The evidence. No original ("autograph") of any biblical book survives, as none survives for any ancient work. What survives are copies, and here the Bible is unusually well-attested. The New Testament comes down in thousands of Greek manuscripts (plus early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic and more), vastly more, and from closer to the time of writing, than for any other work of antiquity; some fragments (such as the tiny papyrus P52 of John) are dated by palaeographers to within a couple of generations of the originals, though that dating is an estimate from handwriting style and is itself debated, with a number of specialists arguing for a range decades or more later. For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls (found from late 1946 or early 1947 at Qumran) pushed our oldest Hebrew copies back roughly a thousand years, and the Great Isaiah Scroll, about a millennium older than the medieval manuscripts behind our printed Hebrew Bibles, proved to be substantially the same text, a striking witness to careful copying. The 1915 International Standard Bible Encyclopedia's articles "Text of the Old Testament" and "New Testament, Text of" tell the same transmission story from the scholarship of a century ago.
The counter-case (attributed, not minimised). Because everything is a copy of a copy, the manuscripts also disagree among themselves in hundreds of thousands of places (the more copies, the more variants). Textual critics, the field of textual criticism exists precisely to weigh these, judge that the vast majority are trivial (spelling, word order, obvious slips) and that no cardinal teaching hangs on a disputed reading; but a few substantial passages ARE textually doubtful and are flagged in most modern Bibles (the longer ending of Mark, 16:9–20; the woman caught in adultery, John 7:53–8:11; the "Johannine comma," 1 John 5:7). Skeptical scholars (e.g. Bart Ehrman) stress the uncertainty and the theological motives some scribes may have had; conservative scholars stress the recoverability of the original from the wealth of witnesses. The fact is the enormous, early, cross-checkable manuscript tradition; the argument is how close that gets us to the autographs, a question of degree on which honest scholars differ. Cross-references: ISBE "Text of the Old Testament" and "New Testament, Text of"; the Septuagint (the ancient Greek OT, an independent 3rd–2nd-c. BC witness that sometimes differs from the Hebrew) is held in this reference as.
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