What should our stance be when we consider that fallible men have down through the centuries been the vehicles that God has used to make copies from his original autographs? I wholeheartedly concur with Roger Nicole that we should rejoice! For he states in his essay, “Yet the very great concurrence of the manuscripts of the Bible gives us strong warrant to rejoice in the assurance that God has safeguarded for us a text which is in substantial conformity with what was originally given.”1 While it is clear that there are variants among the copies, we know that the vast majority are very minor, such as spelling, inverted word order, and the like. Nicole goes on to share what I believe is a powerful statement when he says, “But in the overwhelming preponderance of cases even the variants that we do have do not impinge on the message of the Scripture, and thus the frailties of man in the process of transmission have not deprived us of the divine authority we need in faith and practice.”2
In addition, I think it is important to understand that the scribes, who did the copying, were a very special class of people. Consider what Baptist theologian and apologist, Bernard Ramm, had to say about them: “Jews preserved it as no other manuscript has ever been preserved … They kept tabs on every letter, syllable, word, and paragraph. They had special classes of men within their culture whose sole duty was to preserve and transmit these documents with practically perfect fidelity-scribes, lawyers, masoretes. Whoever counted the letters and syllables and words of Plato or Aristotle? Cicero or Seneca?”3
I think that those who are quick to say that while the original autographs may have been inerrant, clearly variants show that the copies are not, miss the point. While we are quick to accept as historically accurate other ancient documents, with far less fidelity than the Scriptures, the Bible seems to be placed under a different standard.
When we consider the implications of the Dead Sea scrolls my confidence in the copies of the Scriptures grows even greater. For example, one of these scrolls was a 23-foot-long one, which contained the complete text of the Book of Isaiah in Hebrew. Not only was it dated through both Carbon 14 dating and the meticulous work of independent papyrologists at 100 B.C., but it is virtually identical with the Hebrew texts we have today. I don’t know about you but the more I begin to understand that the copies we have today are no ordinary copies I get excited. Coupled with the fact that Jesus relied on copies of the Old Testament and felt comfortable enough to hold them as divinely inspired, I rejoice and feel supremely confident in their veracity.
1 John MacArthur, ed., The Scripture Cannot Be Broken: Twentieth Century Writings on the Doctrine of Inerrancy, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), p. 297
2 John MacArthur, ed., The Scripture Cannot Be Broken: Twentieth Century Writings on the Doctrine of Inerrancy, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), pp. 297-298