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Research

How we got the Bible

Scrolls, scribes, the Dead Sea discovery, the New Testament manuscripts, and the road from Hebrew and Greek to the King James Bible.

The Bible is sixty-six books, written by more than forty people over about fifteen hundred years, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. It claims one Author behind its many writers: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Timothy 3:16). This is the short history of how it reached us.

Copied by hand

None of the original manuscripts survive. They were written on papyrus and parchment, which wear out. For thousands of years every copy was written by hand, and Jewish scribes, later called the Masoretes, counted the letters and words of each book to catch mistakes. The oldest complete Hebrew Bibles we had for centuries were the Aleppo Codex (about AD 930) and the Leningrad Codex (AD 1008).

The oldest piece of Bible text ever found is much older: two tiny silver scrolls from Ketef Hinnom outside Jerusalem, from about 600 BC, carrying the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26, "The LORD bless thee, and keep thee."

The Dead Sea Scrolls

In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a cave near Qumran and heard pottery break. Over the next decade, eleven caves yielded tens of thousands of fragments from about 800 scrolls, written between the third century BC and AD 68, including every book of the Old Testament except Esther. The Great Isaiah Scroll, about a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex, matches it almost word for word. The differences are mostly spelling. Isaiah 53, "he was wounded for our transgressions", was copied there more than a century before Jesus was born.

The New Testament manuscripts

The New Testament was written roughly between AD 45 and 95. We have more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts and fragments, plus many thousands in other ancient languages. By comparison, Caesar's Gallic Wars survives in about ten early manuscripts. The oldest New Testament fragment, P52 (John 18), is usually dated to the early second century. Complete Bibles survive from about AD 350: Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.

Which books belong

As GotQuestions.org explains, God determined which books are Scripture; the church recognized them. Early Christians quoted the apostles' writings as Scripture from the start (Peter already ranks Paul's letters with "the other scriptures", 2 Peter 3:16). The church asked whether a book came from an apostle or someone close to one, whether it was accepted by the churches, whether it taught sound doctrine, and whether it bore the marks of God's Spirit. Athanasius listed exactly our 27 New Testament books in AD 367, and councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) affirmed them.

Into every language

One story

Jesus said the Scriptures "are they which testify of me" (John 5:39). On the road to Emmaus, "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). That is the thread through all sixty-six books.

Sources

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