It is very important that you understand how to defend the reliability of the Bible.  There are many critics who will challenge the Bible.  Atheists will try and find inconsistencies.  Cults often claim it has been corrupted thereby justifying their "new" revelations.  Muslims deny its validity in order to justify the Quran.  So, knowing the issues surrounding its reliability and how to discuss it with people is very important.  After all, if the Bible can't be trusted then we haven't a leg to stand on.
      The fact is that the Bible copies do have textual variations.  You need to know why they exist and what they are.  This way, you can better handle objections such as, "The Bible was copied so many times that it can't be trusted," or "The Bible was translated from one language to another and then another so that through the centuries it became unreliable."

Inspiration

     When we say that the Bible is inspired, we are saying it is inspired in the original documents.  "Inspiredness is not a quality attaching to corruptions which intrude in the course of the transmission of the text, but only to the text as originally produced by the inspired writers. The acknowledgment of biblical inspiration thus makes more urgent the task of meticulous textual criticism, in order to eliminate such corruptions and ascertain what that original text was."¹  Therefore, when critics of the Bible point out apparent contradictions, what they are doing is either failing to understand the context of the passages they are examining, or they have encountered a scribal copying error.  The fact is that there are indeed copyist errors on the biblical documents and they account for many alleged contradictions.  Remember, it is the autographs (original writings) that are inspired and inerrant, not the copies. The copies we have now are copies of inspired documents.  The copies are not themselves "inspired"; that is, they have no guarantee of being 100% textually pure.  Does this then mean that we can't trust the Bible?  Not at all.  The copies are so accurate that all of the biblical documents are 98.5% textually pure.  The 1.5% that is in question is mainly nothing more than spelling errors and occasional word omissions like the words  "the", "but", etc. This reduces any serious textual issues to a fraction of the 1.5% and none of these copying errors affects doctrinal truths.  Following are some types of copyist errors:

• Dittography - Writing twice what should have been written once.

  • A good example would be writing "latter" instead of "later."  "Latter" means nearest the end.  "Later" means after something else.

• Fission - Improperly dividing one word into to words.

  • Example:  "nowhere" into "now here."

• Fusion - Combining the last letter of one word with the first letter of the next word.

  • "Look it is there in the cabinet... or Look it is therein the cabinet."

• Haplography - Writing once what should have been written twice.

  • A good example would be "later" instead of "latter."  "Later" means after something else.  "Latter" means nearest the end. 

• Homophony - Writing a word with a different meaning for another word when both words have the exact same pronunciation.

  • Meat and meet have the exact same sound but different meanings.  Also, there and their and they're are another example.

• Metathesis - An improper exchange in the order of letters.

  • Instead of writing "mast," someone writes "mats," or "cast" and cats."

     Additionally, we need to clarify that the copies have "repeated" copyist errors.  This means that each of these copy errors is in all the documents is counted as another, when in reality, they are repeated mistakes. In other words, when a word is omitted in a copy through a copyist error and that document is then copied, say ten times, then the total variants would be eleven (the original plus the ten copies).  But in reality, there is only one copyist error and it was simply repeated in the copies.  If you look at the diagram illustration below, you can see where the word "only" is omitted in a copy in the 3rd century documents.  When the copies are recovered, say all of the ones listed in the 3rd century level, and they are compared, we can see that the word "only" was omitted in one document but not in the others.  Therefore, the variant is known and corrected easily by comparison to other documents (as well as internal consistency, sentence structure, etc.).  This is how the scholars are able to reconstruct the Bible with such incredible accuracy.

    In the above diagram, there are 26 total "documents" - designated by solid lines.  The red documents contain variants.  In this illustration there would be a total of nine variants in 26 copies.  But, we can see that they are really one variant that has been copied.  This illustrates why the Bible is actually extremely well preserved since we are able reconstruct the document tree and see where variants are introduced and then document them.
     Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940's, the oldest extant copy of any Old Testament writings were the Masoretic Text dated around 916 AD.  When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, a complete copy of Isaiah was found.  Its date was 125 BC.  The difference in dates between the oldest copy and the newly discovered Isaiah document was 1000 years.  This provided a pristine opportunity to judge the copying accuracy of the Old Testament documents since it would be easily discernable which errors crept in over 1000 years.  The documents proved to be 95% textually identical.  The 5 percent that was different were mainly misspellings of words and did not constitute any threat to the content or reliability of the text.  This shows how accurately it was transmitted. 

Copying Checks

     In other words, in English we have letters, "a, b, c, d, etc." and numbers "1, 2, 3, etc.)  We have alpha and numeric characters.  In Greek and Hebrew there are only one set of writing characters for both numbers and letters (see The Greek and Hebrew Alphabet
with numeric equivalents).  In Greek, for example, the first letter is "alpha."  It is also used as the number one.  The second letter "beta" is used as the number 2, and so on.   When the Greeks wanted to write a number they just used the corresponding character.  It is similar in English.  What is this, "o"?  Is it a letter or a number?  We can only know when it is used in context.  Similarly, the Greek writers of the New Testament would copy the biblical manuscripts.  By default, every letter also has a numeric value.  When the copies were done, the copyists would add up the numeric values of the words copied and compare them to the original copy.  If there was an error, the copy was destroyed and a new one was begun.  This was done with both the Hebrew and Greek writings of the Bible.  Therefore, the Bible was copied with extreme care.

Other ancient writings

     If the critics of the Bible want to through it out because some of the copies of the documents are not perfectly identical, then they must also throw out other ancient writings which are no where near as well preserved as the biblical documents.  Please consider the chart below that compares the New Testament to other ancient writings.

Additional manuscript information

• The John Ryland manuscript, p⁵², dates from 130 AD.  Contains a fragment of John 18:31-33, 37.
• Chester Beatty papyri, p⁴⁵, a codex.¹  Dated around 200 - 250 AD and contains all four gospels and Acts.
• Chester Beatty papyri,  p⁴⁶, a codex, Dated around the year 200.  Contains Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossains, 1 and 2 Thessalonians.
• The Bodmer manuscript dates from 150-200 AD, p⁶⁶, a codex.  Dated around 200 AD.  Contains John 1:1-6 and 6:35b-29:15.
• There are 19,368 citations of the four gospels by the church fathers.

     It is obvious that the New Testament is far better preserved than any other ancient text, yet, people have no problem believing in Caesar, Plato, and Aristotle.
     The New Testament documents fall into three categories:  1) Greek manuscript copies, 2) other language copies, and 3) citations in early church writings.  The NT was written in Greek and we have more than 5000 different Greek Manuscripts from which to compare.  Additionally, there are another 19,000 manuscripts of ancient origin that are translations.  That is, we have 19,000 manuscripts of the New Testament in Latin, .....  And finally, all of the NT (except for 11 verses) can be reconstructed from quotes of early church writings.  It is very well preserved.
     Therefore, we can see that the Bible is an ancient document that has withstood thousands of years of transmission with remarkable accuracy and clarity.  We can trust it to be what it says it is:  the word of God.  It is reliable.
     For more information on textual manuscripts please see: Papyri, p1 through p76; 200 AD to 700 AD copies and Letter Uncials; 4th to 10th century copies.

------------------------ Focus Points ------------------------

1. The biblical copies are so accurate that all of the biblical documents are 98.5% textually pure.
2. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940's, the oldest extant copy of any Old Testament writings were the Masoretic Text dated around 916 AD.  When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, a complete copy of Isaiah was found.  Its date was 125 BC.  The difference in dates between the oldest copy and the newly discovered Isaiah document was 1000 years.  This provided a pristine opportunity to judge the copying accuracy of the Old Testament documents since it would be easily discernable which errors crept in over 1000 years.  The documents proved to be 95% textually identical.  The 5 percent that was different were mainly misspellings of words and did not constitute any threat to the content or reliability of the text.  This shows how accurately it was transmitted. 
3. If the critics of the Bible want to through it out because some of the copies of the documents are not perfectly identical, then they must also throw out other ancient writings which are no where near as well preserved as the biblical documents.
4. The New Testament documents fall into three categories:  1) Greek manuscript copies, 2) other language copies, and 3) citations in early church writings.  The NT was written in Greek and we have more than 5000 different Greek Manuscripts from which to compare.  Additionally, there are another 19,000 manuscripts of ancient origin that are translations.  That is, we have 19,000 manuscripts of the New Testament in Latin, .....  And finally, all of the NT (except for 11 verses) can be reconstructed from quotes of early church writings.  It is very well preserved.

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1.  The New Bible Dictionary, (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.) 1962.