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Are the texts used as a basis for translation reliable ?

It should be obvious that a translation can be no better in quality than the text from which it is derived. Passage of time and hand copying have led to differences between the old manuscripts. Which ones are right? How can we tell what the original authors wrote?

We have a number of excellent tools to use to derive high quality text. First, we have a lot of material, far more than for any other single work of antiquity. Incomparably more: thousands of times more. Second, we have technology to accurately date the manuscripts, and we know some of the manuscripts are very old ones, a few quite close to the originals. Third, we have technology that can enable us to read things invisible to the human eye, such as writing inside a very fragile scroll that would be destroyed by opening it, and means to read things that have been erased and written over, revealing manuscript material overwritten by unrelated work. Last, but far from least, we have studied how things get corrupted in the process of transmission such that in most cases we can work through the differences to find the original source with a very high degree of certainty. Scholars dedicate their lives to this work and slow but constant improvements are being made.

There is a school of thought that tends to generally prefer the simplicity of going with the majority text to the detailed task of careful study and analysis. Proponents of this view tend to be focused on the text underlying the old King James version of the Bible in a belief that the most used version of the Bible provided by God to the church for so many centuries ought to carry authority. The idea is that the text which is most preferred for use will proliferate and appear in the majority of documents. These will also be more recent documents since the older ones from which they were derived would have deteriorated through heavy use, but were copied before they perished. Following this reasoning, the very old surviving documents are thought to be less used because of poor quality, and that they therefore survived. This argument has the benefit of being simple to understand. Unfortunately it does not bear up well under examination. There are many translations made earlier than the most recent manuscript copies. They do not fit well with this theory. Neither do numerous quotations of scripture by early writers made long before the more recent manuscripts. Almost all modern translations of the Bible are based on a text derived by scholarly research and analysis which ignores this approach.

Depite the differences in thought leading to the choice of text for translation the differences in text are relatively few and mostly quite minor. Irrespective of the translation you choose, you will get a reasonably accurate rendering representative of the content prepared by the original authors. There is better than 99% overall agreement between scholars over the original text behind the manuscripts. Differences are for the most part small, of minor importance, and do not affect matters of church doctrine. The oldest fragment of the New Testament was written less than 100 years after the original document, and the oldest complete copy is from about a couple of centuries later. There are over 100 truly ancient New Testament documents and over 5,000 more recent such copies. The ancient translations into Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic and other languages along with the many thousands of quotations from church fathers, mean that we have over 20,000 source documents that can be consulted for verification. Compare that with only 2 copies of Lucretius, or 10 of Caesar, originally written about the same time as the gospels. Their oldest copies were produced about 1,000 years after the original works, at least ten times longer than the gap for the New Testament.

In short, there is not much doubt at all about exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. The textual basis underlying our modern translations is of excellent quality and the best that dedicated scholars can produce. Photographic copies of some of the documents are available online, and tabulated reproductions of those from about 450CE and earlier are also available online. You can see and examine for yourself if you are prepared to put in the necessary effort. There are no secrets in this work of love by dedicated men and women committed to providing us all with the best, most trustworthy possible understanding of scripture.