One thing that I have learned about modern people is when it comes to the Bible they easily believe that the biblical documents, being so ancient, have been dramatically altered over the centuries. For that reason, they cannot be relied upon as a source of spiritual truth.

Eleven years ago, I wrote a book titled, Reliable Truth: The Validity of the Bible in an Age of Skepticism. There is a chapter in the book on ancient manuscripts.

One interesting fact in this chapter was that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. Prior to that, all written manuscripts had been handwritten and copied and then recopied for thousands of years.

What most people do not know is that up until this time, when the printing press was invented, there were only around thirty-thousand books that existed in all of Europe. And what’s interesting is that nearly all of these thirty-thousand works were Bibles or Bible commentaries meticulously recorded by monks over the centuries.

It is also compelling to note that ancient classical literature owes its survival today to Christianity and the Church.

Furthermore, there have been many ancient manuscripts that have been discovered that help validate the accuracy of these writings. A good example of this is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy named Mohammed was in search of a lost goat. As he was throwing rocks, one of them fell into a hole, and he was surprised to hear the shattering of pottery. He was on the west side of the Dead Sea about eight miles south of Jericho. He was hoping he had discovered a buried treasure, but he was disappointed to find it was nothing but a cave full of jars containing leather scrolls. They had been carefully sealed and, as it was later determined, had been there for almost two thousand years. Archeologists believe they were placed there in 68 A.D.

As you can imagine, archeologists, journalists, and scholars flooded to the excavation site. For nine years they excavated the entire area. In the process, they found numerous scrolls, thousands of manuscripts, and a number of different fragments, all well-preserved in airtight clay jars. They’d been placed there, ironically, by a Jewish monastic society called the Essenes. And most scholars believe that they were hidden in these caves during the Jewish revolt against Rome—sometime between 66 A.D. and 73 A.D—as a protection against the Roman attack.

When these manuscripts were first discovered, those to whom the Bedouin shepherd boy had told his story were also disappointed. They, too, would have preferred treasure over manuscripts—but soon they realized that people would pay money for such discoveries. Fortunately, they sold them to credible individuals who valued them and who would ensure they were placed in the hands of universities, museums, and collections where they could be properly studied.

One important scroll in particular was the ancient Isaiah scroll, which was apparently copied around 100 B.C. This was such a significant discovery because prior to it, the oldest copy available of the Old Testament had been copied in the ninth century A.D. Thus, until this discovery, there existed a thousand-year time gap for the Old Testament, and this discovery shortened the gap so dramatically that it excited the interest of religion scholars all over the world. The people who possessed this copy of the book of Isaiah, trying to determine what they actually had in their possession, contacted the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem.

An employee named John Trever, who had just received his PhD from the school, also happened to be an excellent amateur photographer. Trever took photographs of all the passages of the great Isaiah scroll, which measured twenty-four feet long and ten-inches high, and sent these images to Dr. William Albright, the leading biblical archeologist in the field. Having received the photographs, Albright studied them and concluded that the Dead Sea find is,

[T]he greatest manuscript discovery of modern times! . . . And there can happily not be the slightest doubt in the world about the genuineness of the manuscript.

And he dated the scrolls to approximately 100 B.C.

Award-winning freelance journalist Jeffrey Sheler covered the American religion scene for nearly two decades at U.S. News and World Report. He writes extensively about the Dead Sea Scrolls in his well-researched book, Is the Bible True? He writes,

[When scholars] carefully examined the fragile parchment scrolls and assembled hundreds of brittle fragments into page after page of Biblical text, the scholars were astonished at what they found.

Notre Dame professor Eugene Ulrich, who was an editor of a series called “Discoveries in the Judean Desert,” comments,

The scrolls have shown that our traditional Bible has been amazingly and accurately preserved for over two thousand years.

What biblical scholars ultimately discovered, then, was that the scrolls found in these caves were Old Testament manuscripts and fragments and they were virtual matches to copies written thousands of years later. But what may be of the greatest significance, unlike the many fragments discovered, is that they also possessed the Isaiah scroll, comprising the entire book—all sixty-six chapters—of Isaiah. It is over 2,100 years old today.

What is so amazing is how the text has undergone so little alteration as it was copied over the centuries. Norman Geisler suggests, for instance, to take the fifty-third chapter of the book of Isaiah, which many consider to be the most important chapter. It was written about a “suffering servant” who would bear the iniquity of the world.

Of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only seventeen letters in question. Ten of these letters are simply a matter of spelling, which does not affect the meaning. Four more letters suggest stylistic changes, such as conjunctions, and the remaining three letters are minor stylistic changes, such as conjunctions. The remaining three letters comprise the word “light,” which is added in verse eleven (Isaiah 23: 11) and does not affect the meaning greatly.

Thus, in one chapter, of 166 words, there is only one word (three letters) in question, after a thousand years of transmission, and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage.

This demonstrates the great care that was given by those who copied it. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are portions of every Old Testament book except for the book of Esther.

So, can you see the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls as they relate to the Old Testament? In addition, as James Agresti points out . . .

One of the primary facts revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the traditional text of the Old Testament has been transmitted very accurately for at least two millennia.

Clearly, those who copied and recopied the Old Testament documents did so with great care and reverence. They believed they were performing a sacred task that would influence many generations to come. And they were right.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.