to our New Testament, although he mentioned that some questioned Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 John and Jude.

One can see that the books of the New Testament were collected together gradually in the late first and early second centuries. In every case apostolic authority appears to have been the key factor determining whether or not they would be included in the canon. In some of the earliest lists, other books were mentioned. Some mentioned the letters known as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. These are non-apostolic writings from around ad 100. The Muratorian Fragment specifically mentions that the Shepherd of Hermas could be read in public, but that it was not to be considered as part of the apostolic writings. One can see that other letters circulated, but that the dividing line between those that could be read for the encouragement of the church and those that were considered canonical was clearly based on apostolic authority. Even today it is not uncommon for excerpts from other spiritual books written by Christian authors (the modern equivalent of the Shepherd of Hermas) to be read during a sermon. Of course there is always a clear line between such books and the Scripture.

As already mentioned, some have tried to claim certain apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Thomas and other lesser-known writings were excluded from the New Testament canon by church councils in the fourth and fifth centuries. The fact is that none of these works were ever accepted as being apostolic by the church as a whole. They may be controversial to some now, but they were not in the first centuries. In any case, by the time of the first major church council at Nicea in ad 325, the canon of the New Testament had been unchanged for over a hundred years. There is no way that the bishops who assembled at Nicea could have changed the canon of the New Testament even if they had wanted to.

This still leaves a couple of the questions raised above unanswered. How can we know all the books of the New Testament are inspired? What we can say from the evidence about this question is that all the New Testament books were accepted by the church as a whole as having apostolic authority—in other words to be inspired—during a time when some who had known the apostles themselves were still alive. Whether or not the letters show the marks of inspiration is a separate matter from the subject of this chapter.

Were there any other inspired writings that did not make the cut to get into the Bible? The answer is probably yes. One can assume that Paul and the apostles wrote other letters to encourage or admonish the churches. Surely, some of these letters contained inspired messages to disciples in the scattered churches. Why were these letters not saved? That would be a matter of speculation. Most believers simply accept on faith that one way or another God caused those books he wanted in the Bible to find their way into the canon of accepted scriptures.

It is fun to speculate about such matters, but we will stick to what we know. In summary, one can conclude from the evidence that the text of the Greek New Testament available to us today is virtually an exact representation of the original writings. In addition, the evidence points to the fact that those books we have in our New Testament are there because, by the overwhelming consensus of the early church, they were accepted as having apostolic authority.

THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

To some extent, the evidence supporting the Old Testament text is similar to that of the New, but there are some major differences. The first and most obvious difference is that the Old Testament is older (no kidding. he says). These writings had been passed down over a time span from about five hundred to well over one thousand years before the first words of the New Testament were put to papyrus. The second obvious difference is that the original language of the Old Testament was Hebrew.[5] We have already seen that the Sinai and the Vatican manuscripts include nearly complete copies of the Old Testament. These manuscripts do provide important corollary support to the Hebrew text, but their evidence is only indirect, because they are copies of a Greek translation of the Hebrew text. The history of the Old Testament text on the whole is the history of the Hebrew manuscripts.

We have already seen that the manuscript support for the Greek New Testament is astonishingly good. It is far stronger than that of any other ancient book. What is the case with the Hebrew Old Testament? To answer that question, one’s first instinct might be to turn to the manuscripts and writings left behind by the early Christian movement. It turns out that this is not the most helpful place to start because the Old Testament of the Christian church was a Greek translation known as the Septuagint (more on that later). Even the writers of the New Testament, when quoting the Bible, used the Greek Septuagint translation rather than the Hebrew. For our oldest and most reliable Hebrew manuscripts we must rely on copies made by the Jews themselves.

Therefore, our study of the sources of the Old Testament turns to the history of the Jewish stewardship of their Hebrew Bible. Up until well into the twentieth century, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts were from the late ninth century onward. The oldest and most reliable Hebrew manuscripts until fairly recently were:

1. The Cairo Codex (Codex Cairensis). A codex of the former and latter prophets dated at ad 895.

2. The Leningrad Codex of the Prophets. This codex includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve Minor Prophets. It is dated at ad 916.

3. The Leningrad Codex (Codex Babylonicus Petropalitanus). The Leningrad Codex is the oldest Hebrew copy of the entire Old Testament. It was copied in ad 1008.

All of these manuscripts are examples of what is known as the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scribes who were active in Tiberias, a town on the Sea of Galilee from about ad 500-1000. They took their name from the Hebrew word masorah, which means authoritative traditions. These Jewish religious leaders took it upon themselves to compile and analyze the various somewhat different strands of Hebrew texts in existence at the time. By carefully justifying the different textual traditions, they created one authoritative version. It would appear that they did a very good job of producing an accurate text of the Hebrew Bible. However, they systematically destroyed all the variant readings of the Hebrew, which is unfortunate for those scholars who attempt to study the ancient text.

Another significant factor that reduced the number of available ancient manuscripts was the Jewish law that old and damaged copies of the Hebrew scripture were to be destroyed. The Jews had a ritual in which they performed a ceremonial burial of old or defective copies of the Scriptures. This goes a long way toward explaining why in general, there are no copies of the Hebrew Bible from before the ninth century.

On the whole, though, the work of the Masoretes at preserving the Hebrew Scripture was positive. These scholars were absolutely fanatical about preserving the Bible. The Masoretes were meticulous to the extreme about maintaining the text as an exact copy. It would appear that they had an almost superstitious reverence for the actual letters themselves.

Before even starting to copy the scrolls or codices, the scribe was required by the Masoretes to go through an elaborate ceremony. In order to preserve the integrity of the text, the Masorete scribes counted all the letters in the Old Testament. They kept track of such arcane details as the middle verse of the Pentateuch (Leviticus 8:7). They also found the middle verse of the entire Hebrew Bible (Jeremiah 6:7). They were aware of the middle word of the whole Old Testament, as well as the middle word of each book. In addition, they kept record of the middle letter and verse of each book. Taking it to the extreme, they also counted the number of times each Hebrew letter appeared in each book and counted the number of verses that contained all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. All this was intended to produce exact copies of the Scriptures. Imagine doing all this letter and word counting, and using it to check every copy of the entire Old Testament. And they did not have word processors!

The evidence is that the Masoretes were only continuing a tradition passed down to them by earlier scribes. This almost unbelievable level of meticulousness on the part of the Jewish scribes has allowed the text of the Old Testament in Hebrew to come down to us with remarkable accuracy since before the time of Christ.

In their efforts at reproducing as close to an original Hebrew text as possible, scholars have a number of sources available besides the Masoretic text. A very significant help in reconstructing the Hebrew text is the Septuagint translation. This is an early translation of the Hebrew into Greek, which provides an independent comparison to the Masoretic text. The word Septuagint is Latin for seventy, after a tradition that it was seventy scholars in Alexandria, Egypt who accepted the task in around 250 bc to make a Greek translation of the Pentateuch. This translation was commissioned for the famous library in Alexandria. Over the decades following the translation of the Pentateuch, the entire Old Testament was translated into Greek, forming the Septuagint translation. Because the Septuagint and the Hebrew texts have a separate history, scholars are able to get an excellent snapshot of what the Hebrew text appeared like at around 200 bc. Often scholars make minor corrections to the Masoretic text using the Septuagint as can be seen by looking in the margins of most Bibles. The Septuagint translation was the Bible of the early church, which explains why there are so many good ancient manuscripts of this version.

Other translations that are helpful in reconstructing the original Hebrew writings include the Samaritan Pentateuch. This was a translation of the first five books of the Old Testament from the Hebrew into Aramaic. It was used by an ethnically mixed splinter group of Jews who later came to be know as the Samaritans. These are the same Samaritans as the woman at the well (John 4:1-43) and the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37). They only acknowledged the Pentateuch as being Scripture. The translation is particularly useful since it was made in around 400 bc, again providing an excellent parallel check to how the first five books appeared at this very early date. There are somewhere around 6,000 variants from the standard Masoretic text in the Samaritan Pentateuch, the great majority of which are minor spelling and grammatical differences.

Besides these, there are a number of other independent checks on the Hebrew text, which include the Syriac translation from around ad 100, as well as the Latin translation known as the Vulgate. Jerome, a Hebrew scholar of great reputation, made this excellent translation in AD 390-405. In addition, a great number of quotes from the Hebrew are found in such Jewish commentaries as the Talmud (ad 200-500) and others.

The Talmud contains rules for copying the Hebrew Scriptures similar to those of the Masoretes. One list of the regulations from the Talmud is recorded below.

A synagogue roll must be written on the skins of clean animals, prepared for the particular use of the synagogue by a Jew. These must be fastened together with strings taken from clean animals. Every skin must contain a certain number of columns, equal throughout the entire codex. The length of each column must not extend over less than forty-eight, or more than sixty lines; and the breadth must consist of thirty letters. The whole copy must be first lined; and if three words be written in it without a line, it is worthless. The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other color and be prepared according to a definite recipe. An authentic copy must be the exemplar, from which the transcriber ought not in the least deviate. No word or letter, not even a yod (a vowel mark), must be written from memory, the scribe not having looked at the codex before him…. Between every consonant the space of a hair or thread must intervene; between every word, the breadth of a narrow consonant; between every new section, the breadth of nine consonants; between every book, three lines. The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line, but the rest need not do so. Besides this, the copyist must sit in full Jewish dress, wash his whole body, not begin to write the name of God with a pen newly dipped in ink, and should a king address him while writing that name he must take no notice of him…. The rolls in which these regulations are not observed are condemned to be buried in the ground or burned; or they are banished to the schools, to be used as reading books.[6]

From this excerpt it is clear that the fanatical dedication of the Jewish scribes to producing accurate copies of the Scriptures began long before the work of the Masoretes. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Talmudists (ad 100-500) and to the Sopherim before them (400 bc-ad 200) for preserving a Hebrew text of outstanding accuracy.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Before 1947, despite all the evidence already presented, the oldest available Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were made over one thousand three hundred years after the original. Clearly this is a very long gap, allowing great room for errors in transcription. This gap was closed considerably with the discovery of what is known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is now famous. In 1947, an Arab boy looking for a lost goat happened upon a cave in the hills above the Dead Sea. In the cave he discovered a trove of clay jars containing a number of very old parchment scrolls. He removed some of the scrolls from the jars. Ultimately, some of the scrolls ended up in a market place where a dealer recognized them for what they were.  Members of the Qumran community had hidden these scrolls in the cave. The inhabitants of Qumran were from a Jewish sect known as the Essenes. The Essenes were an ascetic Jewish splinter group. They had moved to the remote desert hills east of Jerusalem where they could practice their communal religious lifestyle in relative peace. In a time of persecution, probably during the Roman/Jewish wars, they hid a number of their most valued manuscripts in a series of caves in the hills above their settlement.

Following the initial discovery, a careful search of the caves in the area revealed a large number of well-preserved scrolls. The scrolls had been hidden away some time around ad 100, but some of the manuscripts were as old as 250 bc. This discovery ultimately proved to be the most significant find in the history of biblical manuscripts. A number of the scrolls contain the writings of the Essenes themselves on religious topics ranging from end-time prophecies to rules for monastic living. Most significantly however, scattered among these writings were a number of fragments of Old Testament books, and even some complete books of the Old Testament in Hebrew.

The Dead Sea Scrolls include at least fragments of almost every Old Testament book. Included is a manuscript of the entire book of Isaiah, which has been dated to 100 bc or earlier. Imagine the delight of scholars of the Hebrew Bible to suddenly have available an entire copy of Isaiah one thousand years older than any that had been previously available. This copy of Isaiah could be compared to the Masoretic text, giving scholars the ability to measure how much the text had been changed through being copied over a thousand year period. Ultimately, in the 1952 translation of the Revised Standard Version of the Old Testament, only thirteen very minor changes were made to reflect the new discovery. That makes thirteen changes to the second longest book in the Old Testament over the course of one thousand years.

To get a feel for how significantly the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls moved the date of the earliest available manuscripts toward the time of the books actually having been written, consider the graph below.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this remarkable find. The evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals that over a one thousand year span, a number of changes had crept into the Hebrew text. However, virtually all of these are minor changes in spelling, in word order or in grammatical usage. To quote the noted biblical scholar F. F. Bruce:

The new evidence confirms what we already had good reason to believe—that the Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with utmost fidelity.[7]

In fact, the Hebrew script is particularly prone to minor copying errors. Some of the Hebrew letters are very similar. For example, the Hebrew letters kaleth (ד) and resh (ר) are very difficult to distinguish. Similarly, the letters he (ה) and heth (ח) could easily be mistaken for one another. The fact that the Hebrew text, like the Greek, includes strings of letters without large spaces between words, made it very difficult to produce perfect copies. Besides this, the original Hebrew writing was without vowels. This was an additional impediment to producing perfect copies, because in the spoken language, vowels give context to the consonants, making it less likely to make a copying mistake.

Another problem in producing a perfect copy of a Hebrew manuscript arose with the use of numbers. The Hebrew script used letters for numbers, similar to the use of Roman numerals. With words, a copier can use the context to help decide what letter is being used. For example, if one saw a manuscript with a line such as the man ra# to the store, with one obscured letter, they can easily decide that the missing letter is an “n”, not a “t”. In general, numbers do not offer such contextual clues. It is easy for 510 soldiers to become 500 or 51 or 5100. In general, one should be careful about assuming when numbers are found in the Old Testament, that they are exactly the same as written in the original.

All this having been said, it is important to bear in mind that in almost every case we are talking about are truly minor changes. The additional evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that despite a significant number of changes in spelling and grammatical endings, the original meaning is preserved in almost every case. Whether the king of the Babylonians was Nebuchadnezzar (as in most Bibles) or Nebuchadnezzar (probably a more accurate spelling by looking at outside sources), has no impact on the meaning of the book of Daniel.

In summary, God chose the Jewish people to be the stewards of his written word. The wisdom of his choice was proven by the incredible devotion of the Jews to preserving the Old Testament Scriptures with amazing fidelity. Despite some changes in numbers, spelling and grammar, thanks to the Jewish scribes, we have the Old Testament essentially preserved as it was written well over two thousand years ago.

THE OLD TESTAMENT CANON

One last set of questions needs to be raised regarding the Old Testament as it was with the New Testament. How were the books now found in our Old Testaments chosen? What criteria were used? Are they all inspired? What about the Apocrypha?

One thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that the early Christian church had no part in choosing the Old Testament canon. The list of accepted scriptures was set long before Jesus Christ walked the earth. In the New Testament, Jesus himself quoted from nearly every Old Testament book. Yet, he never once quoted from such unaccepted writings as the Apocrypha.

Jesus specifically referred to the Old Testament canon when he claimed that he had fulfilled all that was “written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). The divisions of the Hebrew Bible were the Law of Moses (the Pentateuch), the Prophets, and the Writings (or Psalms). Again, he referred to the entire Hebrew canon in the phrase “from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah” (Matthew 23:35). Of course, the murder of Abel is found at the beginning of the Bible. The assassination of Zechariah son of Berekiah is found in 2 Chronicles 24:20,21. The Jewish Bible has a different order than what is traditional in Christian editions. In the Bible of Jesus’ day, 2 Chronicles was the last book. When Jesus used the phrase, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the Jews were aware that he meant from the beginning to the end of the Bible.

When and by whom was the canon of the Old Testament set? It has been said that a group of Jewish teachers gathered in the Palestinian city of Jamnia at the end of the first century to agree on a final list of accepted writings. The meeting at Jamnia did occur, but almost certainly all they did was confirm the canon that had already been set for at least two hundred years. Before the meeting at Jamnia even occurred, Josephus mentioned a list of the Old Testament scriptures:

“We have not 10,000 books among us, disagreeing with and contradicting one another, but only twenty-two books which contain the records of all time, and are justly believed to be divine. Five of these are by Moses, and contain his laws and traditions of the origin of mankind until his death….From the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets who succeeded Moses wrote down what happened in their times in thirteen books; and the remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.”[8]

The five books referred to by Josephus are the Pentateuch. The thirteen historical/prophetic books may seem like a low number. That is because the Hebrew Bible at that time combined 1 and 2 Samuel into one book. Similarly, the pairs 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ruth and Judges, Jeremiah and Lamentations, and Ezra and Nehemiah were each combined into one book. The supposed “minor prophets” (Hosea through Malachi) were combined to form one book known as “The Twelve.” If the four “books containing hymns” of Josephus are the traditional Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon that make up the Hebrew “writings,” then the list of Josephus is exactly the same as our canonical Old Testament.

Who chose the Old Testament books? The bottom line is that we do not have a detailed record of how these books were chosen. In a manner similar to New Testament, it would appear that the list of the Old Testament books was chosen gradually by acclamation of the Jewish teachers. Apparently, only the accepted books passed the mark as being inspired writings. In the end, the believer is left with the evidence of the books themselves, combined with faith that God had his hand in what ended up in his Bible. One of the main points of this book is to show overwhelming evidence that the books we do find in both our Old and New Testaments show marks of inspiration.

One of the best ways for students of the Bible to prove to themselves that the accepted canon of the Old Testament has the marks of inspiration is to pull out a Roman Catholic Bible and begin reading the apocryphal additions to the Old Testament. A quick reading of Tobit or of the additions to Daniel or of Judith will reveal the glaring difference between an inspired writing and the work of human ingenuity. It will be obvious to most why the Jewish community unanimously rejected these writings as not being inspired by Jehovah.[9] When one reads what is obviously religious fiction (Tobit and Judith for example) or historical books in which the author apologizes for his mistakes (2 Maccabees), it will bring out in stark contrast the quality of the inspired writings in the Old Testament.

This extremely brief discussion of the Old Testament canon has barely even begun to address the possible questions about specific books or parts of books and whether they belong in the list of inspired writings. Anyone who has read the Bible at all and does not have at least some questions about particular passages has not been paying attention. What about such and such book? Isn’t there even one that never mentions the name of God? What about this one story? It doesn’t seem to fit the flow of the book. Am I to take this literally or not? How could God allow that to happen? Isn’t there at least an appearance of contradiction between these two passages? It is in stubbornly seeking answers to such difficult questions that I personally have found some of my greatest conviction about the inspiration of the Bible. It has been through facing rather than avoiding asking the hard questions that I have become convinced that the Bible as a whole fits together in a way that can only be explained by accepting that it is ultimately the work of God himself. Let the adventure begin. It would be helpful to summarize some of the conclusions of this chapter.

1. We have a Greek text of the New Testament that is almost an exact copy of the original writings.

2. Theories that all or parts of the New Testament were written well into the second century or that major changes were made to the New Testament during the third or fourth centuries are simply   unsupportable from the evidence.

3. The New Testament canon was essentially fixed by ad 150 and has certainly remained unchanged since about ad 200.

4. The canon of the New Testament was set by general consensus of the first and second century Christian leaders based on apostolic authority.

5. It would be an overstatement to say that we have a Hebrew text of the Old Testament that is an almost exact copy of the original writings. Copying the rather difficult Hebrew script over many centuries allowed a number of changes in numbers, in spelling and in other minor details. Nevertheless, the evidence allows one to conclude that the received text of the Old Testament is remarkably close to that of the original writings.

6. The canon of the Old Testament was set by general consensus of the Jewish teachers perhaps as early as 400 bc, but almost   certainly by 200 bc. The books were chosen because they had the   marks of inspiration.