Transmission of the Bible

The grass withers, and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

— Isaiah 40:8

Transmission of the Bible is the process by which the text of Scripture has been copied, circulated, and handed down from its original writing to the manuscripts, versions, and printed editions read today, since none of the biblical authors’ own autographs survive.¹ It is a distinct question from inspiration (whether the text is God-breathed at its origin) and inerrancy (whether it is true): transmission asks instead whether, and how reliably, that original text has reached the present. The Reformed confessions answer that it has, by God’s own “singular care and providence.”²

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession states the doctrine directly, tying the text’s preservation to its continuing authority:

The Old Testament in Hebrew…and the New Testament in Greek…being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentic; so as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal to them.²

The Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Philadelphia Confession state the identical claim in the same chapter and paragraph (Westminster’s own wording reads “authentical”), making this a shared Reformed conviction rather than a Baptist distinctive.³

Biblical Basis

Scripture itself records the deliberate transmission of God’s written word, in both Testaments. In the Old Testament, after the Babylonian exile had left most Jews no longer speaking Hebrew as their native tongue, Ezra and his associates read the law aloud to the assembled people and had it interpreted for them (Neh. 8:1-8), a scene Barrows takes as evidence of the same care for the text’s faithful transmission already at work in “the fidelity and skill of Ezra, who was ‘a ready scribe in the law of Moses.’”⁴ The text could also be providentially restored after deliberate destruction: when King Jehoiakim burned the scroll containing Jeremiah’s words, Jeremiah dictated it again to Baruch, “and many similar words were added” (Jer. 36:27-32).

In the New Testament, the apostles wrote letters with the explicit expectation that they would be copied and read beyond their first recipients. Paul directs the Colossians, “when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans” (Col. 4:16), and puts the Thessalonians “under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers” (1 Thess. 5:27). John pronounces a blessing on whoever “reads aloud the words of this prophecy” to the assembled church (Rev. 1:3). Kruger reads this pattern of commanded public reading, set against the Jewish synagogue’s own practice of reading Scripture aloud (Luke 4:17-20; Acts 15:21), as placing the apostles’ own writings in the same category as the Scripture already read in worship from the very time they were written, not as a status conferred on them only later.⁵

Historical Development

Old Testament: scribal transmission

After Hebrew ceased to be most Jews’ spoken language, its traditional pronunciation was preserved for centuries in synagogue reading before the Masoretes fixed it in writing as the Masoretic Text, between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries AD, through an elaborate system of vowel points and accents.⁶ Rules governing the copying of synagogue scrolls extended to the material of the parchment, the ink, the number of lines and words per column, and a required inspection of the completed copy, which Barrows treats as evidence of the same reverence for accurate transmission already visible in Ezra’s own handling of the text.⁷

New Testament: copying and its variants

Barrows compares the New Testament’s manuscript tradition favorably against every other ancient writing: it was copied more often, and earlier after its composition, than any other work of antiquity. The same abundance of copies that increases the number of surface variations among manuscripts also multiplies the means of checking and correcting them, so that, in his words, “the greater the number of copies, the greater will be the number of various readings, but this will make the true text not more but less uncertain.”⁸ He locates the origin of that process in God’s ordinary providence rather than in any miraculous exemption from error, comparing it to a missionary who must learn a foreign language by patient study rather than by direct revelation: “it is the will of God that we should have a pure text of the New Testament…not without hard labor, but by years of patient toil in the study and collation of the abundant materials which his good providence has preserved for us.”⁹

Barrows classifies the resulting various readings into three kinds: substitutions (a word changed through misheard dictation or an inadvertent slip of a letter), insertions (a copyist filling out a phrase from a parallel passage or absorbing a marginal note into the text), and omissions (the eye skipping from one of two similarly-ending words, lines, or sentences to the other).¹⁰ He judges that “by far the greatest number” arose from simple inadvertence rather than deliberate alteration, adding that “wilful falsifications in the interest of a particular sect or party cannot with any show of justice be imputed to the men who have perpetuated to us the text of the New Testament.”¹¹

Four manuscripts stand out among the witnesses to this transmission for their age and completeness: Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, both assigned to the fourth century, and Codex Alexandrinus, generally assigned to the fifth, each originally contained the whole Greek Bible.¹² Sinaiticus in particular was recovered only in the nineteenth century, when Constantin Tischendorf found it at the monastery of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai.¹³ From these and other manuscripts, later scholars built up the classification of distinct textual families and, beginning with Erasmus’s 1516 Greek New Testament, the succession of printed Greek editions that modern New Testament textual criticism studies today.

Objections and Responses

If none of the biblical writers’ own autographs survive, how can the transmitted text be trusted? Barrows answers that the absence of the autographs does not leave the text’s substance in doubt: “there is no ground for supposing that if we had the autographs of the evangelists and other sacred writers, they would present to us a gospel differing in any essential particular from that which we now possess. We should see in them the same glorious Saviour, and the same holy system of doctrines and duties.”¹ The same holds for the Old Testament: the manuscript evidence, though comparatively late, gives “a good degree of purity,” and the surviving variant readings among the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint concern, “for the most part,” trivial points rather than the substance of what is revealed.¹⁴

Doesn’t the sheer number of textual variants across the New Testament manuscript tradition undermine confidence in the text? Barrows’s own account of why variants multiply, set out above, is itself the answer: a large number of variants is the by-product of an unusually large and early body of copies, not a sign of instability in what those copies actually attest. Revelation, on his reading, “does not lie in letters and syllables and grammatical forms, but in the deep and pure and strong and broad current of truth ‘given by inspiration of God.’”¹⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 26, “The New Testament Text and Its History,” 380. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 8. ↩ ↩²
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scripture,” para. 8; The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 1, para. 8; The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 1, para. 8. ↩
Barrows, chap. 14, “The Original Text and Its History,” 179-80. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 6, “The Corporate Reception of the Canon: The Emergence of a Canonical Core.” ↩
Barrows, chap. 14, 178. ↩
Barrows, chap. 14, 179. ↩
Barrows, chap. 26, 381. ↩
Barrows, chap. 26, 381. ↩
Barrows, chap. 26, 381-82. ↩
Barrows, chap. 26, 382-83. ↩
Barrows, chap. 26, 384-86. ↩
Barrows, chap. 26, 385. ↩
Barrows, chap. 17, “Criticism of the Sacred Text,” 213. ↩ ↩²