No Two Biblical Manuscripts Are The Same? Old and New Testament Evidence

Have you heard the oft-repeated assertion that "no two Biblical manuscripts are the same?"  It is one of the most often-repeated arguments by enemies of the God of Scripture and opponents of perfect preservation.  However, it is simply false. There are early copies that are identical to the later printed texts.  For example, you can view the Qumran manuscript 4QGenb (4Q2) here.  A picture from this manuscript, which dates to c. A. D. 50, is below:

This manuscript "is identical to codex L," (Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012], 31), the basis for the common printed Hebrew Bible published by the United Bible Society, as well as being identical to the Hebrew Received Text published by the Trinitarian Bible Society.  You are, thus, viewing with your eyes a very ancient Hebrew text that is identical to printed editions of the Hebrew Bible.

What about for the New Testament? Consider the copy below:

P⁵², the oldest undisputed fragment from the Gospel of John, dates between A. D. 90-125 (J. Kenneth Eakins et al., “Archaeology and Biblical Study,” ed. Chad Brand et al., Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 100; Lee Strobel, In Defense of Jesus:  Investigating Attacks on the Identity of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI:  Zondervan, 2007), “Interview #2, Daniel B. Wallace.”)  It contains a Greek text that is identical to modern printed editions of the Gospel of John.  P⁵² was discovered in an obscure village in Egypt a great distance from Ephesus, where the Gospel of John was composed, demonstrating that the book had been in circulation for quite some time before this very ancient manuscript was copied.  Keener explains:

This text’s discovery far from the Gospel’s likely places of origin pushes its proposed date of writing back at least a quarter century[.] . . . Nor does the manuscript allow us to suppose that this represents a pre-Johannine tradition on which John based part of his Gospel . . .[this] oldest fragment of the Gospel of John . . . does not differ by a single word from our printed Greek texts. . . . 𝔓⁵² . . . proves the [early] existence and use of the Fourth Gospel in a little provincial town along the Nile, far from its traditional place of composition (Ephesus in Asia Minor)[.] (Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary & 2, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012], 141–142.)

Thus, very ancient manuscripts of the Bible that are exactly identical with modern printed texts exist.

Furthermore, there are many Biblical manuscripts that represent the text-type found in the Textus Receptus and the Authorized, King James Version that are identical with each other even over the space of entire books.  (This is not the case with the inferior and tiny minority of manuscripts that support the modern Greek critical text). For example, click here to view four manuscripts from widely separated parts of the world, copied in different centuries (and collated by Dr. Wilbur Pickering), that have a text that is absolutely identical for the entire book of Titus. 

One can contrast this extremely careful copying of the Received Text with the very careless copying of the favorite MSS of the critical text, Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (Aleph). Herman Hoskier did a full collation of Aleph and B, and in the Gospels he found the following:[1]

Disagreements between Sinaiticus and Vaticanus
Matthew	656
Mark	567
Luke	791
John	1022
TOTAL	3036

Compare this with the differences between the Westcott-Hort or critical Greek text and the Received Text in the entire New Testament:

TEXTUS RECEPTUS vs. WESTCOTT-HORT CHANGES

TR Has 140,521 Greek words. W/H changes 5,604 places in the N.T.

TR has 647 pp. in Greek Text. W/H changes include 9,970 Greek words.

TR has 217 Greek words. per page. W/H changes 15.4 Greek words per page.

TR has 100% of the Greek words. W/H changes 7% of the Greek words.

TR has all 647 pp. unchanged. W/H changes total 45.9 pp. in Greek text.[2]

The number of differences between Aleph and B just in the Gospels is comparable to the number of Greek words in which the TR and the W/H text differ in the entire NT--if one extends the average number of disagreements in the Gospels between Aleph and B over the entire NT, there would be more disagreements between the two MSS that critical text advocates falsely claim are the best than there are between the Received Text and the W/H printed editions!

Facts such as these--and there are many more where these came from--should put to rest the myth that there are no Biblical manuscripts that are identical with each other.  They should also show the unsoundness of the critical Greek text and the modern Bible versions based upon it and the superiority of the preserved Word of God contained in the Hebrew and Greek Received Texts from which the Authorized, King James Version was translated.

For more on this topic, please see the studies on Bibliology and the course lectures on the preservation of Scripture and Biblical manuscript evidence (lectures are not all online yet) on my website.  A forthcoming (Lord willing) book of mine on Biblical archaeology and prophecy, which will elaborate further on the evidence for Scripture presented in my two debates with leading atheist Dan Baker, President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, over the topics "The Old Testament is Mainly Fiction, not Fact" (Dan Barker affirmed, Thomas Ross denied) and "Archaeology and Prophecy Validate the Bible as the Word of God" (Thomas Ross affirmed, Dan Barker denied) will also have a discussion of Biblical preservation.

TDR

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[1]           Herman Hoskier, Codex B and its Allies:  A Study and an Indictment, vol. 2 (London:  Bernard Quaritch, 1914) 1.

[2]           Donald Waite, Defending the King James Bible (Collingswood, NJ:  Bible for Today, n. d.) “Forward.”