Stop 1. The roots: copies all the way down

Nobody alive has seen the original pages of the Bible. The ink dried thousands of years ago. What we have are copies, and copies of copies, all made by hand.

Look at the roots of the tree. On the left are the Old Testament roots. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. On the right are the New Testament roots. The New Testament was written in Greek. Each root tip is a group of old copies. The deeper the root, the older the copy.

On the Old Testament side, the Dead Sea Scrolls go deepest. They are Hebrew scrolls from about 250 BC to AD 68. The Septuagint is the Old Testament translated into Greek about 2,100 to 2,300 years ago. The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew text. Jewish scribes copied it with great care. A scribe is a person whose job was copying books by hand. The best copy of this text is from about AD 1008.

On the New Testament side, the oldest pieces are the earliest papyri, from about AD 125 to 200. Papyrus is an ancient kind of paper made from a plant. Next come the great codices, which are big books from the 300s. Last are the later Greek copies. Most of what survives is in that group.

After thousands of copies, you would expect small differences, and that is what we find. Most are tiny, like spelling. A few matter. Scholars treat them like detectives. They ask which copy is oldest, and which change makes sense. A scribe might write a helpful note in the margin. The next scribe might copy that note into the text. So the longer wording is often the later one.