Has the Bible Been Corrupted Over the Centuries?

We're working our way through the book Questioning the Bible (Jonathan Morrow). His next chapter deals with the issue of whether the Bible has been corrupted over the centuries. Some people worry about passages like John 8:1-13 or Mark 16:9-20, where Bible footnotes indicate these passages were not found in the earliest manuscripts. So, the key question is simple: how do we know that what was written in the first century is what we have today in the 21st century? Let's take a look at what he says.

He starts off by talking about something called the telephone game. People sit in a circle while one person whispers a message to the player on his right who then turns to the next person and repeats the message. By the time it makes it around to the original whisperer, the message is usually wildly different. Some people suggest this is a good analogy for how the New Testament was transmitted.

However, it's a bad analogy. Why? First, the telephone game is linear (from one person to the second to the third…), But the New Testament gospels in the copying process were not done that way. There are multiple lines of transmission within the original documents which were probably copied several times. We have access to earlier copies to compare with later copies. In addition, the telephone game is verbal, but the text was written, with the result that the words and phrases can be examined along the way. Finally, when we play the telephone game, life or death usually do not hang in the balance. There would've been a high degree of motivation among the copiers to get the message right.

The author then turns to textual criticism, the practice of reconstruction for ancient texts. There are three fundamental questions when it comes to reconstructing the New Testament – how many manuscripts do we have? How early are these manuscripts? How important are the textual variants (differences) among these manuscripts?

Let's start with how many manuscripts are available. The answer is that we have a wealth of material with nearly 6000 Greek New Testament manuscripts, as many as 20,000 translated versions, and more than 1 million quotations by early church fathers. In comparison with the average ancient Greek author, the New Testament copies are well over one thousand times more plentiful. This gives us an opportunity to examine these different manuscripts to look for any wildly different stories, but they aren't there.

Let's deal with the other two questions in the next blog.