The Right Words: How the Text Was Copied

The first witness gave us the right books. But a book can have the right title page and still, over centuries of hand-copying, drift word by word from what its author wrote. So the second witness must now testify: do we have the right words? Here is the honest situation. We do not possess a single original manuscript — not one page in the hand of Moses or Paul. The autographs are gone. What we have instead are copies: copies of copies, made by hand, for fourteen hundred years before the printing press. And that raises a fair and serious question. Can a text copied by hand so many times still be trusted? Did the Word survive the scribes? We will answer honestly, holding the same discipline we learned at the start. We will concede what is real — that copying by hand did produce mistakes, and we will not hide them. We will refuse what is merely alarming — the claim that these mistakes have swallowed the Word. And we will stand where the evidence stands: that God so preserved His Word, through an astonishing abundance of witnesses, that what you hold is His Word still. The authority rests, as always, on the Bible in your hands.

To weigh the copying we must first picture it. Before printing, every copy of Scripture was made by hand, one letter at a time. A scribe might work from an exemplar open before him, copying line by line; or a reader might read aloud to a room of scribes, each writing as they heard. The early materials were papyrus, made from a reed and inexpensive but fragile, and later parchment or vellum, made from treated animal skin, far more durable. The form changed too: the Jewish Scriptures were kept on scrolls, but Christians embraced the codex — the book form, with leaves bound at the spine — very early, which made the Gospels and letters easier to carry and consult. This was slow, costly, demanding work; a single large manuscript could take a scribe the better part of a year and the skins of an entire flock. It was not done carelessly. Copying the sacred text was an act of devotion, and the craft was taken with the seriousness the Word deserved. To imagine bored monks idly altering the Bible is to misunderstand entirely the reverence with which it was made.

The care went far beyond good intentions. For the Old Testament, the Jewish scribes — and above all the Masoretes, who worked from about the sixth to the tenth century — built extraordinary safeguards around the text. They counted the letters and the words of each book. They knew the middle letter of the Torah and would check it. They recorded in the margins, in a body of notes called the Masorah, how many times a word appeared and where. They had strict rules for the copying of the divine name and for correcting or destroying a flawed sheet. A copy that failed the checks was not used. For the New Testament, Christian scriptoria — later the monasteries — copied and compared with their own discipline. This matters because the popular fear is exactly the opposite: that careless or scheming hands slowly changed the Bible over the centuries. The truth is that the men who copied it were, by and large, its most careful guardians, who counted every letter precisely because they believed every letter was God's.

Still, they were men, and men copying by hand for centuries make mistakes. Honesty requires that we say so plainly. Most errors were unintentional. There were errors of the eye: mistaking one similar letter for another, or writing a word twice, or — a common slip — skipping a line because two lines ended with the same word. There were errors of the ear, when a scribe wrote from dictation and two words sounded alike, as "their" and "there" do to us. There were errors of memory, holding a phrase in mind and altering it slightly, and errors of judgment. A smaller number of changes were intentional, but these were usually well-meant: a scribe smoothing a hard reading, harmonizing one Gospel to match another, or adding a clarifying word. Deliberate changes to teach false doctrine are rare and, where they exist, detectable. This is the gnat we do not swallow whole and do not pretend away: hand-copying made some mistakes inevitable. The question is not whether variants exist — they do — but whether they have overwhelmed the Word. To that we now turn.

Here the picture changes completely, and in our favor. The New Testament has come down to us in a wealth of manuscripts unmatched by any other writing of the ancient world. There survive more than five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, in whole or in part, together with many thousands more in Latin and other early translations, and so many quotations in the writings of the early church fathers that the New Testament could nearly be rebuilt from them alone. Set that beside the great works of classical antiquity. Most survive in a mere handful to a few hundred copies, and often the earliest copy we have was made a thousand years after the author died. For the New Testament the earliest fragments come within a generation or two of the writing, and the copies number in the thousands. Scholars have called this an "embarrassment of riches." It is the opposite of a text hanging by a thread. No ancient book is so richly, so early, so many times attested — and that abundance is not our problem. It is our security.

But someone will object: do not those thousands of manuscripts disagree in hundreds of thousands of places? They do — and understanding why is everything. The number of variants is large precisely because the number of manuscripts is large. If you have five thousand copies and each contains a few slips of the pen, you will count a great many differences; a book that survived in three copies would show far fewer. The variant count grows with the witnesses, not with the corruption. And when you look at what the variants actually are, the fear drains away. The overwhelming majority are differences of spelling, or of word order — and Greek word order is so flexible that "Christ Jesus" for "Jesus Christ" changes nothing in translation — or obvious slips, or readings so garbled no one would ever adopt them. Only a small fraction are both meaningful and genuinely in doubt, and not one of them places a single article of the Christian faith in question. So we concede the number honestly — it is true, and we will not hide it — while refusing the conclusion the number is meant to suggest. The many variants are the footprints of many witnesses, and many witnesses are how a text is kept.

See now the deep logic of it. With thousands of independent witnesses, no single scribe's mistake can corrupt the Word, because his error stands exposed by all the copies that do not share it. A text kept in one fragile line could be lost by one careless hand; a text kept in thousands of lines corrects itself.

But how, exactly, does a text correct itself? Here lies the quiet genius of the thing. Among those more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, no two are exactly alike — every copying hand left its own small fingerprints. Yet they do not scatter at random; they fall into families, groups of copies all descended from a common ancestor. And here is the key. When one scribe made a slip — a misspelled word, say — that slip was passed down to every copy made from his, and so to his whole family; but it never appears at all in the families that descend from a different line. The mistake, instead of hiding, betrays itself: it marks out exactly the family it belongs to, and its absence from every other family shows plainly that it was never in the original. So by setting the families side by side and comparing them, the scholars of this patient science — textual criticism — can see just where and when a reading first entered the stream, and can lift it back out again, recovering the earlier wording from the many witnesses that never carried the error. The very abundance that produces the variants is the thing that makes them correctable.

This is how God preserved His Word — not by a single flawless chain of copies, which He did not promise and we need not claim, but by an abundance so great that the original readings are recoverable and secure. Even the largest disputed passages are few and famous. The longer ending of Mark and the account of the woman caught in adultery are the two most discussed in the whole New Testament; they stand in the Received Text that underlies the King James and the Reina-Valera and are printed there in full, while some of the earliest Greek copies lack them, which is why other Bibles mark them with a note. How to weigh that evidence is the very question of the Received and Critical Texts, which we take up in Unit 6. The point here is only the scale: the entire discussion turns on a handful of places, never on the heart of the faith.

So the second witness gives its first testimony. The words you read are, in their substance and overwhelmingly in their detail, the words the prophets and apostles wrote. We do not claim a perfect, unbroken chain of copies — to claim it would be to strain a gnat, and to set a believer up to stumble the day he learns of a variant. We claim something better and truer: that God preserved His Word through an abundance no accident could erase, so that what reached your hands is His authoritative Word. When you read your Bible, you are not holding a rumor worn thin by retelling; you are holding the recoverable, well-attested Word of God. The right books, and within them the right words. But we have met the witnesses only in the mass, as a number. In the next unit we will meet them one by one — the actual manuscripts, the papyri and the great codices and the scrolls hidden in a desert cave — and let each of them speak.