Now, how can we be sure that we have what he wrote? As we have noted, no original documents for any ancient book exist today. Imagine storing newspaper in the elements for a year, much less a century or millennium. In addition, there was no way to distribute the biblical writings apart from hand copying. In the era before movable printing, scribes were the first publishers. How do we know that they copied the Bible accurately?

"Textual critics" are scholars who devote themselves to studying copies of ancient literature, seeking to develop a version that is as close to the original as possible. Textual critics work with the manuscripts of Shakespeare, for instance, debating which passages came from the playwright himself, which to attribute to Christopher Marlowe, and so on. Scholars study the copies of works by Plato and Aristotle, seeking to determine which is closest to the originals.

Textual critics do the same hard, crucial work with the Scriptures. They may or may not be people of faith. Their work is scientific and precise, not guided by personal spiritual presuppositions. We can trust their conclusions as the product of objective scholarship.

Textual criticism works best when two circumstances prevail: numerous ancient copies, as close in time to the original writings as possible. The fewer the ancient copies, the less material the scholars have to use. The larger the gap between the original and our earliest copies, the greater margin for undiscoverable error in transmission.

What copies of famous ancient literature do we possess today? Caesar's Gallic Wars was composed between 58 and 50 B.C. Our oldest copies of it were made 900 years later; we have only nine or ten good manuscripts. As a result, we have no independent verification for much of Caesar's descriptions except the book itself. And historians debate the degree to which we can trust the copies we possess.

Tacitus was the most famous historian of ancient Rome. His descriptions of first-century life in the Empire are considered the most authoritative histories we have. However, of the 14 books of his Histories, only four and one-half survive today. Our earliest copies were made 900 years after the originals.

The History of Thucydides was written around 400 B.C. Our earliest complete manuscript dates to 1,300 years later. We have only five or so copies of any work of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the earliest of which was made 1,400 years after the originals.

By contrast, our oldest complete New Testament was made just 300 years after the original. The Chester Beatty papyrus contains a section from John 18, and dates to A.D. 130 (just 35 or so years after John's original). We have thousands of other parts of the New Testament in papyrus sections. and the letters of first- and second-century Christians. In fact, we can reconstruct most of the New Testament just from these ancient letters.

No other ancient book comes close to the Bible with regard to the number and quality of manuscript copies in existence today. The sheer weight of evidence is strongly in favor of biblical trustworthiness and authority.

Historians possess more than 5,000 various Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and more than 10,000 copies in other ancient languages. They classify these copies by age and writing materials, and whether they used upper or lower case letters. They also group manuscripts by the geographic centers where they were produced--Alexandria, Egypt; Caesarea in Palestine; Antioch of Syria; Constantinople; and Rome.

Textual critics consider a number of factors in determining which manuscripts are oldest and closest to the originals. They examine the chronological appearance of the document--its apparent age and the period when it first came into use. They investigate the geographical circulation of the manuscript, the extent of its usage, and the number of times the document was copied, on the assumption that the more widely accepted the document, the more likely it was considered reliable by its audience. They look for agreement between the manuscript and quotations found in the church fathers.

And they investigate the historical "genealogy" of the manuscript's textual tradition. Scholars know that documents originating in Alexandria, for instance, possess certain advantages and flaws. Each geographic center manifests its own techniques and characteristics in copying and transmission.

Much of the work of textual critics consists in identifying the presence of scribal, editorial, and/or translator errors. Scholars have identified four kinds of unintentional errors as most common, and watch for them with special interest.

Some mistakes arose from faulty eyesight--failing to distinguish between similar letters and similar errors. For instance, the Hebrew "y" (yodh) looks much like the "w' (waw). And the Greek capital letters for epsilon (made as a rounded E) and theta (an oval with a line in the middle) are very similar when handwritten.

"Haplography" occurred when a scribe wrote once what should have been written twice (like "occurence" for "occurrence" or "maping" for "mapping" in English). "Dittography" occurred when the scribe wrote twice what should be written only once. And "metathesis" resulted from changing the proper order of letters or words.

A second kind of error resulted from faulty hearing, when the scribe made copies from dictation or even pronounced the words to himself as he wrote them. "Homophony" occurred when the scribe wrote a wrong word which sounded the same as the correct term (like "two" for "to" in English).

A third category of scribal mistakes was errors of the mind. The scribe held a phrase in his memory as he copied it, and sometimes transposed or missed letters or words as a result. Mistakes of this type fall into several categories:

1. "Metatheis," when the scribe changed the proper order of letters or words.
2. "Fusion," combining the last letter of a word with the first letter of the following word, or combining two words into one.
3. "Fission," the improper separation of one word into two.
4. "Homoeoteleuton"--when a phrase ends in a certain way, a scribe can miss that which follows if the concluding phrase also ends in the same way. When the scribe looked from the original to the copy he was writing, then looked back to the original, his eyes could easily fall on the latter ending and miss that which came in between.
5. "Homoearkton"--the loss of intervening words if two phrases begin in the same way.

A fourth kind of unintentional error resulted from mistakes in scribal judgment. Words and notes made in the margin of the older copy were sometimes incorporated into the text of the new manuscript. Scribes would occasionally copy across two columns of a text, rather than working down the passage a column at a time.

At times, scribes tried to "clean up" the text before them by making deliberate changes to the manuscript at hand. If a scribe felt the style of his text could be improved, he would sometimes make grammatical "corrections." Parallel texts in the gospels were often harmonized to agree completely with each other. New Testament quotes of Old Testament texts were "improved" to conform to the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament).

"Conflation" was a common problem. When a scribe worked from two or more manuscripts and found variant readings, he would sometimes include both in his copy. And some scribes added doctrinal statements according to their convictions. For instance, one amended Luke's statement, "It seemed good also to me to write an orderly account" (Lk. 1:3) to read, "It seemed good also to me and to the Holy Spirit" (following Acts 15:28, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us … ").

We should expect such errors to creep into the handwritten copies of any ancient book. And the more copies we have, the more likely it is that we will find such errors. Watching for such common mistakes is the first step to finding them in a particular text. Then scholars are able to correct these mistakes, developing a text which is as close to the original as possible.

How do textual critics do this work? They follow certain established rules. Here is the procedure for the Old Testament suggested by Ernst Wurthwein and followed widely by scholars:

• When the Masoretic Text (MT, the most reliable OT text) has been preserved without a variant, and there are no other manuscripts which differ, we must accept the reading as proper.
• When the MT and other manuscripts support different readings, the MT is to be preferred wherever appropriate.
• When the MT and other manuscripts support different but apparently equally possible or plausible readings, determine which reading is more difficult (see below) or most likely explains the other versions.
• Pay close attention to psychological and/or theological reasons why a particular scribe or school might preserve the text in a particular way.
• When no clear conclusion can be made based on manuscript evidence, suggest a conjectural solution which seems closest to the authorial intention of the text.

In describing the work of New Testament textual criticism, Bruce Metzger outlines the procedures typically followed. First, consider external evidence. How old is the document? What type does it embody? Next, examine the text itself. In general, when variances occur we are to prefer the more difficult reading. We assume that the scribe would more likely resolve apparent contradictions within the text. For instance, when we find two versions of a text within Matthew's Gospel, one of which seems less likely to come from Matthew's pen, we should assume that it did.

We are to prefer the shorter reading to the longer, assuming that the scribes would more likely add explanatory phrases than omit portions of the text. We will assume that a version which harmonizes parallel accounts is more likely the product of scribal changes than one which is distinct from the other versions.

In addition, we are to consider:

• The style and vocabulary of the author throughout his work.
• The immediate context.
• Harmony with the usage of the author elsewhere, and in the Gospels.
• The Aramaic background of Jesus' teaching.
• The priority of the Gospel according to Mark (probably the first to be written).
• The influence of the Christian community upon the formulation and transmission of the passage in question.

With these rules in place, textual critics go about the painstaking task of comparing the multiplied thousands of ancient copies of Scripture. And the result: we have a Bible which is trustworthy in every matter of faith and practice.

As a case in point, consider the Dead Sea Scrolls. Prior to their discovery in the caves at Qumran, the oldest complete copy of the Old Testament known to scholars dated to the tenth century. When a shepherd looking for a lost sheep found the first of the scrolls in 1947, the most dramatic discovery in the history of biblical archaeology and manuscripts resulted. We now possess Old Testament manuscripts dating back to the first century before Christ. The Scrolls contain every book of the Old Testament except Esther. They take us a thousand years closer to the originals.

How close was the Masoretic Text to these documents? In other words, how accurate were the scribes who copied the text for a thousand years? The results are amazing. There is word-for-word accuracy in more than 95 percent of the texts. The variations which remain are the results of obvious scribal errors. For instance, translators of the Revised Standard Version made only 13 changes from the Masoretic Text for Isaiah, none affecting faith and practice.

It is clear that the scribes who transmitted the Bible across the centuries before printing was available did their work with astounding accuracy. Their work, while not perfect, was far closer than the manuscript copyists for any other ancient book. With the help of textual scholars, we today possess an Old Testament which is virtually identical to the originals. And the Greek New Testament we have today is likewise accurate and trustworthy.