Why Trust Ancient Scripture?

If the case rests on old texts copied and recopied for millennia, how can we trust what they actually say?

The objection, at its strongest:

1. The claim that the God of Israel has spoken rests on texts written, copied, and recopied by hand for thousands of years.
2. Along the way they could have been altered, mistranslated, or invented outright: we have no originals.
3. So even if a personal God could speak, we have no reliable record of what He supposedly said. The whole case rests on unverifiable ancient documents.

In response:

• Textual transmission is a solved, measurable question — not a mystery. We do not have to guess whether the text drifted; we can check. The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed our Hebrew manuscripts back roughly a thousand years, and when a scroll of Isaiah copied before Christ is laid beside the medieval text, they match to a remarkable degree. Far from a game of telephone, the copying tradition — with its obsessive scribal safeguards — preserved the text with striking fidelity. Where variants exist, they are cataloged in the open and touch no major claim.
• "We have no originals" proves too much. We have no originals of Caesar, Tacitus, or Plato either, yet no one doubts they wrote. Judged by the ordinary standards of ancient history — number of manuscripts, closeness to the events, agreement across copies — the biblical texts are the best-attested documents of the ancient world, not the worst. If their transmission is too shaky to trust, then all of ancient history collapses with them.
• Recognizing a revelation never rested on a perfect manuscript. This stage argued that a genuine word from God comes with credentials: prophecy, checkable events, moral fruit, inner coherence across ages. Those signs do not hang on whether every letter survived unchanged; they operate at the level of the events and the enduring witness of a whole people, which no scribal slip could erase. The argument was never "trust the text because it is old," but "weigh the marks that only God could stamp."
• Translation is not a veil but a discipline. We are not at the mercy of one rendering. Scholars work from the original languages, compare thousands of witnesses, and expose their reasoning to public scrutiny. Difficulties in translation are real and openly debated — which is the opposite of a hidden corruption no one can check.

So the antiquity of the Scriptures is not the weakness the objection imagines. The record is better preserved, better attested, and more openly examined than almost anything else from the ancient world — and the case for the God of Israel was never a bare appeal to the text, but to what that well-attested record reports He did.