The Bible
The text was transmitted by hand-copying for centuries. This page follows that chain: what manuscripts survive, where they disagree, and what the word “reliable” can and cannot carry.
For how the list of books settled — which books, and why — see Councils & the Bible
General further reading, not citations to specific pages.
From hand-copied papyrus to the printed critical text, and from there into Arabic.
1st century onwards
There was no printing press. Every copy was written out by a scribe from an exemplar in front of him, and papyrus perishes, so copies were made because originals wore out. Two things follow together: the text came down through a chain of copies rather than a preserved original, and every copy carries the possibility of a slip of the hand.
2nd century to the press
Around 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament survive, from scraps of papyrus to complete books. The earliest surviving piece is a fragment of John (Papyrus 52), dated to the second century — and its precise date is genuinely disputed: c. 125 became conventional, but scholars have argued the range is considerably wider. Then come the papyri of the second and third centuries, and then the two great fourth-century manuscripts: Sinaiticus, the earliest complete New Testament, and Vaticanus, of the same era but lacking the end.
That is more than survives for most texts of antiquity. It is sometimes said that works of Greek and Latin literature reach us in only a few dozen late manuscripts — a frequently repeated overstatement: the Iliad alone survives in thousands of witnesses. The accurate claim is that the New Testament is better attested than any other ancient text, and that a comparison with any particular work needs checking rather than a blanket figure.
2nd–5th century
The text was translated early into Syriac, Coptic and Latin, and later into Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopic. These are not a side-note in textual scholarship but one of its instruments: an early translation testifies to what stood in the Greek text it was made from, in that place and at that date.
When a Syriac manuscript from the East and an Egyptian papyrus from the south agree on a reading, that is the agreement of two witnesses neither of which can have copied the other. And it is the churches of this site that preserved those witnesses.
Found from 1947
The oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament in our hands were Masoretic, from around the tenth century AD. Then manuscripts predating Christ were found in the caves at Qumran by the Dead Sea, among them the Great Isaiah Scroll — roughly a thousand years older than anything previously known.
Comparing the two is the test: if copying changed a text substantially, a thousand years would show it. What showed were differences of spelling and a small number of forms, with the text substantially the same. This is among the strongest available evidence for careful transmission — and it is the kind that can be measured rather than assumed.
One important qualification: the Isaiah result does not generalise to every Qumran manuscript. Some books were found there in forms that diverge from the Masoretic text and agree instead with the Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch — Jeremiah and Samuel among them — meaning the Old Testament was being transmitted along more than one textual line at that period. The witness is strong for Isaiah; the broader picture is more complicated than that.
From the nineteenth century
Translation today is not made from a single manuscript but from a critical text: editors gather the testimony of all the manuscripts, weigh it, and record the disagreements in an apparatus. This is the basis of the standard editions, such as Nestle-Aland.
Which means the differences are not hidden. They are printed in the margins for anyone who wants them, and any serious modern Bible flags them where they occur.
From the 9th century, and 1865
The books were translated into Arabic from the ninth century, and also written in Syriac letters in what is known as Garshuni. The most widely used Arabic translation is the Van Dyck of 1865, produced in Beirut by Arab translators — Butrus al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yaziji — with American missionaries, and it became the text people across the Arab world know by heart.
The number of differences among the manuscripts is estimated at around 400,000. The figure looks enormous, and the reason is mechanical: the sheer number of manuscripts. Every additional copy adds opportunities for error — someone with two manuscripts has fewer variants than someone with six thousand.
The overwhelming majority cannot even be translated: spelling, word order that does not change the sense in Greek, prepositions, a line dropped or repeated — visible slips of the hand that comparison between witnesses exposes.
A small number affect the meaning, and a smaller number again carry theological weight. These are known by name and by location. They are not a secret waiting to be uncovered — they are printed in the margins of scholarly Bibles.
مرقس 16:9–20 · Mark 16:9–20
The longer ending of Mark, containing appearances and signs.
Absent from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the two great fourth-century manuscripts. Most editors judge it a later addition, which is why modern Bibles print it in brackets or with a footnote.
يوحنا 7:53–8:11 · John 7:53–8:11
The woman taken in adultery, and Christ's words: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”
It does not appear in the oldest manuscripts, and in some it appears at a different point in the Gospel. Many editors regard it as an old and authentic tradition inserted into the text late. It is among the best-loved passages in the Bible, and that does not change what the manuscripts say.
1 يوحنا 5:7–8 · 1 John 5:7–8
A clause naming the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, read as an explicit witness to the Trinity.
It appears in no early Greek manuscript; it is a late Latin addition, and critical editions omit it. Worth saying plainly: the doctrine of the Trinity does not rest on it and never did — the Creed was framed in 325 without it.
لوقا 22:43–44 · Luke 22:43–44
The angel strengthening Christ in the garden, and his sweat like drops of blood.
Present in some witnesses and absent from others; the judgement remains genuinely disputed among editors, and it is normally printed with a footnote.
Two questions get run together here, and they get run together from both directions: by those who argue from the number of manuscripts to the truth of the message, and by those who argue from a variant in a copy to the collapse of it. They are separate questions:
What stood in the earliest text that can be reached. That is a checkable question, and the answer is strong: the text we hold today is very close to the text being read in the second century, and where there is no certainty there is a footnote saying so. As a matter of transmission, this is among the best-attested texts to come down from antiquity.
Whether what the text says is true. Accuracy of transmission tells you that you are reading what was written, not that what was written happened. A text transmitted without a single error would leave the question of its truth exactly where it was.
Some of what the Bible contains is open to historical examination — names, governors, cities, events — and some of it is not open to it by its nature, the Resurrection among them, which the Church confesses in faith.
The honest answer is in two parts: the text is reliably transmitted, to a degree that can be demonstrated and measured; whether to believe what it transmits is a different matter, and neither substitutes for the other.