Each And Every Word

We must not think of "inspiration" the way the world thinks when it says, "Shakespeare was certainly an inspired writer." What we mean by biblical inspiration is the supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit on the Bible's writers, which guaranteed that what they wrote was accurate and trustworthy. Revelation means the communicating of truth to man by God; inspiration has to do with the recording of this communication in a way that is dependable.

In short, God put the thoughts into these men, and used them to write the Scriptures, all the while watching over them to allow their own particular style of writing while not going any farther or falling short of what God intended.

But how can we prove that the Bible is really the Word of God? In short, there are four areas of examination:

A) Manuscript Evidence

1. The number of existing manuscripts

There are more than 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, over 10,000 in Latin and over 9,300 other early versions totaling 24,000+ manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today, ranking it first in manuscript evidence.

The Iliad, by Homer, is second ... with 643 surviving manuscripts.

2. The dating of the manuscripts

The New Testament autographs date to between 40 100 A.D. Until 1995, the earliest extant manuscripts dated to the fourth century (a 250 300 year difference). Norman Geisha states that the average gap between an original composition and the earliest available copy is over 1,000 years for other works of antiquity.

3. Variant readings

Through the proper application of textual criticism, comparing all the available manuscripts with one another, we are able to confidently reconstruct the original reading. Let's briefly compare numbers on variant readings. The New Testament contains approximately 20,000 lines, of which 40 lines are in question. This equals .5% (one half of one percent).

The Iliad contains approximately 15,600 lines, of which 764 lines are in question. This equals five percent. That's ten times more variants than the New Testament in a document which is only three-quarters its length. The sheer number of extant NT manuscripts we possess narrows tremendously the margin of doubt on the correct reading of the original documents (known as autographs).

Of the 0.5% of the New Testament variant readings, only one eighth of those amount to anything more than a stylistic difference or misspelling.

An example of a fairly typical variant reading:

MSS. 1 Jesus Christ is the Savior of the whole worl.

MSS. 2 Christ Jesus is the Savior of the whole world.

MSS. 3 Jesus Christ s the Savior of the whold world.

MSS. 4 Jesus Christ is th Savior of the whle world.

MSS. 5 Jesus Christ is the Savor of the whole wrld.

(from bibleoutreach.net)

B) Archeological Evidence

The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in 1947, included an ancient copy of the scroll of Isaiah. This scroll, dating to approximately 100 BC was found to be identical to the Modern Hebrew Bible in over ninety five percent of the text. The remaining five percent consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling.