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Was the Bible Copied Faithfully from One Generation to the Next?

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How much can we trust that the New Testament was not changed as it was copied by hand? In this video, I develop the classic argument for the reliable copying of the New Testament based on the latest manuscript numbers in the updated Evidence that Demands A Verdict.

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Tags archaeologybiblecopiedcopyevidencegospelshandwrittenmanuscriptsNew TestamentNumbersproofreliablescribetrustworthy
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17 Comments

  1. You have an original document dated the 3rd century that says 1. boar lion went beach good time. Then a later document from the 8th century says 2. A boar and lion went to the beach and had good time. A later document from the 15th century says 3. A boar and a lion went to the beach and both had a very good time. This is the line used in the 21st century. And then another document from the 19th century says 4. An eagle and a lion went to the forest and didn't have a good time. I would say 1-3 are still valid and since 3 is what's used to teach the current generation there's no overall problem there. If 4 was being taught in the 21st century then yes obviously there is a corruption and the teaching is wrong. But since it's 3 there's no need to really fuss about it.

  3. On March Forth (4th) 2001, God cast out 23 demons from me. Then told me His name is Yahweh. As the days rolled on He told me "the KJV is a tool of the adversary to hide His Name and the true name of His Son, our Messiah, Yahshua—not Jesus". He said to "use The Scriptures from ISR". Google it and buy from Amazon and if you cannot afford it I will send for free. Message me or leave reply. He has told me thousands of things over the years including "all religion is false". 20 years in and none of that has changed. Come out from the religious traditions and false demonnations.

    Fast and pray that you would be adopted into His Family, the true Kingdom family of Yahweh Elohim (God). Be willing to unlearn the lies Pastors have bound you with. We are NOT to learn from man but from Him through the Ruach Ha Kodesh, The Spirit of Truth, that separates truth from error and the profane from that which is set apart (holy).

  4. Huh? I didn't follow how first Sean says, "300,000-400,000 variations across the manuscripts." But then a minute or two later, "500,000 non-spelling variants in the Greek." How could the number grow even though the category narrowed? Did Sean misspeak the first time?

  5. When the false doctrine of the Trinity is preached, there is a RELIANCE on that heavily edited scripture. McDowell spins that around to justify editing the scripture. He says that the trinity doctrine is already proven and so this 'minor' editing just reinforces a known thing. [This was preempted by the claims that most edits are spelling and punctuation – setting the listener up for the deception]. You cant use a verse to 'prove' a doctrine and then say that it is appropriate that the verse was edited because it lines up with the doctrine it proved. A crime scene investigator would call that 'tempering with the evidence'. Study the following: Proverbs 30:6 "Do not add to His words, Or He will reprove you, and you will be proved a liar." Revelation 22:18-19. Deuteronomy 4:2 "You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it…" What I suggest you do is amalgamate your lecture on "Can all religions be true" with "can all translations be true."

  8. Enjoy your work and how you focus on defending the gospel in many areas of life in which we need biblical answers. However, really wondering why you haven't made any videos about racial prejudice and biblical justice? Did I miss that video? You can't turn on the news without seeing African-American lives being taken by people in authority (cops) on a daily to weekly basis! What would Jesus say and do and want Christians (especially white Christians like yourself) to say and do regarding this matter? Ps 139: 23 Let me know, if you posted a video on this topic or will post one.

  9. Thank you Sean my concern is about how many Christians blindly buy and read “The Passion Translation” a blasphemous book as the bible one guy wrote it and he changed so much of the bible adding and subtracting recklessly even the Gospel and the words of Jesus are changed to support his own false doctrine and many will use this to belittle the actual bible.

  12. As explained in the book I gave you last September (Chapter 4, Section 4.4):

    —Begin Excerpt—
    So, alright, the Gospel writers claim to be honest and back up their claims with the aforementioned embarrassing details. Fine, but how well-preserved are the accounts? Do we know what the originals said or do we not? Some people claim that the Gospels were written too late to be reliable. Irenaeus, on the other hand, who lived during the second century, quoted from 21 of the 27 New Testament texts. How could he have quoted from these Gospels if they weren’t written until 200 years later as people like Bart Ehrman often like to assert? Who did Irenaeus learn from? Ignatius and Polycarp, who in turn were taught directly by the apostle John. We have a fragment of John from the early Second Century — it’s called Rylands Library Papyrus P52, and it has been dated to AD 130. So, you may be thinking “well, that’s a pretty big time-gap!” Yeah, about that: there is another fragment, this time of the Gospel of Mark, that dates to before A.D. 90, and it was discovered by Craig Evans, professor of New Testament Studies at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. How, exactly, was this fragment of Mark discovered? By tearing down a mummy mask that was not from an Egyptian pharaoh but from a commoner, who didn’t have access to the kinds of materials that royal masks were made out of. Methods aside, this is only a 60-year time gap at most, which is within the lifetimes of most of the people who can purport to be eyewitnesses. Even if we didn’t have this early fragment of Mark, the Rylands Papyrus is still a time gap of between 50 and 100 years. Big gap, right? Not by ancient standards it isn’t. The time gap is only half the story. The other half of the story is how many manuscripts we have available — the more, the merrier, because with more available it becomes much easier to know what the original looked like. In the case of the New Testament, we have more than 24,000 copies or portions, along with a 50-year (give or take) time gap.

    I, therefore, have managed to devise the following formula in order to compare the veracity of the Bible with the veracity of just about every other ancient source in existence (this is copied from my own blog, from a post I wrote there back in 2016) where V is veracity, N1 = number of manuscripts for source 1, G1 = time gap for source 1, N2 = number of manuscripts for source 2, and G2 = time gap for source 2:

    V = (N1/G1)/(N2/G2)

    Apply that formula to Cicero, where the earliest manuscript dates to AD 400 and there are only 15 manuscripts available, and we have a situation in which the New Testament is (24000/50)/(15/400) = 480/0.0375 = 12,800 times more reliable than Cicero. Try to use Sallust and it gets even worse: we've got 20 manuscripts — slightly more than Cicero, sure — but the earliest manuscript is from — wait for it — the 10th century AD! We're talking a quadruple-digit time gap in Sallust's case, which would put Sallust at 1,000 years removed with only 20 manuscripts, which, for the record, is also a tie with Tacitus. This results in a situation in which the New Testament is (24000/50)/(20/1000) = 480/0.02 = 24,000 times more reliable than both Tacitus and Sallust, and this is based on the most conservative estimate possible. What about Caesar's own works, that he himself allegedly wrote? We've only got 10 manuscripts in that case and also a time gap of 1,000 years, making the case for the historicity of Jesus 48,000 times stronger than the case for the historicity of Caesar if self-published sources are preferred. Plato? Even worse: Try 1,200 years removed and only 7 manuscripts available, meaning that the New Testament is (24000/50)/(7/1200) = 82,285.712285… times better preserved than Plato. Thucydides? 1,300 years removed and only 8 manuscripts to choose from, meaning the New Testament is (24000/50)/(8/1300) = 78,000 times better preserved than Thucydides. Suetonius? 800 years removed, only 8 manuscripts to choose from, meaning that the New Testament is (24000/50)/(8/800) = 480/0.01 = also 48,000 times better preserved than Suetonius. Even the Iliad, which is already in second place to the Bible with regard to this test, only has 1,757 manuscripts available and a time gap of 500 years, making the New Testament (24000/50)/(1757/500) = 480/3.514 = about 136.59 times better preserved than the Iliad. So, does one affirm the historicity of Jesus, doubt the historicity of both Caesar and Jesus, or is he or she a hypocrite? Because these numbers are incriminating evidence that affirming the historicity of Caesar while at the same time doubting the historicity of Jesus is hypocrisy.

    Oh, but wait, how different are these 24K manuscripts from one to the next? Sure, the sheer number of these differences may be high, but 80% of them have to do with spelling and another 19% with grammar. Does spelling detract from meaning? No. Does grammar detract from meaning? No. Grammatical errors are extremely easy to read around. Only 1% of those differences are in any way more than one sentence long, and none of these have anything whatsoever to do with any core aspect of the story whatsoever. The ability to reconstruct the original in the case of the Bible is simply unparalleled compared to every other ancient source currently in existence.
    —End Excerpt—

    Ehrman commits the hasty generalization fallacy with the reasoning mentioned at 11:54 in this video.

  16. The BIBLE is the best documented Piece of literature in antiquity, and it is historically reliable, so reliable in fact that it knows people and event's that the historians didn't know about and are being confirmed by archeology. But because it calls for the change of the person reading it, many deny it, and call it fairy tale, Feel bad for those people