I am sure that most of you at one time or another have played the “Telephone” game. In the game, a message is given to the first person in a line of people. They in turn are told to repeat the message to the next person in the line by whispering it into their ear. That person then repeats the message to the next person in line until it reaches the end of the line. Well, you guessed it by the time the last person in the line gets and repeats the message to the group, it becomes significantly different from the original message given to the first person in the line.
Sadly, since the Bible has been copied and re-copied many times over the last 3,000+ years, many contend, like the game “Telephone,” its message is quite different from the original message, and, therefore, can’t be trusted. However, as I have shared in a previous devotion called “Scribes” (dated: November 4, 2020), this amazing profession of skilled men, were ultra-meticulous in copying and passing down the sacred Scriptures from generation to generation.
Referring to the scribes, Christian theologian, Bernard Ramm, once said: “Jews preserved it as no other manuscript has ever been preserved. With their massora (counting methods) 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, massoretes. Whoever counted the letters and syllables and words of Plato or Aristotle? Cicero or Seneca?”1
And speaking of scribes, if they needed any vindication of the accuracy of their work, enter the Dead Sea Scrolls. For a detailed discussion of these amazing scrolls please see my devotion, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” (dated: March 22, 2021).
Basically, the Dead Sea Scrolls, are a group of ancient manuscripts, many of them biblical, that were accidentally discovered in 1947, in the Middle East. To give you an idea of the significance of these scrolls, just listen to how the Encyclopedia Britannica terms their recovery: “Taken together, these manuscript finds are without precedent in the history of modern archaeology.”2
As an example of one of these Dead Sea Scrolls, consider that one scroll contained the complete text of the Book of Isaiah in Hebrew; and was 23-feet-long. In order to determine the original date of the manuscript, the Isaiah scroll was both Carbon 14 dated in 1949, at the University of Chicago, and examined independently by a team of papyrologists. Both teams came to the same astounding conclusion that the Isaiah manuscript was copied around 100 B. C.
When we compare this 2,000-year-old document with any present day Bible, the significance of this discovery begins to come to light. When we compare each text, word for word, we find that they are virtually identical. Yes, there are tiny spelling variations, grammatical mistakes, and different arrangement of words, but these don’t change any essential doctrines. There can now be no doubt that the Old Testament you hold in your hands today is virtually identical to the ones used by Jesus and the other religious leaders of 2,000 years ago.
These findings should forever silence the critics who contend that the Bible has been rewritten so often as to be of little trustworthiness. So, can we trust the Bible we have today? I dare say that the Dead Sea Scrolls, coupled with the hundreds of other archaeological finds that have validated numerous biblical accounts, in my book, make the Bible a first rate book of history!
1 Bible History (worthyofpraise.org)
2 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th Edition (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1986), Volume III, p. 937.