When you first start thinking about how we go from manuscripts and their copies to a Bible that we hold in our hands, you might think that that's a little academic and stuffy. There is certainly a lot of information to learn, but right off the bat I want to tell you why that's important. If you learn and understand how this process works, you can combat the claims of many different types of groups and people just by knowing this one set of information.

There are some today, you might call them radical egalitarians who say the Bible has been changed over time to say that men have different roles than women. That requires that the Bible actually have been able to be changed over time. Muslims say basically that the Bible's been corrupted over time. That's a simplification, but, nonetheless, they make that claim. The question is do the facts support it? Mormons say well we trust the Bible and in as much as it's translated or transmitted correctly. Well, has it been translated correctly? Has it been transmitted correctly? We need to be able answer those claims and if we understand the process that we go through, we'll be able to talk with those different types of people in different groups.

The first thing to point out is that we do not have the original manuscripts that were written by the biblical authors. That may pose some concerns for people, but in some ways this shouldn't trouble us too much. None of us have ever read the original manuscript penned by an author of a book, most likely. We all base our life off of books that are copies. The electrical engineer doesn't say well he can't build a system because his text book is only a copy. In the same way we shouldn't reject things simply because they're copies because we actually have a lot of copies of new testament manuscripts. We have about 5800 Greek new testament manuscripts and if you include Latin and Coptic and Syriac the number goes very close to 30,000 or more. Now, lets compare this to other ancient works of antiquity. Homer has about 1800 manuscripts. Caesar and Plato and Pliny the Younger have all about 200 manuscripts. That's not much evidence for those by comparison.

But for the new testament we have a ton of manuscripts to work with and many of them are early. The copy time gap for some parts of the new testament is 25 years. That's the time from when the original was penned to the earliest copy we have. That's very low. If you look at Homer or Pliny the Younger or Caesar those are all 500 to 750 to a 1000 years old from when the original was supposed to have been written to the copy. We have a lot of evidence for the new testament. We also have early evidence. We have biblical manuscripts that are copies that are copied throughout many different centuries. Some of them date to the first century, some to the second, third, fourth, all the way through the 12th and the 14th, and we have copies of copies of copies. That is certainly true.

Something you need to know and I would rather you hear here first than somewhere else is that there are differences between these copies and these differences are called variants. They are where a manuscript varies from another text and they're estimated at over 200,000. I want that number to have some shock value because when someone like skeptical critic Bart Ehrman uses that term he expects it to have shock value too. I want us to talk through that number together. To put this in context, there are only 31,102 verses in the King James Bible, but the variants between manuscripts are estimated at 200,000 or more. That's an overwhelmingly large number and for some they want to present this in the way where it makes it seem like we can't know what the original said. We can't have any confidence in it, but that is…