You Can Trust the Bible

1. The preservation of the Bible is remarkable. All of the early manuscripts of the Bible were copied by hand—long before there were printing presses. Scribes made copies of the original manuscripts and distributed them. Thousands of copies of such manuscripts or portions of them still survive.

Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament that go back 150 to 200 years before Christ were found near the Dead Sea in 1947. It’s amazing that these two-thousand-year-old scrolls contain exactly the same truths as we find in the Old Testament of Bibles printed today. Powerful evidence of how reliably God’s Word has been transmitted to us!

The apostles first wrote much of the New Testament as letters they sent to Christian churches established after the death and resurrection of Christ (Colossians 4:16). More than 4,500 manuscripts of all or a part of the New Testament are on display in the great museums and libraries of Europe and America. Some of them date back to the second century. By comparing these early manuscripts with today’s Bible, we can readily see that the New Testament has also remained essentially unchanged since it was first written. Remarkably enough, we are much more certain about the original text of the Bible than we are about the original text of Shakespeare’s plays.

Sir Frederic Kenyon, once the director of the British Museum, in his book Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts assures us: “The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand 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.”

Today the Bible or portions of it have been translated into over 2,060 languages and dialects. God’s Word remains the world’s best-seller; over 150 million Bibles and Bible portions are sold each year.