The objection runs like this: nobody has Moses’s scroll or Isaiah’s first copy. Every Bible on the shelf rests on copies of copies, made by hand over many centuries. So how could anyone know the wording survived? The evidence gives a fairly direct answer. Copying alone does not doom a text to drift. What matters is how the copying was done and whether older copies can be checked against newer ones. For the Bible, both can be examined, and Old Testament scholar Dr. Paul Wegner argues that both point toward faithful transmission.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, put the challenge plainly: “We just have copies of copies.” The question that follows is hers too: “if we don’t have the original, how can we know what the original says?” It is fair, and it can be tested.
What Decay Would Leave Behind
Start with what the objection predicts. If hand copying steadily degraded the text, three things should show up:
- Loose work. Scribes would work carelessly, with no reliable way to catch errors.
- Wide differences. Much older copies, when found, would differ widely from later ones, because centuries of drift would have piled up.
- Hidden changes. Deliberate alterations would be concealed, since anyone changing a sacred text would want the change to pass unnoticed.
Faithful transmission would leave a different trail: strict copying standards, some method for comparing copies, old manuscripts that closely match later ones, and changes that are small, explainable and visible.
Those predictions can be checked in order.
The Rules and the Checks
Scribes have a poor reputation. In the Gospels they appear beside the Pharisees as targets of Jesus’s rebuke, and many readers carry that impression over to their work as copyists. If the scribes are remembered for hypocrisy, why trust what they copied?
The written standards they worked under are the first piece of evidence. Wegner points to a section of the Talmud that sets out how Scripture was to be written. One rule stands out: “if it has three mistakes on any page, they had to totally throw it away and start over.” A copyist could not erase. A mistake in writing the divine name meant discarding the page. A scribe was not to return even a king’s greeting until he had finished writing the name Yahweh. The rules governed the spacing between letters and which materials could be used.
These rules show the standard the tradition held itself to. They do not prove that every scribe in every century met it. A rulebook records an expectation, not a performance record. Still, a community that throws away a page over a few errors is treating the text as something to guard, and it is hard to square that with the picture of casual copying. Fields drew the fair conclusion: “it’s not a careless pursuit.”
A second detail matters more than the rules. Copyists were already comparing manuscripts in the centuries before Jesus, doing an early form of what scholars now call textual criticism. Wegner defines the term: “Textual criticism means to compare manuscripts and try to determine the most accurate reading.” He describes an account of three Torah scrolls kept in the temple. When two agreed against the third, the third was corrected.
Strict rules reduce errors, but no human process removes them entirely. Comparing copies catches what slips through. The objection pictures a single chain, where each mistake passes forward forever. The evidence describes something closer to a network, where copies check one another.
The Scrolls From Qumran
A careful process is promising, but the real test is a comparison across time. If drift had been happening, copies far older than the ones scholars had been relying on would expose it. Such copies came from caves near Qumran, in the finds now called the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Wegner says the oldest manuscript he knows of from those caves goes back to about 400 BC, while most date from around 150 BC onward. He puts the number of these biblical manuscripts at about 300, and notes that new fragments still surface, partly because some were sold off to different places. These figures come from conversation, and anyone wanting precision should check a standard reference. The argument does not depend on the exact count.
The decisive observation concerns Isaiah, which is Wegner’s specialty. Among the finds are three major Isaiah scrolls, and he says one of them is almost exactly like the text we have today. He frames the comparison across the long era of hand copying, from about 150 BC to the printing press: “Those manuscripts were almost exact.” He adds: “So that gives you some clue as to how careful they were.”
This is the most direct test available. The comparison works by setting the ancient scroll beside the medieval Hebrew text that later Bibles were built on and noting where the wording differs. The objection predicts large differences after more than a thousand years of hand copying. The Isaiah evidence shows a very close match. The scrolls are published and studied, so the claim does not rest on Wegner’s word alone.
The limits should be stated plainly. One closely matching scroll speaks most directly to one book. It shows what careful copying could achieve. It cannot by itself show that every book was copied with equal care. Wegner himself does not claim every Qumran manuscript matches the later text word for word. He says “a good share of them” are very similar to what we have today. Some differ, which is what real manuscripts look like, and why comparison is necessary at all.
The Edits the Scribes Admitted
The strongest counterevidence is that scribes did change the text. Wegner names this rather than avoiding it.
Some changes look like updates. Genesis 14:14 says Abram pursued his enemies “unto Dan,” yet Joshua and Judges show the city did not take that name until the Danites captured it, a couple of hundred years after Moses. Wegner compares it to calling Chicago the Windy City before anyone called it that. His explanation is that copyists sometimes updated place names so readers would recognize them. The end of Deuteronomy works similarly:
“And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10).
That line makes sense only if it was written some time after Moses died. Wegner notes that the Talmud itself credits Joshua with the closing verses, and he has no problem with a later prophet adding a few lines at the end of the book.
Other changes were made to avoid embarrassment. In a scene where Abraham stands before the Lord (Genesis 18:22), Wegner says the original wording had the Lord remaining before Abraham. Once standing before someone came to mean honoring them, that reading seemed to have God honoring Abraham, so the scribes reversed it. And as Wegner puts it, “the scribes tell us they do that.”
He gives a second example from Judges. A man named Jonathan, whom the scribes regarded as wicked, was traced back to Moses. Finding the connection shameful, they inserted the Hebrew letter nun to turn the name into Manasseh, and wrote it raised above the line so readers could see it had been added (Judges 18:30).
How damaging is this? If the claim is that no copyist ever touched a word, these examples refute it. Careful defenders of the text do not claim that. But a caution belongs here too. These are Wegner’s chosen examples, and a handful of cases cannot tell us how often such changes happened across the whole tradition. That question belongs to the wider study of manuscripts, not to a few illustrations. Wegner’s own judgment is that the updates did no harm and were meant to help: “I don’t have a problem with a scribe trying to help keep the text accurate.”
The evidentiary point survives the caution. A text quietly reshaped would hide its changes. In these cases the scribes recorded or marked what they did. A tradition that records its own edits hands later readers the means to check its work.
The Books Written After Jesus
The objection usually targets the whole Bible, so the same reasoning should be tested on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
The first factor is numbers. Wegner counts almost 6,000 Greek manuscripts of these books, “5,500 and some.” Many differences among them are spelling that does not affect meaning. More copies means more variation in total, but also more material for comparison.
The second is distance. Wegner states that “we’ve got manuscripts that go back now within 50 to 75 years of the originals.” His argument from that gap is about living memory: “that’s not much that can happen in 75 years, because you’re gonna have people that are alive when those manuscripts were being written.” Anyone altering the text would face readers who knew its earlier form.
The third is method. Counting manuscripts is not enough. A late manuscript copied many times can carry many errors, so a reading found in more copies is not automatically the better one. Scholars give weight to early manuscripts and apply set principles to decide which reading is most likely original. The result is an eclectic text, built from the best readings across all the manuscripts.
A common misunderstanding also needs correcting. People compare English Bibles, see the differences, and assume the underlying text is unstable. Wegner’s reply: “the Greek manuscripts are actually closer than the English translations are to it.” Varied English wording mostly reflects translators’ goals and choices.
The same fact explains why modern translations sometimes differ from the King James Version. Earlier Greek manuscripts have surfaced since the 1600s. More evidence, found later, lets scholars get closer to what was first written.
What Remains Open
The gap for the Old Testament is real. The 50-to-75-year window applies only to the Greek books. If Moses wrote when Wegner places him, the oldest Qumran material still sits many centuries after the writing. The scrolls show stability across the long era of hand copying that followed them. They cannot show what happened in the earliest stretch. For that period, the argument rests on the scribal culture and on what the text itself shows, with no manuscripts to set side by side.
Wegner admits uncertainty too: “there is a certain amount of doubt or possibility that some changes could have happened.” His claim is high confidence, short of certainty about every letter.
Some of his arguments are theological, and they should be weighed that way. He suggests God allowed the originals to perish because “we would probably worship the originals more than the God behind them,” adding, “Because we venerate just about everything.” He also argues that if God holds people responsible for what Scripture says, God has reason to ensure a text that can be known. A believer may find these reasons persuasive. A skeptic cannot check them. The manuscript case stands or falls on manuscripts.
That brings the question back to the scribes. Fields observed that Jesus rebuked the people who spent the most time with Scripture without treating the text in their hands as unreliable. Wegner agreed that their problem was failing to live by what they copied, while their texts were accurate. A copyist’s moral failures do not reach back and change the wording of what was carefully copied. Those are two separate questions, and the evidence speaks to the second.
The “copies of copies” objection assumes copying means drift. The evidence shows strict standards, early comparison among copies, ancient manuscripts that closely match later ones, and changes that were often marked. None of that proves the Bible is inspired, a claim that rests on other grounds. It does mean a reader opening the text today is not guessing at a lost original. The wording can be examined, and the examination has been done.
