Summary
Can your kids explain why they trust the Bible without answering, “Because Mom said so”?
In this episode, Amy and Tricia Scribner tackle the first of two big questions about the reliability of the New Testament: Do we actually have what the original authors wrote?
Skeptics sometimes compare the transmission of Scripture to a giant, centuries-long game of telephone—one person passes a message to another, mistakes pile up, and eventually the message bears little resemblance to the original. But that analogy misses some important facts. The New Testament wasn’t transmitted through one fragile chain of whispered messages. It was copied in writing across multiple communities, languages, and manuscript traditions.
Amy and Tricia walk through the work of textual criticism, explaining how scholars compare thousands of surviving manuscripts, translations, and quotations from early Christian writers to reconstruct the wording of the New Testament. They discuss manuscript quantity and quality, the importance of early copies, textual variants, and the “chain of custody” connecting the apostles with later Christian teachers. And yes—there are variants. Lots of them. But simply counting variants can make the evidence sound much scarier than it is. Most involve things such as spelling, word order, or other differences that do not change the meaning of the passage. As Tricia puts it, variants need to be weighed, not merely counted.
The takeaway for Mama Bears? We don’t have to teach our kids to fear questions about biblical manuscripts. We can give them tools for investigating those questions using Scripture, reason, and reality—and help them understand why the hosts conclude that the New Testament has been reliably transmitted.
Main Points Covered
- The New Testament was transmitted through multiple written lines, not like a single game of telephone.
- The abundance of manuscripts helps establish reliability because textual critics can compare copies across different manuscript families.
- Earlier and higher-quality manuscripts carry particular weight when scholars reconstruct the original wording.
- Textual variants should be weighed, not simply counted. Most involve spelling, word order, or other differences that don’t affect meaning.
- We can confidently recover what the New Testament authors wrote, while leaving the separate question of whether their claims are true for the next episode.
Resources & Organizations Mentioned
Scriptures:
- Hebrews 1:3
- John 18
- Romans 8:1
- John 7 / John 8:1–11
- Mark 16:9–20
Other Resources:
- Life-Givers Apologetics by Tricia Scribner
- Crows and the Missing Piece by JD Carmolinga
Quotable Quotes
The New Testament has the earliest and most documentation of any ancient writing. - Tricia Scribner Share on X When it comes to the differences called variants among ancient New Testament manuscripts, you must weigh them, not count them. - Amy Davison Share on X We can be confident that the text that we hold in our hands is authentic to what the original apostles wrote. - Tricia Scribner Share on X
We are all in this together, so sometimes our posts are a bit of all of us.
