They have found that fragments from the scrolls in the Dead-Sea find—the ones that they had assumed were blank—actually have text on them. What will they find written? Should we worry?

This reminds me—recently, I had the pleasure of having a young lady from Lebanon visit over a cup of tea. She innocently brought up the subject of religion and wanted to share with me her thoughts. She then proceeded to explain to me how the Biblical text had been corrupted and so on.
While I am good at written communication, I am hopeless when it comes to speech.

When someone says that the Biblical text is not reliable, and they are actually referring to the manuscripts and not to the truths contained in the text, then it ought to be a fairly simple matter to settle. I mean, you do not need a Christian or someone Jewish to defend this. Just any secular person who is somewhat aware of the branch of study called textual criticism should be able to research it. I am sure a properly-trained Christian apologist would be able to supply the finer details, but to refute the idea that the Biblical text is corrupted and unreliable is quite easy to do.

They would come to the conclusion that the manuscripts available for the Biblical texts are more copious and closer to the original autographs than what is available for any other ancient text, like Homer for instance.

That alone cannot prove that the Bible is what it claims to be. So truth seekers may have many questions that they can ask and many reasonable objections. But corruption of Biblical texts is not one of them.

Anyway when the lady said this, I think a few useless sounds escaped from my throat—I told you I am no good at this—but she went on to explain that she had seen this with her own eyes. By this she meant that a Bible owned by a lady she knew was different from another Bible she saw somewhere else.

As I did not know where to begin to explain her misunderstanding,  I just told her that one day we can meet and talk about this, because it is a big subject.

Indeed this is a big subject—the reliability of the Biblical text. Christians have always maintained that the Bible is reliable as a text, but when the Dead-Sea scrolls were found, so well preserved, and when the Biblical texts that it included were found to be practically the same as what we hold in our hands today, that claim was vindicated. It never ceases to thrill me.

Now they seem to have found some more text on scroll fragments that, for more than half a century, were assumed to have been blank. Do you think we need to be afraid that something will be found that will suggest that the Bible texts we have are not what were in the original autographs? After all, if the Bible is not accurate, the case for Christianity will be shaken to the core. So it is always significant and exciting when news like this comes out.

Click here for the article that discusses the blank Dead-Sea scrolls.