In my discussions with atheists, some of them have raised the “Chinese whispers” objection. As the game goes, the more a sentence is repeated from one to the other, the more it varies until eventually it says something totally different from the original.

The objection states that the different sections of the Bible were originally written between 2000 and 3500 years ago. Back in those days they didn’t have computers or printing presses and every copy of the Bible had to be made by hand. Each time a copy was made, some errors would have occurred, and then these errors would have been copied into copies that were made from that one, along with new errors, and by and by over the years we have lost what was originally written.

The simple reality is that while this type of thing is theoretically possible, it has not actually eventuated to cause us the claimed problem. There are thousands of copies of manuscripts that we still have today with some of these dating back to even hundreds of years before the time of Jesus. Having thousands of manuscripts available from so long ago, means we can compare them together to discover any errors that might have been made in copying and also any that were outright corrupted.

In more recent times, an important discovery was made of what we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These have been sitting untouched for two thousand odd years until they were discovered in the mid 1900s. Among the many manuscripts were copies of much of the Old Testament section of the Bible. By comparing the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Biblical manuscripts that were already available, it was confirmed that copying of the Bible was a meticulous work, done with an extremely high degree of accuracy, and even over thousands of years, what we have today is still true to the original.

There is no legitimate reason to doubt the validity of the Bible as far as being true to the original. This is just an excuse to avoid seriously considering the validity of the content of the Bible.

So our little series leaves us with only one objection left. Stay tuned for next week, when we look at religion being used to abuse.