The Evidence Room · The Copy Room

How the text reached us

Nobody has the page Paul wrote on. Here is what we do have, how much of it there is, and how the copies compare.

4 objects in this room

Each one is photographed, dated, and placed in the museum that holds it, with what it puts on the table and exactly what its text says.

late 7th century BC

The Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls

Israel Museum, Jerusalem · Ketef Hinnom, Jerusalem, 1979

Two rolled silver amulets, worn around a neck, carrying the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24–26. They are the oldest known copies of any biblical text — some four centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The exact reading

They carry a blessing, not a book: the find dates the wording, not the whole Pentateuch. And the amulets run shorter than Numbers 6:24–26 — the clauses about God being gracious and lifting up his countenance are not on the silver.

c. 125 BC

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ)

Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem · Qumran Cave 1, 1947

The whole of Isaiah, a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bible known before it — and Isaiah 53, the suffering servant, demonstrably in circulation long before Jesus of Nazareth.

The exact reading

It differs from the medieval text in spelling and in hundreds of small readings; none of them changes what chapter 53 says.

2nd century AD

The Rylands Fragment (P52)

John Rylands Library, Manchester · Egypt; identified 1934

A credit-card-sized scrap of John 18 — Pilate and Jesus, "What is truth?" — copied in Egypt, far from where John was written, within a century or so of the writing.

The exact reading

Roberts dated it c. AD 125 in 1935. Nongbri showed in 2005 that the handwriting samples used for comparison actually span the whole second century; the honest range is wider than the famous date.

c. AD 330–360

Codex Sinaiticus

British Library, London (with Leipzig, St Catherine's, St Petersburg) · St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, 1844–59

The oldest complete New Testament in existence, written on parchment in four columns a page, with the Old Testament in Greek alongside it.

The exact reading

It also contains the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, and it ends Mark at 16:8 — the manuscript shows the canon and the text still being handled, not a finished printed book.

The questions this room answers

Hasn't the Bible been copied and changed so many times we can't know what it said?

We do not have the originals, and the copies do differ. Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman (The Text of the New Testament, 4th edition, 2005) class the great majority of the differences as spelling, word order and obvious slips, and the readings that change a meaning are printed with their evidence in the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies editions, which is the reason we can say anything about them at all.

THE CLAIM

The copies differ in spelling and slips, not in the message.

1Say the honest thing first: the originals are goneManuscript
2The number, counted carefullyThe numbers
3What a variant actually isThe text
4The two long passages we show you rather than hideThe text
5The oldest scrap, dated honestlyManuscript
6The Hebrew side, and the other half of the truthManuscript

WHERE IT STANDS

Nothing hidden: the disputed passages are printed in the open.

high confidence

6 steps5 objections answered at full strength10 named worksWalk it →

The exhibits behind this room

Where the manuscripts differ: every place, with the evidence→

How we got the Bible→

The ending of Mark→

All Scripture is God-breathed→

The manuscript arguments in the catalog→

How Hebrew works→