Intro
Welcome to apostolic life in the 21st century, a podcast dedicated to helping modern day believers live out the teachings of the first century church. This podcast is part of the teaching Ministry of Dr. David K. Bernard. Dr. Bernard has dedicated his life to studying the Bible and helping believers apply its message to their daily lives. In apostolic life in the 21st century, Dr. Barnard answers your questions about what the Bible teaches, and how those teachings apply to everyday life. Thank you for joining us for this broadcast.

Question
The Bible was obviously written a long time ago. And of course, we know that all of the original authors are dead. Parts of the Bible were written up to 3,500 years ago, and the newest portions were written about 2,000 years ago. We also do not have copies of what we would call the autographs, the original manuscripts that were pinned by the biblical authors. Considering all that, how do we know that the Bible that we have today is an accurate reflection of what the original writers actually wrote?

Response
That's a great question. It's a very important in our day. So let me give you a resource. If you want detailed discussion, from an Apostolic perspective, I've written a book on this very subject, it's called God's Infallible Word, available at PentecostalPublishing.com. So I can only give a very brief answer now. But there there is a lot of historical information and even statistical information that will backup what I'm saying. So if you really want that, go to God's Infallible Word.

But let me try to give you a brief answer. In the Old Testament is written in Hebrew with a few passages in Aramaic, we only have a few manuscripts complete manuscripts of the Old Testament, and they only come from about AD 1000. So at first thought, you might say, "Well, how in the world will we know?" Because, of course, in the days before printing, all the ancient Bibles had to be copied by hand. And so how do we know errors didn't creep in? And since there's so much later than the original, how do we know there weren't changes over the centuries that we can't trace?

Well, for the Old Testament, there are two basic answers. The first is the Hebrew scribes took what we might call fanatical care. If you study what they did, they would copy a portion of the text and they would count every single letter. And then they would record how many letters on that portion of the scroll, or what we might say, that column or that page. And then they would identify what is the middle word or the middle letter, and they would come up with all these little statistic measurements. And they would put them so that when you go back to copy that, you would check those and if the if it was off, then you knew there was a mistake, and you go back and fix your mistake. So it's almost unimaginable for us today, because we're not used to this kind of detail. But scribes spent their whole life doing this. And it might take years to copy, you know, one scroll. So they would take the time, and they were theologically motivated. This is the sacred word of God. I mean, before they would do this, they would, they would take a bath, they would wash, they would change their clothes, because it was so sacred and holy. And so they took this extreme care to a, it wasn't just like sloppily copying, they made sure that it was accurate. So that's one reason why we can have a high degree of confidence in the Old Testament.

The second one is in a dramatic experiment that you could not duplicate. But as I said, the oldest manuscripts we had of Hebrew, about 1000 AD. So you could say, well, surely, in 1,000 years or 2,000 years, there had to be many, many errors that crept in, and we have no way of knowing. And that's what many scholars said, especially liberal scholars, well, then, there was the dramatic discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s. And subsequently, they found these scrolls in the Judean desert, that are dated back to the time of Christ, in some cases, a century or two before the time of Christ. So in one moment, you could leap back from AD 1000 to you know, BC, 1000 years. So you had a dramatic experiment, okay? What if we had a set of manuscripts, and then another man says 1000 year later, how many errors would creep up in 1000 years now we actually had evidence. And the perhaps the clearest was the entire book of Isaiah called the Isaiah scroll. So we can compare these two scrolls 1,000 years apart. And guess what we found, basically no differences. And the difference that existed didn't affect content. But we're mostly spelling, our, you know, minor changes of the way things were written, but not changing the meaning at all. So the Dead Sea Scrolls dramatically vindicated that the Old Testament text we have really is accurate.

Now, the New Testaments a very different story. Because we did have many scribes on an individual basis, some manuscripts of, obviously, lesser quality and others. But the good thing about the new test, we have over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, that's far more than for any other ancient book. And we have at least fragments, going back to the beginning of the first century, just a few years. That's the Gospel of John. So the Gospel of John might have been written the 80s, or 90s. And we have a fragment from about 115. So just a few years, and then we have partial manuscripts and complete manuscripts within about 200 years. And and again, that is dramatically closer to the originals than any other ancient book. But the key of the New Testament having so many manuscripts, you can compare them. So even though no management may be perfect, let's say you have 100 manuscripts of a certain text, well, if 100 of them are exactly the same, then you know, that's got to be original. But chances are somebody made a mistake among those 101 of the scribes probably made a mistake. But you still would have 99 or 98. So you can say, okay, 98 say one thing to say another, Which do you think is right? Obviously, the 98? Well, that's a simplified illustration. But that's what's called textual criticism. So what you do when you have so many managers, you compare them all, and you cancel out errors, you can obviously see, well, this one is wrong. And this word, this one is wrong on that word, maybe no one is perfect, but you put them all together, you can reconstruct the original with near certainty. Now people like to magnify the differences, because there are some differences among the major manuscripts, and therefore there are some differences among the various translations. But from a theological perspective, there really are no doctrinal differences, the major differences that we find even where there's a phrase, or a few cases of verse, maybe it's omitted from one person's preferred text or translation, but the same phrase will be in another place. So you're really gonna argue whether this is the Word of God, but is it in the right place? Or did it get copied somewhere else? You're not really there really is no doctrinal issue at stake among the remaining variations. And in most cases, again, it's very small, like should it be this word, or that word, and either word would fit the context. So we're not sure 100% which one, it is, somewhere in most cases, you're not really talking about a doctrinal issue. And where you are talking about a significant difference, you can find the same phrase or the same teaching in another place. So you're not really arguing whether this is a biblical concept, you're just arguing should it be this place, and that place or this place, or that place, it's more of a technical scholarly discussion, but just to give you so the, the, the the New Testament texts can be vindicated by the large number of ancient Greek manuscripts that you can compare. And through the process of textual criticism, you can arrive at the original text.

But just to give you an illustration, most of our knowledge of Greek history comes from a few historian. So Heraclitus, his history, we only have eight manuscripts. And these manuscripts are over 1300 years later than Heraclitus. Plato's a famous philosopher that we get a lot of our understanding of Greek philosophy from him. Well, one of his works, we only have seven copies 1300 years later than what he wrote Caesar Gallic Wars. Julius Caesar, obviously, he's a famous person, we get a lot of our knowledge from Roman history from what he wrote, we only have 10 manuscripts of his book there 900 years later than when he wrote, well, I could go down the list. So we have a high degree of confidence that we know Greek history that we know Roman history, that we know Greek philosophy, but we're getting it from a handful of manuscripts that are 1,000, 1,500 years later, but still, we we feel we've got a pretty accurate text. We can, you know, expound all day on Greek and Roman history and philosophy. And we know we're talking about, well, the New Testament. And this was some years ago and I wrote this 5306 Six manuscripts, a fragment from 30 to 50 years, most of the New Testament 150 years, all the New Testament 250 years. So if we say the New Testament unreliable, then we've got to say everything we know about Greek Roman philosophy. In Greek, Roman history is all bogus. We don't know anything about ancient history. Obviously, we do know.

And so the bottom line is we can have a high degree of confidence that yes, the New Testament texts and the Old Testament texts we have is what God gave us. And then theologically, the Book of Psalms and other places talks about God's truth is preserved forever. God's word is preserved forever. And we believe that since God inspired the word, surely he would have preserved it for us today. Now, I'm not saying any particular manuscript is perfect, that there are no scribal errors there are that there are no translation errors. There are there are no printing errors there are. And if you doubt that, we'll just just copy the book of Matthew, as fast as you can, and see if God miraculous sees preserve your hand from making an error or see if there's any error. Obviously, there can be errors. But the point is, those errors are not in the original text that was inspired us and through a process of careful study, we can reconstruct the original text. humanly speaking, if we can't say 100% certainly, certainty, theologically speaking. And also by practical study, we can say, there is no text that would undermine any episodic doctrine that we hold today, we can have absolute confidence that the word God gave the message God gave is what we have today.

Outro
Thank you for listening to this episode of apostolic life in the 21st century. If you enjoy this podcast, please take a moment to give us a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. We also appreciate it when you share apostolic life in the 21st century with a friend or family member. Finally, join us again next time as we look at how the Bible applies to everyday life.