Bible Translations (Final)

The disciples of Jesus wrote the New Testament in Greek; and though we do not have the original documents, we do have around 6,000 copies of the Greek manuscripts that were made very close to the time of the originals.  These various manuscripts, or copies, agree with each other to almost 100 percent accuracy.  Statistically, the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure.  That means that there is only ½ of 1% of all the copies that do not agree with each other perfectly.  Furthermore, the majority of those “disagreements” are merely spelling errors and minor word differences, e.g. instead of saying Jesus, a variation might be "Jesus Christ."

Even if all of the New Testament manuscripts were destroyed, it could be extracted from the writings of the Church Fathers.  Their numerous books and letters contain over 38,000 quotations from the New Testament.  From their writings alone we could reconstruct the entire New Testament minus about 11 verses.

Lastly, when the Bible is translated it is not translated from a translation of a translation of a translation.  It is translated from the original language into the desired language.  It is a one-step process and not a series of steps that can lead to corruption.  A Spanish translation is derived directly from the same Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. It is the same for each and every language into which the Bible is translated.

In summary - leaving the matter of the Bible being God’s word as a separate topic –the Bible is more reliable as historical literature than any other readily accepted historical document.

Knowing this, one can read the New Testament and conclude that Jesus established the Catholic Church, and it is through that Church, that we learn what books comprise the Bible and that those books are indeed inspired.