TEXT OF THE BIBLE

The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew (with certain minor portions in Aramaic), while the New Testament was penned in Koine Greek. None of the original documents (called autographs) of either Testament is extant today -- and for good reason. Likely men would worship them as idols if they were accessible. What scholars have done, therefore, is to gather the available ancient evidence, and from this evidence construct a Hebrew text and a Greek text from which modern translations derive. (a) There are tens of thousands of manuscripts (whole or fragments) of the Hebrew O.T. Some of the most valuable are the Dead Sea Scrolls, representing parts of all O.T. books except Esther. The discovery of those texts in 1947 pushed our knowledge of the O.T. back about 1,000 years earlier than the evidence previously possessed. This fabulous find demonstrated the amazing accuracy of the scribal copying process of the O.T. manuscripts across the centuries. By a comparison of the available data, noted scholar Robert D. Wilson confidently argued, on the basis of ancient manuscripts, versions, and secular inscriptions, that one may be "scientifically certain" that the modern text of the O.T. is "substantially the same text" as that "written by the original composers of the Old Testament documents." (b) The restoration of the Greek text of the N.T. is even more impressive. The evidence consists of three main categories. There are more than 5,300 Greek manuscripts, some fragments of which extend back to the second century A.D. This body of evidence is much more substantial than what exists for the Greek classics. There are literally thousands of ancient versions (translations of the N.T. into languages other than Greek), and some of these are quite ancient. This is remarkable since the ancients rarely translated documents from one tongue to another. Too, there are thousands of quotations from the N.T. in the writings of the early "church fathers" (of the first two centuries of Christian history). Virtually all of the N.T. could be reproduced from these documents alone. From these various sources, the science of "textual criticism" has constructed Greek texts upon which our present translations are based. All of this evidence provides a solid foundation for confidence in the integrity of the English Bible. See also TRANSLATION.