Part 3: The Fulfillment of God's Promise to Preserve His Word.

We accept our modern Bible as being an accurate record of God’s word because of our faith in God’s power and His promises to preserve His word. The actual fulfillment of these promises regarding the New Testament, however, had to occur after the New Testament was completed.

By examining ancient copies of the Scriptures, we can appreciate how thoroughly God has fulfilled His promise to preserve His word.

A. Modern Evidence for the Original Text of Scripture

We today do not have any of the “autographs” — the original manuscripts of the Bible in the very hand-writing of the authors. But as mentioned earlier, men carefully copied, quoted, circulated, and translated God’s word through the years. As a result, we today have volumes of evidence to establish what the original texts said.

1. We have more than 4500 hand-written copies of the Bible in the original languages.

Some of these manuscripts are complete, others are partial or fragments. Some of them are dated to within a few centuries of the time of the New Testament writers, and a few are dated to within a few decades of their time.

2. We have many ancient translations of the Bible into other languages.

3. We have thousands of Scripture quotations found in ancient non-inspired writings.

In fact, all but a few verses of the New Testament could be reproduced just from these uninspired quotations.

Compared to the writings of other ancient authors, our evidence for the Bible’s content is overwhelming. For other writings, “convincing evidence” may consist of just a few manuscripts dated less than 1000 years from when the men lived. But with the Bible we have thousands of manuscripts dated less than 1000 years from when Jesus lived, and many manuscripts dated within just a few centuries.

These manuscripts were copied by men such as the “Scribes” of Jesus’ day, who were fanatically precise in their work. They checked their work by counting number of letters and words per line, per page, etc. No errors were tolerated. Remember that Jesus often disagreed with these men about their explanations of the Scriptures, but He never criticized the accuracy of their copies of the Scriptures.