Manuscripts of the Bible

Many people will tell you that you can’t trust the Bible because it has become corrupted and changed over the centuries. They will tell you that the Bible we have today is not the true Bible, but if we look at the evidence, we find this isn’t true.

The Bible is very old – it’s not hard to imagine that it has been changed many times over the years. You can see it playing out like an ancient game of telephone, where one person would say a phrase into a person’s ear and repeat it to the next person. By the time it gets to the last person, it’s totally changed!

But what does the historical evidence say about the Bible?

We don’t have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible, the documents actually written by Paul, for example BUT we do have an overwhelming number of manuscripts that date very close to the originals.

To set a baseline for comparison, this chart shows a sampling of the number of manuscripts for the ancient works by people you may have heard of like Plato and Aristotle.

For the New Testament, we have over 5,600 partial and full manuscripts written in the original Greek, compared to 200 or less of other ancient works.

If you include Latin and other early language copies, we have over 25,000 early manuscripts of the New Testament. 

When you look at the timing of when the New Testament was written, some of the manuscripts may date back as early as the middle of the second century. This is a relatively short amount of time from the original writing. 

The Bible is the most well documented book of the ancient world. You can trust that your Bible hasn’t been changed and it’s what God originally intended.