The Journey of How the Bible Was Made and Preserved
Lesson 2 of our six-week study is designed to deepen confidence in the Bible by tracing the remarkable path it traveled to reach modern hands. This Bible study traces how the Old Testament was formed through prophetic authority, translated into Greek as the Septuagint, and preserved despite centuries of copying. The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls — predating previous manuscripts by 1,000 years — confirmed the text’s remarkable accuracy, giving believers solid historical grounds for trusting Scripture.
Summary:
Introduction and Purpose of the Study
Our study is a six-week informational series intended to strengthen the class’s confidence in the Bible as God’s Word before transitioning to a longer “real-life discipleship” study. The aim is not deep theology but historical literacy: helping believers articulate not only what Scripture says but how the book in their hands actually arrived there. The class is encouraged to supplement the lesson by reading Dennis’s blog, which traces the story even further back into the prehistory of writing itself.
• How We Got Our Bible – The Story of Canonization
• From Clay to Canon: The Epic Journey of Writing from Cuneiform to the Biblical Record
• Tracing the Journey of Scripture Through the Ages
• James White: But it IS Translated Correctly!
• Standing Firm: How You Can Be Certain the Bible is the Word of God
Can We Trust the Bible? — A Study of the Old Testament’s Origins and Reliability
This conversational Bible study lesson is aimed at helping our members understand where the Bible came from and why it can be trusted. Pastor Joey uses audience engagement, historical evidence, and a dramatic discovery to build a case for the reliability of Scripture.
How the Old Testament Came Together
The lesson opens by asking a simple but important question: how did we actually get the Old Testament? The teacher explains that the Bible’s 66 books — 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New — were written by many different human authors over centuries. What bound them together was not a vote by committee, but divine authority. A book was recognized as Scripture at the moment it was written, because a true prophet spoke with the formula “thus says the Lord” — grounding the canon in prophetic authority rather than institutional approval.
What Jesus Called Scripture
The Jewish people never called it the “Old Testament” — they called it the Tanakh. Jesus Himself, after His resurrection, referenced these writings in Luke 24:44 as the fulfillment of everything written about Him. The teacher also cites the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, who confirmed that the Jews recognized exactly 22 divinely inspired books — a number that, when grouped differently, matches the 39 books of our English Old Testament perfectly.
The Septuagint, the Apocrypha, and the 400 Years of Silence
Around 250 BC, Jewish scholars in Egypt translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, producing what became known as the Septuagint — the Bible of the early church. After the prophet Malachi, God went silent for approximately 400 years. During that period, writers produced religious and historical literature known as the Apocrypha — including the books of the Maccabees, which record events connected to the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Importantly, the Apocrypha admits its own limitations: 1 Maccabees 9:27 acknowledges that the prophets had ceased, meaning even its own authors knew they were writing history, not Scripture.
The Skeptic’s Challenge — and the Miracle of 1947
For centuries, critics attacked the Old Testament on one central point: the oldest complete Hebrew Bible in existence — the Leningrad Codex — was dated to 1008 AD, more than 1,000 years after Christ. How could anyone trust that scribes hadn’t altered the text, especially the Messianic prophecies? Then in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy named Mohammed, searching for a lost goat in the cliffs near the Dead Sea, threw a rock into a cave — and heard the sound of shattering pottery. Inside were ancient clay jars containing tightly wrapped leather scrolls: the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls — A Mic Drop Moment
Archaeologists eventually uncovered scroll fragments from 11 caves, representing every Old Testament book except Esther. Historians identified the scribes as the Essenes — a devout Jewish community who had hidden their library in 68 AD as Roman armies approached, sealing God’s Word in jars for 1,900 years. The crown jewel of the discovery was the Great Isaiah Scroll, dating to 125 BC — over 1,000 years older than any previously known manuscript. When scholars compared it word-for-word with the 1008 AD Leningrad Codex, they found only 17 minor letter differences across 166 words in Isaiah 53 — none of which altered a single doctrine or prophecy.
Conclusion — A Foundation for Faith
Pastor Joey closes with a four-part summary: the Bible was spoken by the prophets, recognized by Jesus, translated for the world, and proven true by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The lesson’s purpose is not theological theory but practical faith-building — so that believers can hold their Bibles with confidence, knowing what they hold is real.
Reliability of Manuscript Transmission
A Wes Huff video from the Can I Trust the Bible? series anchors a discussion of manuscript reliability. The class addresses the common objection that copying must have corrupted the text like a giant game of telephone. The evidence says otherwise. The Great Isaiah Scroll, recovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, is virtually identical to the Isaiah we read today, with only minor punctuation differences. The qualifications of the New Testament writers — apostles or close associates such as Mark, Luke, James, and Jude — also came up, alongside an interesting contrast with Islamic claims that an illiterate Muhammad miraculously received the Quran. Far from undermining the Bible, the steady stream of new manuscript discoveries functions like additional pieces of a 10,000-piece puzzle: more pieces yield greater confidence in the completed picture.
Can I Trust the Bible? — Episode 2: Manuscripts, Archaeology, and Historical Reliability
Filmed in Egypt, this episode demonstrates that the Bible’s manuscripts — confirmed by discoveries at Oxyrhynchus and the Dead Sea — have been faithfully preserved with no doctrinally significant changes. The Gospel authors’ precise historical accuracy, even surpassing prominent Roman historians, gives strong intellectual grounds for trusting Scripture’s reliability.
Why This Question Matters
Wes opens by explaining what drew him to manuscript study: if the Bible cannot be trusted, there is no rational basis for faith in Jesus. Critics typically argue that modern Bibles are merely translations of translations built on error-ridden copies with unknown authorship. Wes acknowledges this would be a genuine problem — if it were true.
The Oxyrhynchus Discovery
Much of the earliest manuscript evidence for the Bible comes from Egypt, and particularly from the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus on the Nile. In 1895, British scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the city’s garbage dumps and uncovered over half a million papyrus fragments — including portions of every book of the Bible, along with classical and religious texts. Far from shaking confidence in Scripture, these discoveries powerfully confirmed it.
P1 — The Earliest Matthew Fragment
Among the Oxyrhynchus finds was P1, a fragment of the Gospel of Matthew containing the genealogy of Jesus. When ancient papyri like P1 were compared against much later manuscripts such as the King James Bible’s source texts, the result was not contradiction — it was striking confirmation. The text had been preserved with remarkable consistency across centuries.
The Septuagint and Translation Accuracy
The episode addresses the charge that modern Bibles are translations of translations. The key correction: the Bible has always been translated directly from its original Hebrew and Greek sources — not copied from intermediate translations. The Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament used by the New Testament writers themselves) illustrates how translation and copying were managed carefully from the very beginning. As more archaeological evidence accumulates, our understanding of the text gets closer to the original — not farther away.
Manuscript Differences — Not a Problem, but a Proof
Rather than hiding textual variants, modern Bible translations openly footnote them — a sign of scholarly honesty, not confusion. Wes uses a memorable analogy: the manuscript tradition is like a puzzle with 100,100 pieces instead of 100,000 — the extra pieces are identifiable precisely because we have so much material to compare. The vast majority of scribal differences are spelling variations or word-order changes that affect no doctrine whatsoever. Most critically: no essential Christian teaching rests on any disputed text.
Is the Bible Historically True?
Having established textual reliability, the episode turns to a deeper question: even if we have the right words, could the authors simply have invented them? The answer lies in the Gospel writers’ precision with historical details. Luke 3 alone contains 22 verifiable historical references confirmed by archaeology and ancient sources. Furthermore, Luke correctly identifies Pontius Pilate’s official title as “Governor” — a detail the prominent Roman historian Tacitus got wrong, using “procurator” instead. The accuracy of the Gospel authors on precise historical particulars, even where other ancient writers err, is strong evidence they were writing genuine history.
Conclusion
The journey through Egypt’s sands arrives at a confident verdict: the Bible contains the right books, faithfully preserved, written by authors who went to great lengths to anchor their accounts in verifiable history. Though separated from the original events by two thousand years, the evidence gives solid intellectual grounds to trust that what we hold today is what the original authors wrote.