Apologetics
Can You Actually Trust the Bible?
More manuscripts than any ancient text. By a lot. Here's why scholars take it seriously.
People to say the Bible has been "translated so many times it's basically a game of telephone." Sounds smart. It's also completely wrong.
Here's what actually happened — and it's way more interesting than the conspiracy theories.
📜 The Manuscript Evidence Is Absurd
The New Testament has roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands more in other ancient languages. That's not a typo. Almost 25,000 manuscript copies.
For comparison:
- Homer's Iliad: ~1,900 copies
- Plato's works: ~210 copies
- Gallic Wars: ~10 copies
Nobody questions whether we know what Plato wrote. The Bible has over 100x more manuscript evidence.
⏰ The Time Gap Is Tiny
The earliest New Testament fragment (P52, a piece of ) dates to around 125 AD — roughly 30 years after the original was written. Most ancient texts have gaps of 500-1,000 years between the original and the earliest copy.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, pushed our earliest Old Testament manuscripts back by 1,000 years — and showed that the text had been transmitted with insane accuracy. 53 in the Dead Sea Scrolls is virtually identical to what's in your Bible right now.
🔍 What About the Differences?
Yes, there are textual variants — roughly 400,000 across all manuscripts. That number sounds scary until you realize 99% of them are spelling differences, word order changes, or obvious scribal errors. None of them affect any core Christian doctrine.
Textual critics (scholars who study manuscript transmission) can reconstruct the original text with over 99% accuracy. That's not a claim — that's what secular scholars like Bart Ehrman acknowledge.
📰 The Authors Were Journalists, Not Mythmakers
literally opens his Gospel by saying he "carefully investigated everything from the beginning" and wrote "an orderly account." That's not mythology language. That's journalism language.
, writing in (dated to ~55 AD, just 20 years after ), listed specific witnesses to the and said most of them were still alive — essentially saying "go ask them yourself."
Myths don't develop in 20 years while eyewitnesses are still around to fact-check them.
The Bottom Line
The Bible isn't a book that fell from the sky. It's a collection of documents written by real people, preserved through a transmission process that scholars can verify, with more manuscript evidence than any other ancient text.
You don't have to check your brain at the door. The receipts are there.