The record
Manuscripts Without Magic
The originals are gone. Thousands of copies remain.
The Bible has a paper trail, and you can still look at it.
Colossians 4:16 · INTF - New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room · Peter J. Gurry, The Number of Variants in the Greek New Testament · Luke's Genealogy in NT Manuscripts - CSNTM · P52 - CSNTM · P46 - CSNTM · Codex Sinaiticus Project
They say
If all we have are copies of copies, how do we know the Bible wasn't changed along the way?
The scene
We don't have the sheets that left the hands of Paul or the Gospel writers.
We have what came after them.
Thousands of handwritten Greek manuscripts containing some part of the New Testament survive. Some are scraps small enough to fit in your hand. Others are entire books.
And every word had to be copied by somebody.
If you spent your days copying lines by hand, you'd make mistakes too.
Words were missed, sometimes lines got written twice, and one surviving copy of Luke's genealogy is so badly scrambled that God ends up with a father. The scribe appears to have copied across two columns instead of reading down them.
Some mistakes are that obvious. Some aren't.
We know that scribe got it wrong because other copies of Luke don't make the same mistake. Put copies beside each other and you can start working out what happened.
Across thousands of surviving manuscripts, the differences add up, but having that many copies also gives us an enormous amount to compare.
Those copies didn't stay in one place. Christian writings were travelling between communities from very early on. They were copied as they went, and within the first few centuries copies had spread across the Roman world, from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome, North Africa and beyond.
A scribe could change the copy in front of him. He couldn't change the ones that had already gone somewhere else.
Some of those surviving copies are old. A tiny scrap of John's Gospel is often dated to the second century, although dating handwriting that old isn't precise. From around AD 200 we have most of a papyrus book containing letters of Paul, and by the fourth century there's Codex Sinaiticus.
When complete, Codex Sinaiticus contained the Old and New Testaments. The conservation team estimates that making its parchment required nearly 200 animal skins, and at least three scribes copied the text by hand. Their different hands can still be identified.
The manuscripts have been photographed and digitised. You can open the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, look at the scrap of John or turn the surviving pages of Codex Sinaiticus.
They're still here.
The point
The documents have a history you can inspect.
Sit with this
Have you ever actually read one of the Gospels?