The reliability of the Old Testament

So far we have looked only at the reliability of the New Testament writings. It is pertinent also to say a little about the Old Testament. Here the question is a little more complicated, but it is important to point out the evidence brought to us by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls began to be discovered in caves by the Dead Sea in 1947. They had been hidden by members of the Jewish Community at Qumran when their community was destroyed by the Romans during the Roman-Jewish War of AD 66-70. From the 40,000 inscribed fragments recovered, over 500 books have been identified. About 100 of these are copies of the 39 books of the Old Testament. Only Esther is not represented among them. Many of these writings pre-date the community. For example, a text of Exodus has been dated about 250 BC.

Up to the time of this discovery the main text of the Hebrew Bible in use was that which was standardised by a group of Jews working in the eighth and ninth centuries who were known as Masoretes, from a Hebrew word meaning "tradition". They assembled the best Hebrew texts of the Old Testament available at the time and sought to preserve their purity. They gave us what is known as the Masoretic text. However, because of the remarkable discoveries in the caves by the Dead Sea, we now have copies of the Old Testament books that are 1,000 years earlier! It is possible to compare these to see how the copying of the text over such a long period has affected it and to what extent changes have occurred.

To give an example, it is possible to compare the text of one of the Dead Sea copies of Isaiah, which is dated about 100 BC, with that of the Masoretes of 1,000 years later, in order to see how faithfully scribes have preserved the text. For instance, if we take Isaiah 53, (the chapter that foretells the sufferings of Christ, and which is quoted at least 10 times in the New Testament in connection with those events), we find that the Qumran manuscript has 17 letters different from the Masoretic text. Ten of these letters are mere differences in spelling, similar to our spelling of "honor" or "honour", and produce no change of meaning at all. Four more are very minor differences, such as the presence of a conjunction, which is often a matter of style. The other three letters are the Hebrew word "light," added after "they shall see" in verse 11. Of the 166 words in this chapter, only this word is really in question, and it does not at all change the sense of the passage. This is typical of the whole manuscript. Thus we can see in what high regard the Jewish scribes held their sacred scriptures and with what care they copied them. On the basis of the Qumran Isaiah scroll, the Revised Standard Version of 1952 made only 13 minor changes to the whole of Isaiah.

By comparing the standard Hebrew Old Testament text used today with that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Gleason Archer, in A Survey of the Old Testament, found that they:

...proved to be word for word identical...in more than 95% of the text. The 5% variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.