Anytime that you start talking to unbelievers or skeptics about Scripture, you run the risk of hearing the argument “Well that was written so long ago, you can’t rely on it. Can you imagine how much it has changed over the years?”. Another argument would be “You can’t believe the Bible, it’s no different than the game of telephone” and we all know how that game works out. So then how do we answer these arguments, and not fall into the trap of starting to believe them ourselves?
As I said when I started this series, if God is God, He is capable of sustaining His Word, and making it say whatever He wants, but our human minds tend to want more evidence than that.
The funny thing about that is that Herodotus is considered the “Father of History”, he wrote what is called “The Histories”, however we don’t have a single complete original manuscript of his, all we have is 109 manuscripts of his that were copied over 1300 years after anything that he wrote. Yet those same people don’t seem to have a problem believing what he wrote. Then there is Flavius Josephus, a historian alive during the time of Jesus, and most of the copies of his writings still have a 1000-year gap, between them and their originals, while there are a few with only a 400–600-year gap. Again, their works don’t seem to be questioned even with that gap. That’s not to mention the works of Homer, Plato, and Caesar that people tend to accept with even less evidence.
While Herodotus had 109 manuscripts, Josephus only had 9 Greek surviving manuscripts of “The Jewish War”. Experts disagree on the surviving manuscripts of Plato, some believing as many as 210, while others would go as low as 7, while Caesar has 10 surviving manuscripts. So the idea of seven to 210 surviving manuscripts makes it fairly reliable, so when Homer has up to 1900 surviving manuscripts or fragments of the Iliad, it is considered highly reliable. The New Testament has over 5800 surviving manuscripts, almost triple anything else that is considered reliable, so I feel that it’s safe to say that the New Testament should be considered reliable – unless you have an ulterior agenda.
Being as those are historical documents, and the common thought process is that history is written by the victors, who is double checking their work? How important is accuracy? Is there an insistence for absolute perfection? Those are questions that really need to be asked. I still have a set of 1962 World Book Encyclopedias in my office that my parents-in-law had, simply because I wonder if history is being written differently today than it was in 1962.
When it comes to religious texts, if the person making the copies is truly a believer in their God, they would take every precaution to maintain the purity of what they believe to be God’s Word. There is a certain attention to detail and perfection that needs to be maintained, otherwise you are changing what God said. If you truly believe in God, you would want no part in changing anything that He said, ever.
The fact of the matter is, the Masoretes (Jewish scribes) had “over-zealous” rules for copying the Old Testament. They would count every single letter per page, and if the middle letter of the new copy didn’t match the middle letter of the original, they would destroy the whole scroll. They viewed their duty with such fear and accuracy, that they produced details in a way that no other book has ever received.
A hundred years ago, while there was less skepticism then, than there is today, they would spout the above arguments and also claim that Moses didn’t write the Torah, and that Isaiah didn’t write all of the book of Isaiah. They argued that it was all patched together after the fact of Jesus, so that it would all point to Him. They were of the belief that if the Hebrew scrolls were found, from the time of Jesus, that they would be completely different than what they had then.
In late 1946, or early 1947 all of that changed. A young shepherd boy named Muhammed edh-Dhib was looking for his lost goat. He threw a rock into an opening in an attempt to scare the animal out, but what he heard was the sound of pottery breaking. As he explored it a little more, he found several large clay jars. While most of them were empty there was one that contained three leather scrolls wrapped in linen.
He ended up finding 7 scrolls in that cave and took them to the market in Bethlehem and sold them to an antique dealer named Kando for little to nothing. Kando sold four scrolls to Mar Samuel, the Archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church, and three to Professor Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University. Oddly enough, Mar Samuel put an ad in the Wall Street Journal in 1954 to sell his scrolls and they were bought for $250,000 (That would be over 3 million today) by the State of Israel.
Once word got out that they were actually ancient manuscripts, a massive search began. Of course, we know them today as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and between 1947 and 1956, there were over 11 caves found in that area, and fragments of over 930 different scrolls were found. When compared to the Old Testament, there was part of every Old Testament book with the exception of Esther. (Some argue Nehemiah, but being as Nehemiah and Ezra are written as one book most say that book was represented) While the total percentage of the Old Testament found may only add up to 20-25%, it was enough to clarify a lot of details. The “Great Isaiah Scroll” was found 100% intact, on a single 24-foot scroll and it was almost identical to what we have today. The argument that it would likely be completely different was obviously proven false, and the “Telephone Game” theory was clearly disproven. The “Great Isaiah Scroll” was over 95% identical to the text that we translated our Bibles from, yet there was a 1000-year gap between the two. The remaining 5% were variations in spelling, similar to how we might see “color” vs “colour”, but absolutely nothing that would have changed inspiration or the theology of the text.
You almost have to wonder when they were piecing together that “Great Isaiah Scroll” if they saw the irony of
Isaiah 40:8
8 The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.
While the Dead Sea Scrolls encompassed more than just the Old Testament, there were also church bylaws, and prayers, along with Apocryphal/Pseudepigraphal books (books popular at the time but not considered canon, such as 1 Enoch or Jubilees). They are still piecing them together, with much more sophisticated technology, and are discovering new words every day. It’s hard to tell what may be yet to come, but I have no doubt that God will reveal what He wants, when He wants.
We need to always remember what He told us through
Isaiah 46:8-10
8 “Remember this and stand firm,
recall it to mind, you transgressors,
9 remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me,
10 declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose,’
Thank you for reading this, as always, I would encourage you to spend time in His Word, in prayer and in the fellowship of other believers. And if you haven’t visited already, I would encourage you to come visit our little church on the hill, it’s worth the drive.
Bro. Jason
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