Dumb question time: What original bible texts do we really have?

[Bolo Boffin]

5. We don't have Paul's original copy of any letter he wrote, for example.

We have no document like that.

What we have is lots of different manuscripts, some old but most much later, with various disagreements among them. Modern scholars have painstakingly put together critical texts of each book, listing out the major variants and the texual support with each. That's what you look at when you read a Nestle-Aland Greek text of the New Testament. These critical texts also take into account the various languages the books have been translated to when that language demonstrates another variant in the original language.

The Hebrew scriptures are the same, but with manuscripts much further removed from the original composition date. There was a major translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek called the Septuagint, and it's also reconstructed because of its importance. In fact, the New Testament authors appear to have relied on it more than the actual Hebrew scriptures.

We can be reasonably sure we have the original content of most of the New Testament books, with the trouble points clearly laid out (the last few verses of Mark, for example, or the story of the woman caught in adultery that bounces around the gospels until it settles in John where it is today). Less so the Hebrew scriptures.