The Realities of Bible Transmission

The Bible’s documents (the books of the Bible) were written a long time ago. How did the text of the Bible come down to us today? Here are some realities about the Bible’s transmission.

Reality #1: None of the original manuscripts of the Bible’s documents exist today. Nothing lasts forever, since everything decays over time. The Bible’s documents were written on materials that have already completely decayed a long time ago.

Reality #2: The Bible’s documents were transmitted by hand-copying. Before the printing press was invented, the only way to produce a physical copy of a document was to write it out by hand. Copyists made copies of the Bible’s documents for Christian communities around the world. However, these handwritten biblical copies also do not last forever, so these biblical copies had to be copied as well. Thus, the biblical copies that we have today are copies of copies of copies going back to the original documents. Effectively, each biblical copy is a Bible that was used by a Christian community.

Reality #3: There are differences among biblical copies. Copyists did not always copy their source texts exactly identically. This could have happened intentionally or unintentionally. As a result, there are differences among biblical copies in terms of letters, words, and even entire verses. The different readings among biblical copies are called “textual variants”.

Reality #4: Scholars have to reconstruct the original readings of the Bible’s documents. No one biblical copy alone is exactly identical to the original texts of the Bible’s documents. Rather, scholars have to determine what was most likely the original readings of each Bible passage by comparing all the biblical copies that are available to them.

These realities of textual transmission do not only apply to the Bible. Rather, they are true for every ancient document that was composed before the invention of the printing press. For every ancient document, scholars must reconstruct the original text by comparing all the available copies.

In the case of the Bible, biblical copies allow us to know the original text of the Bible’s documents to a high level of accuracy. This means that we can be confident that the Bible has been reliably transmitted to us!