Is the Bible Reliable? How We Got the Bible, Explained for Teens

Two questions that get mixed up

People who ask whether the Bible is reliable are often asking two different things. One is historical and textual: do we have what the authors wrote, or has it been changed beyond recognition over the centuries? The other is about truth and authority: even if the text has survived, should we believe what it says? Evidence can speak to the first question, and it is worth taking seriously. The second is not settled by manuscript counts alone, and honest Christians say so.

This article is mainly about the first. It tries to say plainly what we know and where scholars disagree, because a defence that hides the awkward details tends to collapse the first time someone mentions them.

A library, not a single book

The Protestant Bible has sixty-six books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New. About forty people wrote them over roughly fifteen centuries, in three languages: Hebrew for most of the Old Testament, a little Aramaic, and Greek for the New. They include history, law, poetry, letters and biographies of Jesus. That variety is one reason the question of reliability cannot be answered in a single sentence. The case for Isaiah is not the same as the case for Luke.

The New Testament: a lot of copies, close to the events

More than five thousand Greek manuscripts of all or part of the New Testament survive, and the count rises to many thousands more if early translations into Latin, Syriac and Coptic are included. For comparison, most works of classical writers survive in a few dozen copies at best, and the oldest are often eight or nine hundred years younger than the author. The oldest New Testament fragment most scholars point to is a scrap of John 18 known as P52, usually dated to the first half of the second century, within a few decades of when John is thought to have been written.

That does not prove the New Testament is true. It does mean the text has not been lost or invented late. Scholars working on the text, including ones who are sceptical of Christianity, generally agree that we can recover the wording of the original in the great majority of places.

The Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Before 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew copies of the Old Testament dated to around the tenth century AD. Then shepherds found scrolls in caves near Qumran, by the Dead Sea, and over the next decade many more were discovered. They included a large copy of Isaiah that dates to roughly 125 BC, more than a thousand years older than the medieval text scholars had been using. When the two were compared, they proved to be remarkably close. The differences are mainly spelling and small copying slips, and not changes in the message. Many of the scrolls can now be viewed online through the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.

There is also a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, made in the third and second centuries BC. In places it preserves readings that differ from the medieval Hebrew, and some of those readings now turn up in the Qumran scrolls. That tells us the text was copied carefully but not always identically, and it explains some footnotes in your Bible.

What about the differences?

There are differences among manuscripts, several hundred thousand of them if you count every variation across every surviving copy. Most are trivial: a different spelling of a name, a changed word order that does not alter the meaning, a word dropped by a tired scribe. A small number matter for meaning, and responsible Bibles mark them.

Two famous examples are the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9-20) and the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53 to 8:11). Neither appears in the oldest manuscripts of those books, and most modern translations place them in brackets or add a note. A reader who knows this is less likely to be thrown when a friend raises it. No central Christian teaching rests on a disputed verse, and every doctrine in these passages is taught elsewhere in the Bible.

• Most variants are spelling and word order, and do not change the meaning.
• A few are real, and translations say so in footnotes.
• Scholars use all the manuscripts together to work out the earliest wording, which is why different editions of the Greek New Testament agree on nearly everything.

Who decided which books are in?

A popular claim is that the emperor Constantine, or the council at Nicaea in AD 325, chose the books of the Bible. That is not what happened. Nicaea dealt with the question of who Jesus is and did not discuss the canon. The books of the New Testament were being read as scripture in churches long before, and recognition grew gradually. The earliest known list that matches our twenty-seven books exactly is in a letter by Athanasius of Alexandria in AD 367, and regional councils in the 390s confirmed the same list. They were recognising a collection that churches were already using, which is a different thing from creating one.

The Old Testament canon was recognised by the Jewish community. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles also include several additional books, such as Tobit and Wisdom, which Protestants call the Apocrypha. That is a genuine difference among Christians, and it is worth knowing about when you pick up a Bible in a bookshop.

What archaeology can and cannot show

Archaeology has confirmed a number of details in the Bible. The Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, mentioned in John 9, was uncovered in 2004. The Tel Dan inscription, from the ninth century BC, refers to the "house of David," the earliest mention outside the Bible of David's dynasty. These are helpful because they show the text is rooted in real places and events.

Archaeology cannot prove that Jesus rose from the dead, or that God spoke to Moses. Those claims are not the sort of thing a trowel settles. What it can do is show whether the setting the Bible describes is credible, and on that point the evidence is generally supportive, with some debates, such as the dating of the conquest of Canaan, still open among scholars.

Reliability and faith

Having a reliable text is not the same as being persuaded by it. Many people find the New Testament's claims about Jesus compelling because of what he says and does, and because the writers kept recording details that were awkward for them, such as the disciples running away and women being the first witnesses of the resurrection. Others read the same pages and are not convinced. Neither group has to pretend the manuscripts are better or worse than they are.

If you want to test this yourself, read one Gospel carefully, as described in our post on how to read the Bible, and keep a note of the questions it raises. Questions are not the enemy of faith. In the Bible, people who ask them, from Job to Thomas, are generally taken seriously.