Skeptics make lots of arguments against the Bible, but there's one that stands out as the worst argument

because it would destroy our understanding of history if it were taken seriously.

And that is the copies of copies argument against the Bible.

Skeptics, usually atheists, but sometimes Muslims who are parroting atheist arguments,

will say that we can't know what the Bible originally said

because we don't have the original copies of the biblical texts, and so they could have been

radically changed at some point in the copying process. Even critics who should know better

peddle this kind of doubt about scripture, like in this interview with New Testament scholar

Bart Erman on a pro-Islam channel.

We don't have Matthews' gospel. We don't have the original thing he wrote. What we have are copies that were made of that original thing he wrote.

And as it turns out, we don't actually have the first copies. We don't have, and we don't have copies of the copies, and we don't have copies of the copies of the copy. We have copies that are from, so the first time we get a complete copy of the

Gospel of Matthew, from beginning to end with a manuscript, the whole thing is 300 years later.

Ermin is correct that we no longer possess the original manuscripts of the Bible, but here's why

this is a bad argument. We don't have the original manuscripts of the Bible. But here's why this is a bad argument.

We don't have the original manuscripts of any work that was composed in the ancient world.

We don't have Plato's original Republic. We don't have the original Jewish histories of Josephus.

We don't have the original Roman histories of Tacitus or the Greek histories of Thucydides.

Those books are written on dried leaves or animal skins that

were lost, destroyed, or decayed over time. But modern scholars can reconstruct the original

manuscripts of these works to an extremely high degree of accuracy by comparing all the

surviving copies through a process called textual criticism. For example, although we do not have any of Plato's original writings, we do have about

250 ancient manuscripts that help us reconstruct what Plato originally said.

...