Apologetics
Can You Actually Trust the Bible?
More manuscript evidence than any ancient text in history. The data is worth examining.
A common claim is that the Bible has been "translated so many times it is basically a game of telephone." It sounds plausible. It is also demonstrably false.
Here is what actually happened — and the evidence is far more compelling than the conspiracy theories.
The Manuscript Evidence
The New Testament has approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands more in other ancient languages. That totals nearly 25,000 manuscript copies.
For comparison:
- Homer's Iliad: approximately 1,900 copies
- Plato's works: approximately 210 copies
- Gallic Wars: approximately 10 copies
No serious scholar questions whether we know what Plato wrote. The Bible has over 100 times more manuscript evidence.
The Time Gap
The earliest New Testament fragment (P52, a portion of ) dates to approximately 125 AD — roughly 30 years after the original was written. Most ancient texts have gaps of 500 to 1,000 years between the original and the earliest surviving copy.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, pushed our earliest Old Testament manuscripts back by 1,000 years — and demonstrated that the text had been transmitted with remarkable accuracy. 53 in the Dead Sea Scrolls is virtually identical to the text in modern Bibles.
Addressing the Variants
Yes, there are textual variants — approximately 400,000 across all manuscripts. That number sounds alarming until you understand that 99% of them are spelling differences, word order changes, or obvious scribal errors. None affect any core Christian doctrine.
Textual critics — scholars who specialize in manuscript transmission — can reconstruct the original text with over 99% accuracy. This is not a claim. It is what secular scholars, including skeptics like Bart Ehrman, acknowledge.
The Authors Were Historians
opened his Gospel by stating he "carefully investigated everything from the beginning" and wrote "an orderly account." That is the language of historical methodology, not mythological storytelling.
, writing in (dated to approximately 55 AD, just 20 years after ), listed specific witnesses to the and noted that most of them were still alive — effectively inviting verification.
Myths do not develop within 20 years while eyewitnesses are still available to challenge them.
The Bottom Line
The Bible is not a book that appeared out of nowhere. It is a collection of documents written by identifiable authors, preserved through a transmission process that scholars can verify, with more manuscript evidence than any other ancient text.
The evidence is there for anyone willing to examine it.