Lesson 3 - Is the Bible reliable?
The Original Manuscripts
Ancient books, like the Bible, typically or totally do not have any surviving original manuscripts. As you will see below, only varying quantities of ancient copies of them exist. So then there are no known original manuscripts of any of the books of the Bible. All we have are ancient copies of the originals. Why have the originals perished? Two things are likely: (1) they needed recopying because the material on which they were written degraded and deteriorated, and (2) they were destroyed by the copyists after they made a new copy from them. One thing we know for sure is that the Good News message within the Bible is more important than the technicalities of how we actually got a copy of it. For example, the Bible says, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” (Ro 10:17) This verse teaches that a person can learn to trust God by hearing or reading about the Messiah for themselves, and not primarily by studying historical evidence or lack thereof. Faith comes by hearing, not by seeing (Ro 10:17). After reading the Bible for yourself, then by faith you may begin to trust that the Bible is from God. It is the message in it that convicts and convinces people that the Bible is true, reliable, and trustworthy. Belief in the Son of God does not come by any other means than hearing the message of Him.
Ancient Copy & Textual Proofs
Compare it to any other ancient book, and you will see that the Bible is by far, overwhelmingly, and beyond a doubt (1) the best supported by ancient copies and (2) the best preserved textually. For example:1. Compare It to the Total Surviving Copies, Not Originals, of Various Other Ancient Books
AUTHOR # OF EXTANT [existing] COPIES Caesar Gallic Wars 10 copies Livy Roman History 20 copies Tacitus Annals 20 copies Pliny Secundus History 7 copies Thucydides History 8 copies Suetonius de Vita Caesarun 8 copies Herodotus History 8 copies Lucretius 2 copies Catullus 3 copies Euripides 9 copies Sophocles 193 copies Demosthenes 200 copies (all from one copy) Aristotle 49 copies (of any one work) Aristophanes 10 copies“In the entire range of ancient Greek and Latin literature, the ILIAD ranks next to the New Testament in possessing the greatest amount of manuscript testimony.” [(Metzger, 144) Metzger, Bruce M., Chapters in the History of the New Testament Textual Criticism, Grand Rapids MI,Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1963]
How many extant [existing] copies are there of Homer’s ILIAD?