Bibliology - Week 6 - Preservation

Introduction

Welcome everyone to week 6 of our class in Bibliology.

(Pray)

Review: Last week we discussed the doctrine of canonicity. The canon of Scripture refers to the list of books that are considered to be Scripture.

For the past few weeks, we have gone to great lengths to show that the Bible is God’s inspired revelation and is totally perfect in all that it says. Last week, talked about the canon. And in that lesson, we gave arguments as to why the 66 books of the Bible really are the Word of God. And in the two weeks prior to that, we said that these books really were breathed-out by God, and as a result, are free from error in all matters of faith, doctrine, and history.

Now, as we said two lessons ago, if we want to be technical, the doctrine of inerrancy only applies in an absolute sense to the autographs of the Bible (the original copies written by the hands of the biblical authors themselves). However, all of the original copies have long since perished. None are available for us today. So how do we know that after 2,000 years our Bibles haven’t changed or been altered? This is the question of today’s lesson: preservation.

Here is our definition for today:

Preservation - God’s act of watching over His Scriptures as they were copied over time to ensure their reliability.

Why didn’t God preserve the originals? That is a question that may never know until we get to heaven. But at the same time, the fact that the original copies are no longer available should not surprise us either. When we remember that even the last books of the Bible were written almost 2,000 ago, on papyrus of all things, then it should not be surprising that those copies have disintegrated over time. These books were written on perishable materials. And in fact, I’m not sure that there are any major works of history, that are that old, that still exist in their original copy form.

That’s preservation. That over a period of thousands of years, God preserved the text of the Bible. As scribes made copy after copy, over hundreds of years, the text of the Bible was successfully transmitted. Now, I’ll answer this right up front. Were there times when scribes made a slight error as they copied dozens of pages of the biblical text. Sure. There are times where they forgot to write a ‘the’, or skipped a letter. But in those rare cases, we have dozens of other copies of the same book, where that error is not made, so that we can tell where the error was made, so that we know what the wording was of the original text. By ‘preservation’ we don’t mean that all 1,000 hand written copies of the Bible of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries were always 100% perfect, but rather what we mean is that when we compare the copies we have, any minor slip ups are so obvious that we can, 99% of the time, tell what the original text was. Through this science of collecting and analyzing the copies of the Bible, we can tell what the text of the Bible was. And, I should say that the Bible is far more preserved than ANY OTHER BOOK of antiquity.

Why didn’t God preserve the originals? We may never know. But at the same time, when we remember that even the last books of the Bible were written almost 2,000 ago, on papyrus of all things, then it should not be surprising that those copies have disintegrated over time. These books were written on perishable materials. And in fact, I’m not sure that there are any major works of history, that are that old, that still exist in their original copy form.

I would venture to guess that all or nearly all major works of history from that period of time only exist today in the form of copies, not the original manuscripts. And that’s simply because unless special care was taken to keep the materials protected from the elements, they would have certainly disintegrated as well. So again, the fact of the originals being lost should not surprise us.

But what I want to show you today is the process by which the Bible was transmitted over the centuries. And in the end, I want you to be encouraged to know that God has indeed preserved the text of the Scriptures for us, so that we can know that the Bible we hold in our hands today is the Bible that was originally written by the biblical authors.

Before I get into the details of this lesson, I want to reiterate a point I made about the Bible in Week 1 of our class. Back in that lesson, I said that:

It is important to remember that the New Testament is the most well-preserved book in the world.

(Iliad / NT Chart - compare this chart with the figures later on)

We said that the second most well preserved book is Homer’s Iliad. And that only has 643 copies that remain. In contrast, the New Testament has almost 25,000 copies that exist today. And even if we take into account the fact that the NT is not really one book but 27, even if we divide 25,000 by 27, we still get an average of 926 manuscripts for each NT book, which is still better than the Iliad.

So the New Testament, and the Bible as a whole, is a very well preserved book, from a scientific point of view.

The Main Point

And here is the main idea that I want to get across for this lesson. And that is: The same God who inspired the Holy Scriptures also has sovereignly worked in history to preserve those Scriptures for us.

The Evidence of Preservation

We have already seen that there are 1,000’s of manuscripts that still exist of the Bible.

How do we know that the manuscript copies that we have accurately represent the text of the originals?

Well, we have three different kinds of evidence that can give us assurance that the Bible that we hold in our hands today is the Bible that was originally written hundreds of years ago.

3 Different Types of Evidence:

Evidence #1 - Promises from Scripture

Write out the following verses:

Isaiah 40:8 ESV

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Matthew 24:35 ESV

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

Psalm 119:89 ESV

Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens.

What do these verses say about the Word of God? That it will stand forever.

Evidence #2 - The Precision of the Copyists

I want to talk for a little bit about the extreme care that was taken by many of the Jewish scribes who copied the Bible.

If you stop and think about it, copying the entire Bible by hand must have been an incredible amount of work for the ancient Jewish scribes. It took thousands of pages, lots of ink and tons of patience. You would think that for as large as the Bible is, and for as many times as it would have been copied, tons of errors would have made their way into the Bible, and piled up until the final version looked like a very bad game of ‘telephone.’

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However, when we look at the evidence, we find that this actually isn’t the case. Thanks to the skill and care of the scribes who copied the Bible, we find a very different result. The Talmudists (A.D. 100-500) who were put in charge of copying the Old Testament followed specific guidelines, so that they could be sure that their copies would contain as little error as possible. These guidelines also showed just how much reverence they had for their Scriptures:

Rules of the Talmudists (A.D. 100-500)

The scroll that was used had to be made of clean animal skins.

2. Each skin had to contain a certain number of _columns______________.

Each skin had to contain a certain number of columns.

Each row of the column had to contain exactly 30 letters.

Before writing any text, the entire roll had to be lined.

No word could or letter could be written from memory.

There had to be a space the size of a hair between every letter.

The fifth book of Moses had to end exactly with a line.

While writing, the scribe was not allowed to talk to anyone.

*If one of these guidelines was not followed, “the rolls in which these regulations are not observed are condemned to be buried in the ground or burned.”

?

Those men took their positions seriously. But even their methods of copying look simple when compared to the famous Masoretes (A.D. 500 – 950). These Jewish scholars were important because they recorded the vowels in the Hebrew text where none were included and they added proper punctuation to the Scriptures. Both of these features were absent in the Hebrew manuscripts before the time of the Masoretes. But even more astonishing is the precision they used in copying the Hebrew text.

The Masoretes (A.D. 500-950):

Counted the middle word and letter of each book.

Counted the number of letters on each line, on each page.

Counted the number of letters on each line, on each page.

Counted the number of times each letter appeared in the Hebrew text.

Counted the number of times each letter appeared in the Hebrew text.

Just like the Talmudists, if any copy differed from the original even by one letter, the copy was destroyed. And because we know of these strict guidelines that these two groups used when copying the Bible, we can be sure that our texts aren’t far different from what God originally wrote down.

(Picture of a scribe)

Evidence #3 - The Quality & Quantity of Manuscripts

New Testament Manuscripts

In the chart on page 1, we noted that there are 5,686 Greek manuscripts that still exist. Look at how this number breaks down:

109 Papyri – (2nd - 4th centuries) Most of these were written on long papyrus scrolls (reeds that were glued together). They often were written in all caps, with no spaces between words and no punctuation.

301 Uncials – (4th - 10th centuries) These were written on parchment (animal skins), rather than papyrus and formed into a book. The book was called a codex. These were written in written in all caps, with no spaces or punctuation.

2,866 Minuscules – (10th century and later) These were written mostly on parchment and with a smaller, cursive Greek script, rather than with all caps.

2,410 Lectionaries – These manuscripts contain portions of Scripture not written in ordinary sequence, but written for reading in church services.

5,686 Total

These numbers are from a few years ago. I recently read that there are now over 5,800 manuscripts. So the number has been updated.

Compare this to some other works of antiquity:

(Chart from Daniel Wallace)

Famous New Testament Manuscripts

P52 –This is the oldest fragment that we have of the NT. It is dated around A.D. 140. It is only 3.4 inches tall and contains on one side, and 18:37-38 on the other. It is kept at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

(Slide)

Codex Aleph (Sinaiticus) – This codex was written sometime in the 4th century. It contains almost the entire New Testament and is written in beautiful uncial handwriting. It is currently in the British Library in London.

Codex W (Washingtonensis) This manuscript contains all four gospels and it is one of the few uncials in the United States (located at Freer Art Gallery of the Smithsonian, Washington DC)

Famous Old Testament Manuscripts

1. The Masoretic Text

This is the text recorded by the Masoretes. It is our standard Hebrew text that scholars use today, and it includes vowels and punctuation. Until 1947, their texts were the oldest existing Hebrew manuscripts, dated around A.D. 900. Although these manuscripts were helpful, they were written hundreds of years after the Old Testament was first recorded. How could we be sure that these were accurate?

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls

Then, in 1947 a young shepherd in the Qumran valley stumbled upon several large jars hidden in a cave, containing dozens of leather scrolls. Because the jars had been carefully sealed, the scrolls remained intact for nearly 1,900 years (They were evidently placed there in A.D. 68).

So why were the Dead Sea Scrolls so important? Because many of the manuscripts contained in the jars were portions of the Old Testament. The entire book of Isaiah was found among them, and it was dated back to 125 B.C.! When scholars compared the Isaiah text to the Masoretic text (written 1,000 years later), they found that the texts were 95% identical to each other.

(Show the video)

(Then show the Dead Sea Scrolls online)

Conclusion

God has preserved His Word as He promised.