“Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away” (Mk 13:31).
When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, he personally wrote them on two tables of stone, and gave them into Moses’ care. When he went back down the mountain to the people of Israel, Moses saw them engaged in idolatrous sexual worship. Consequently, he smashed the two tables of stone in his anger (Ex 32:19), and thus, the autograph (i.e. original) of the Ten Commandments was destroyed. When he had resolved the problems caused by the people’s idolatry, he went back up the mountain to God, where he received a second set of two tables containing the Ten Commandments (Ex 34:1, 28). Therefore, the Ten Commandments that the people of Israel received were a copy of the autograph, written by the hand of Moses (Ex 34:27-28); nobody except Moses even saw the original. All they had now was a copy of the original. That copy was placed in the Ark of the Covenant.
It has been objected to me that this second issue of the Ten Commandments was not a copy but a second original. In a sense that is true, but the fact remains that the original autograph that God wrote with his own finger, was smashed to pieces, and is no longer extant. The second writing of the Ten Commandments was done by the hand of Moses, and was a copy of the autograph, albeit given directly to Moses by God as if an original. So, this copy was a perfect copy, corresponding perfectly with the original; it was thus inerrant and authoritative. But this perfect copy written on tables of stone, has also long since disappeared.
The Book of the Law
Following God’s giving the Ten Commandments, he gave the whole law to Moses; it was the pattern by which the people of Israel were to live. It is contained in the books Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These books, sometimes referred to as a whole as the Torah or the Pentateuch, were written down and the original placed alongside (“in the side of”) the Ark of the Covenant, the copy of the Ten Commandments being inside the Ark (Deut 31:9, 24-27); these two tablets were the only item within the Ark itself (1 Kings 8:9). Copies of the Law were made, according to God’s instruction, for each king, so that he would read it all his life and remain faithful to God (Deut 17:18-20).
The king wasn’t told to take the Original from the Ark and read it; he was told to write out a copy. And God didn’t say “Well, king, I can’t give you the original; but I can give you second-best. It’s bound to have errors in it because it’s been copied, but I hope you’ll be OK with that. Because it’s only a copy, you might be challenged about your faith, and you might doubt that you even have my words. But it’s the best I can do for you; the originals are all gone. Sorry….” God was/is quite happy with copies. He regarded the copies that the kings were to have made as being totally reliable, and as Scripture; in his instruction here given, he made no distinction between original and copy. They were one and the same to him.
Although the autograph still existed, at least until the time of Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:25-26), it wouldn’t have been accessible for copying because the Holy of Holies where the autograph was kept was closed to all except for the priest who entered it once a year; so all the copies of the Law were made from copies from the very beginning. Over time and after many copies of copies being produced, by the time of the Maccabees there were several different Hebrew manuscript textual traditions, and there were also several Greek translations of the Hebrew manuscript textual traditions, all existing at the same time as each other, all in circulation, and all accepted as Scripture.
Several centuries later, and after many years of Israel’s apostasy, when reformation was underway during Josiah’s reign, and the temple was being restored, we’re told, “And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it…..And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king….and read it before the king” (2 Kings 22:8, 10). It’s unlikely that this “book of the law” was Moses’ original because that would have most likely been taken to Babylon in the Ark of the Covenant, along with all the other Temple paraphernalia. It would more likely have been a copy, hidden by a godly priest or a Levite during the reign of one of the apostate kings. And it was old, because Hilkiah found it in the temple when the priests were cleaning it out and removing all the idolatrous objects.
The Prophecies of Jeremiah
Next, we turn to the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah chapter 36, God told him to commit all the words that he’d spoken to Jeremiah to writing. So Jeremiah called Baruch and he dictated the prophecies to him, and Baruch wrote them down (Jer 36:1-4). This was the original, or autograph, of Jeremiah’s prophecies.
Jeremiah then instructed Baruch to take this autograph and read it to the people in the temple. Subsequently the original scroll was taken by the king and he cut it up and threw it, piece by piece, into the fire. The original was destroyed (Jer 36:5-26).
Following this, God told Jeremiah to rewrite the prophecies on another scroll. “Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned. And thou shalt say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast burned this roll, saying, Why hast thou written therein, saying, The king of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy this land, and cause to cease from thence man and beast?”(Jer 36:28-29).
Once again, we see that God makes no distinction between the original and the copy. Indeed, he said to the king “Thou hast burned this roll” – the copy, which Jeremiah held in his hand, was equated by God to the roll which had been destroyed. God regarded the copy as his word, just as surely as he regarded the original.
Still in Jeremiah, this time in chapter 51:1-58, God gave a dire prophecy of the coming destruction of Babylon. Jeremiah then wrote the words of the prophecy in a book and gave it to Seraiah (a Jewish official and one of the captives in Babylon), with the instruction that when he returned to Babylon, Seraiah was to read the prophecy aloud and then bind a stone to it and toss it into the Euphrates River, which flowed through the centre of the city (51:59-64). And in so doing, he was destroying the original autograph of this prophecy against Babylon. Why didn’t Jeremiah tell Seraiah to write out a copy and throw that into the River; why did he allow the original, the autograph, to be lost forever? Didn’t he realise that unbelievers centuries later would refuse to believe the bible because there were no autographs?
The only conclusion we can draw is, again, that God is OK with copies of copies of scripture; so we should be too.
So, in every copy of scripture that has ever been made, all the prophecies of Jeremiah were made from copies, sometimes of copies of copies. They were never made from an autograph. There was never an original autograph from which they could be made. And there never has been a Hebrew collection consisting of all original autographs. There has never been an original Old Testament. And God doesn’t care. Israel didn’t care. They had copies and, for them, that was just as authoritative and binding as the autographs. Being copies of the inspired words of God, they, too, were regarded as inspired Scripture. Despite the many Hebrew and Greek textual traditions in circulation, and the variations between them, the copies of scripture that they had were all regarded by God and Israel as authoritative scripture.
The New Testament
Turning to the New Testament, we find further assurance that copies of inspired Scripture are still, in themselves, inspired Scripture, and that it is not important to have the original autographs. When writing to Timothy, Paul said “…from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Jesus Christ” (2 Tim 3:15). There is no way that Timothy would have possessed or even seen an original of the Old Testament. Yet Paul still regarded what Timothy possessed or had access to as Scripture. And Paul could say with absolute confidence that Timothy possessed the words of God in his copy because God promised he would preserve his words (Psalm 12:6-7). “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt 24:35).
And all the authors of the NT regarded the available copies of the OT as inspired scripture, writing in their God-breathed gospels and epistles such things as “But all this was done that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled” (Matt 26:56). And “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself…..did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the road, and while he opened to us the scriptures?…..Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures. And he said unto them, Thus it is written…..” (Lk 24: 27, 32, 45).
Jesus also knew there were no autographs and it didn’t worry him. He said such things as “Did ye never read in the scriptures….” (Matt 21:42); “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures…” (Matt 22:29); “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me” (Jn 5:39). He knew that the scribes and Pharisees only had copies; but he still regarded these copies as Scripture.
So we see that neither Old Testament Israel nor New Testament Church were concerned about original documents.
Contemporary Christendom
It’s sad that Evangelical Christians, who profess to be the Bible’s friends, think they know better. Conservative and evangelical churches and colleges, so-called “bible believing” organisations, have placed a fatal qualification on their declarations about their belief in the bible, using statements such as, “We believe the scriptures in the original autographs to be the infallible word of God”. This statement actually undermines the authority of the bible and suggests that the scrolls, parchments, books, and complete bibles, used by both Israel and the Church, are doubtful. It suggests – to me, at least – that we can’t really trust the bibles we have. If only the autographs are infallible Scripture, what is it that we have now? What have the people of God been trusting in if only the Originals are infallible?
If these Evangelicals are right, our modern versions are merely “best guess” bibles. Therefore they are not infallible; therefore you can’t base doctrine on them. Furthermore, the Church since the 1st or 2nd centuries following the demise of the last original gospel and the last original epistle has been without a reliable, authoritative, Bible – all they’ve had are unreliable copies. I say “unreliable” because, since they’re not the autographs, according to the statement of most Evangelical organisations, only the originals are infallible. So the Church has only had an “approximate” bible for most of its existence. Until the end of time, if contemporary scholarship is correct, there will never be a truly reliable, infallible, authentic, Bible. And therefore God has left the Church without an infallible written guide.
The Divine Preservation of the Holy Scriptures
Professor Bart Ehrman perceptively asks what should make him think that God had inspired the words of scripture if he knew that God hadn’t preserved them (Ehrman, B. 2010). But unlike Professor Ehrman, contemporary Christianity seems not to have recognised this problem; they don’t appear to have seen the implications of their teaching that only the autographs are inspired. Evangelical teachers blithely tell their audiences that only the autographs were inspired, without giving them the assurance that God has preserved his words in the copies of scripture, so that they, too, are the inspired and inerrant words of God.
The Scriptures Have Never Been Lost
Despite claims by skeptics and other enemies of God that the Bible is riddled with discrepancies and contradictions, the evidence for the reliability and trustworthiness of our Bible is astonishing. The thousands of manuscripts in Greek, thousands more in Latin copies, versions in Syriac, Coptic, German etc., and the quotations from the bible in the writings of the early church leaders, all proclaim that the Bible is the preserved words of God. And the whole of Judaism and Christianity were built on accurate copies of copies of the autographs. Add to this the resultant rapid spread of Christianity across the Roman empire and further, and the archaeological findings which give support to the Bible – the absence of autographs and presence of discrepancies (some real, some perceived, some misrepresented) in the texts and versions becomes a non-issue.
References
Ehrman, Bart, 2010, “Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them)”, publ. HarperCollins Publishers, NY.
“Way of Life Encyclopedia of the Bible and Christianity 5th Edition”, Entry “Preservation – Bible”, 2008, p. 455, by David W. Cloud, publ. Way of Life Literature, Port Huron, Michigan.
Some of the information and ideas in this article are essentially from, and inspired by, a DVD entitled “Is Your Bible Missing Something?” Volume 2, by David W. Daniels, 2015, publ. Chick Publications, Ontario, California.