How Accurate is the Bible?

On my church home web site, under the Beliefs and style heading the first thing one will read is this statement; "We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God and inerrant in the original writings." The phrase, "in the original writings" does not imply that the book that we have in our laps on Sunday mornings is not an inspired and inerrant Bible. I certainly believe that I do. Whether one uses the Nestle-Aland text or the majority text or whatever, we have in the Greek texts, an accurate record of God's holy Word. The same statement can be confidently made about the original Hebrew writings.

The fact of the matter is, however, we do not have the original writings. The truth is, we have thousands of copies of the original manuscripts, and no two of them are reportedly the same. Even those people who tout the Textus Receptus should be able to admit that there are no two manuscript copies that are exactly alike. After all, there were other English translations made before the 1611 KJV came out.

So does this mean that the original writings are not so inerrant, and not so dependable? Not at all. What kind of differences are we talking about? We are talking about differences which have no real affect on the dependability of Scriptures at all. For example, let's pretend that we have three manuscript copies of the 1st chapter of 1st Corinthians, and we compare verse 3. The verse in my Bible reads: Grace to you and peace for God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The first of the two copies might read, "From God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, grace and peace to you." The second manuscript may read exactly the way it does in my Bible or it might read, "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Christ Jesus."

There may be slightly different wording, but the verses all say the same thing. Scripture assures us that God's inspired Word is pure, and that it will stay that way. I believe that applies to translations produced since the originals were written, but the originals were what was truly inspired and inerrant. I like the King James version Bible, along with other versions as well, but if I were to think that the KJV was the only truly preserved and inspired Word of God I would be mistaken. The godly men who translated it were fallen men. They may have been godly men, but they were human copyists. I cannot give to them the same kind of credibility that I can to the actual inspiration of the human authors, receiving from God, as they wrote the original Scriptures themselves.

Actually, the variations in the manuscript, according to textual critics is somewhere down around 1%, and these guys have spent centuries comparing these thousands of texts, and that 1% is pretty much nil in its affect on meaning. We can have confidence that our Bible is ridiculously accurate, because none of the minute variations involve any major doctrine. We should be grateful to God for textual scholars and the kind of work they put in on making the labor-intensive comparisons that they do to give us Bibles as close as they can to the original. I believe that these people are given their particular gifts from God and that He uses them in His providential wisdom to preserve the uniqueness of His Word.