text: Actually, very few autographs (original copies) of ANY work older than about 300 years have survived.  We have no originals of the works of Aristotle, Homer, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, or even Shakespeare.  Shakespeare died less than 400 years ago.  Yet scholars believe that the copies we have of all these works are accurate to the original.  There is NO ancient writting, however, that we are more sure of than the Bible.\n\nThe Old Testament was written between 1500 and 400 BC.  The earliest copies we have of the Old Testament date between 200 BC and 200 AD.  That means that some of our earliest copies might have been written 1700 years after the fact.  This sounds like there is a lot of time to make a lot of errors in copying.  If this was any other book, that would probably be true.  However, we know a great deal about HOW the Bible was copied.  First, we know that copies were not made very often.  We have records that tell us that books were only copied once every 300-400 years or so.  These copies were done by only the best scribes, and under very strict guidelines.  We have obtained checklists that a copy must go through before it can be used.  The checklists were along this order..."The 359th word is THE, the 78th letter on the 22nd page is L, the book contains 1294 words, etc."  If the copy did not pass all of the checklist items, it was redone.  This means that our copies of the Old Testament have probably not been copied more than 8 times, and in some cases, probably only once or twice, under the strictest guidelines imaginable.  This is a far cry off from the "telephone game" scenario that critics would like you to believe.\n\nThe New Testament is a bit different.  It was not copied under such strict guidelines, and it was copied over and over and over again.  We are not so assured of its accuracy based on the methods of copying.  However, we are assured of its accuracy because of the great number of manuscripts we have, the relatively short amount of time between these copies and the originals.  We have hundreds of manuscripts from the 1st and 2nd centuries, and thousands of manuscripts from the 3rd and 4th centuries.  We are able to compare all of these manuscripts to one another and determine where and when certain discrepencies arose.  There is only .5% of the New Testament that is of any real dispute, and none of those verses contain matters of doctrine that are not addressed in other areas of the New Testament.