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Have you ever played a game of Chinese Whispers? This is the game where a number of people stand together in one line. A person whispers some passing information to the person next to him who then continue to pass this information to the next person and so on. At the end of the line, the information is usually distorted or changed into something completely different. It is not uncommon for some people to view the Bible as a game of Chinese whispers. Since the information is passed down through so many generations, how is it that the bible is not corrupted?

If that is the way the bible is passed down through generations, this would indeed be a valid criticism. But in reality, this scenario is a poor analogy of how the scriptures is passed down.

Supposed now, that in this game of Chinese whispers, instead of whispering to one another, each person writes the message down on a piece of paper, then passes the paper with the written information to the next person, who then duplicates the written information. Would the preservation of information be better than the previous game which involved only verbal messages? Certainly! Now let us assume, that not only is there one line of people translating this message, but there are thousand of individual lines each copying the same message on a piece of paper and passing it down their own lines. At the end of the game, would we be able to sort out any minor discrepancies and figure out what the original message was based on the thousands of different outcomes? Very certainly!

Let me give you an example. Suppose we have these results at the end of a few lines.
Line 1: all flesh died that moved on the earth
Line 2: all flesh died hat moved on the arth
Line 3: alz flesh died that moved on the earth
line 4: all flesh died that moved on the earth

Would we be able to decide what the original message was? Most certainly. We would know that in this case, the original message would have been ‘all flesh died that moved on the earth’. But let us take this step even further. Supposed that each person at any point in the line can see what every person before him had written before writing his original message. E.g. person number 5 sees what the first 4 persons have written, and then correct any typological errors, and write out his fifth sentence. Person 6 sees what the first 5 have written and then correct any typological errors that may be present. This goes down all the way the line until the final person. What are the chances that there would be mistakes at the end of the line? The answer? Almost nothing. In this case scenario, it does not matter how many times the message is passed down as long as at each stage of the line, the one writing has access to all written materials by those before him. There is essentially no difference from copying from the very original manuscript.

Likewise, the bible has been handed down from many generations. Not only does the scriptures itself guarantee that as the Word of God it cannot be changed, but outside the bible, there is so much manuscript support that it is not possible for errors to slip through into our bibles.

From archaeological records, we have ~25,000 partial and complete manuscripts of the New Testament which are open for examination. We also have ~86,000 quotations from the early church fathers, which in totality, have quoted every passage in the bible. On top of that, we have a few thousand lectionaries (Church service books containing scripture quotations) from the early church. The manuscript evidence for the preservation of the scriptures is astonishing! We have manuscripts dating to the first century, when the writers of the scriptures and their contemporaries were themselves alive and would have corrected if anyone had copied their works wrongly. Secondly, like the example of the modified Chinese Whispers where each person gets to look through all the previous copies of earlier writers, it is not difficult to work out what the original text is when we have access to all these earlier manuscripts all the way back to the time of its writing. Any variance in manuscripts are easily sorted out. 99 percent of the vast amount of manuscripts we have are identical. The 1-2% that contain these minor variance (e.g. Jesus Christ and Christ Jesus) do not in any way change any doctrinal teachings. The vast number of manuscripts we have testify to the accuracy of our modern translations and we can be certain that the bible is the same now as it was originally. Modern translations are always translated from these ancient manuscripts.

The degree of accuracy for the bible far surpasses any other ancient text we have. For example, with secular ancient manuscripts, the closest we have from the time of writing to the first copy we have is almost a thousand years. With the bible, we have writings that date from the very lifetime of the original writers. With secular ancient manuscripts, we only have a small handful of writings, whereas for the bible, we have tens upon thousands of manuscript support.

On top of these, the scribes who copied the scriptures were professional copiers of the bible who spent their whole life copying scriptures. They would measure and count every word, letter and syllabus to ensure accuracy and preservation of the text.

Last but not least, the bible itself guarantees that as the Word of God, “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished”(Matt 5:18). This verse promises supernatural preservation of the scriptural passages – especially important since if it did not claim to be inerrant and infallible, there would be no need to even consider the validity of scriptures.

Further Reading:

http://www.tektonics.org/lp/nttextcrit.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/Manuscript.html

http://debate.org.uk/topics/history/bib-qur/bibmanu.htm