The Bible is Reliable
Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, author and contributor to over three dozen books among which is the Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament, a standard intermediate Greek grammar that is widely used in colleges and seminaries, shares the following about the reliability of the biblical manuscripts from which we derive the New Testament.
People ask, “Are the manuscripts trustworthy in the sense that they are trustworthy witnesses to what the original text actually said?” And I can say, “Absolutely. Yes, we have an extraordinarily reliable Bible.” The Bible we have in our hands today is, in all essential respects, what was written in the first century by the apostles and their associates—and long before that by the prophets and others. Not a single cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith is jeopardized by any viable textual variant, and that’s important for Christians to know.
The way of salvation is clear. We know that the Bible teaches unequivocally that Jesus died on a Roman cross right outside of Jerusalem, that he was raised from the dead bodily, that he is, in fact, the God-man who saves us from our sins, and that when we put our faith in him, we are, in fact, saved. These primary doctrines, essential truths of the Christian faith, are simply not tampered with by textual variants.
It’s also important to understand what we mean when we talk about “textual variants.” A textual variant is any place in which at least two manuscripts disagree on the wording of a passage. When we say at least two manuscripts, we could have a thousand manuscripts on one side that all say the same thing and only one, maybe from the fifteenth century, that has one letter difference. That’s a textual variant. If we count the number of such differences, that gives us the number of textual variants. These differences have largely to do with the wording, the word order, spelling differences— this kind of a thing. The vast majority of our textual variants can’t even be translated because they’re so trivial.
For people who want to pursue the truth about the Bible, and especially if they wish to do so in order to defend their faith, I have five suggestions...
I’d encourage you to read the entire article here and consider his “five suggestions.”
We are uniquely blessed as believers to have such a reliable “word of truth” given and preserved by the Lord for us to hear, read, study, memorize, meditate, and proclaim to others and apply to our lives.
Pastor Jeff