They said, "Is your Bible reliable? How certain are you that your Bible is really reliable?"

He said, "Well, I believe that the Bible is completely reliable."

They said, "But are you telling us that the Bible is 100% accurate --that there are no mistakes in the Bible at all?"

He said, "Yes, I believe that the Bible is totally without error in the original".

They said, "What do you mean, 'in the original'?"

He said, "I mean that those very first manuscripts --the parchment that was actually written on by the men who were being directed and inspired by Almighty God Himself as they wrote-- I mean that the words on those original papers were completely, 100% error-free. So I believe that the Scripture is inerrant in the original."

They said, "Now be honest with us about something. Do you know of anyone today who has access to one of those original manuscripts? Are there any original manuscripts still in existence today?"

He said, "Uh ...well, no. Probably not. None that I know of anyway."

So four of them said, "Well in that case, please tell us: what difference does it actually make to anybody that the original manuscripts, none of which are even around today, are supposedly inerrant? Since the Bible we have today is obviously translated from copied manuscripts, not originals, and since nobody disputes the fact that the copied manuscripts are flawed, it seems clear to us that your Bible is really not much more than a flawed text based on flawed copies. So how can you call the Bible reliable?"

He stood there silently while the four, with somewhat of a sneer, began to walk away. Two others had already laughed and left.

But one stayed behind. He was thinking that probably the others had sneered a little too easily, had laughed a little too readily. Inside, almost instinctively, he sensed that there were likely leaks in their logic. He recalled the time that his 6-year old daughter had come from Sunday School with a story that he had found very hard to believe. "We learned a new song today, daddy," she'd told him. "It was about a cross-eyed bear named Gadlee."

The kid was sharp, always open, honest, and straightforward. She pulled no punches. He had come to trust her simple accounts almost implicitly. But this time it didn't compute. Why would they be singing about a cross-eyed bear in Sunday School? Yet even after some further questioning, she was adamant. That was the song. That was the name. That was the story.

Late that night, just as he was beginning to fall asleep, he began to chuckle. From the back of his memory store, suddenly, the words had come to mind: "For Jesus I'd go anywhere. Gladly the cross I'd bear..."

A simple story. A simple, explainable miscommunication. Neither his daughter nor her Sunday School teachers deserved the label 'untrustworthy' or 'unreliable'. The account had just needed a little focus. In focus, the whole apparent dilemma had melted away like a snowball in July.

THE FACTS: there appear to exist up to a possible 180,000 variations in the various copied New Testament manuscripts. These variations inevitably resulted from the sometimes flawed, always tedious, process of reproducing Scripture by hand. All but 400 of these variations involve only minor differences, such as with spelling and rendition. All are easily discernible for what they are. Of the 400 occasions where the sense of the passage is involved, never once is a single essential doctrine of the Christian faith at issue. Explainable as they are, these alleged discrepancies need cast no doubt on the reliability of the Bible.

THE CONCLUSION
Lacking access to the original issue of a particular statement is not always a problem. In many cases, peripheral evidence and collateral witness can provide equally convincing evidence into the actual nature of the original. Such evidence in the context of our discussion includes: 1) the vast number of Biblical manuscripts, 2) the brief time lapse (by all standards of other ancient literature source data) between original and available copies, and 3) the variety of ancient translations in which the very early manuscripts appear.

FOR FURTHER READING: F.F. Bruce, "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?", Revised Edition, Eerdmans, 1977. Available in most Christian bookstores.