I’ve Heard It Said the Old Testament Is Full of Errors

This article is part of the I’ve Heard It Said series.

A Collection of Evidence

I’ve heard that Old Testament manuscripts are full of errors. Now, it’s true that there are no original manuscripts of ancient books, and the Old Testament is included among that number. We are dependent fully on the copies and the copies of copies that purportedly go back to the original. That is how we have our Old Testament in the first place.

Scribes and Scripture

John D. Meade, Peter J. Gurry

In Scribes and Scripture, scholars John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry answer common questions about the writing, copying, canonizing, and translating of the Bible and give readers tools to interpret the evidence about God’s word.

But those copies have all the signs of human fragility—of human error—within them. So it's not a question about whether there are errors or not. There are. But the question is, Does that lead to despair? Does that lead to a pessimistic outlook that might conclude something like, “Therefore, we don’t have the Bible”?

And I’m happy to say no, because the Hebrew Bible—the Old Testament—has a wealth of manuscripts, a ton of evidence, and textual critics who can actually look at all those manuscripts, compare them, sift out what are simple copyist errors, and actually restore the original text based on comparing all of the evidence. And therefore, I remain optimistic that we can get back to the original books of the Old Testament.

John D. Meade is the coauthor with Peter J. Gurry of Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible.

John D. Meade (PhD, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is professor of Old Testament and codirector of the Text & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary. He is the coauthor of The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis and the author of A Critical Edition of the Hexaplaric Fragments of Job 22–42. He and his wife, Annie, have four children and are members at Camelback Bible Church.

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