Most people think of the signature of a famous person when they hear the word autograph. Others might remember collecting notes from friends in their high school yearbooks. And collectors think of the value of a genuine Shakespeare, Washington, or Lincoln autograph.
Bible scholars are talking about something different. For them, an autograph is the original manuscript for a book of the Bible - and those were written so long ago that none of them have survived to the present day.
That said, we have thousands and thousands of manuscript copies as evidence that such originals did exist, and by comparing these copies with each other and in light of their dates, we can come very close to reconstructing the autographs. There are places where a copyist may have dropped a word or letter, a couple places where passages may be been added (the woman caught in adultery is perhaps the best known example), spots where a name has been changed to a pronoun or vice versa, and other relatively minor differences among the multitude of existing copies.
The important thing isn't that there are so many little differences, but that there is so much consistency over centuries of making copies from copies of copies. As Hank Hanegraaff always points out, God has maintained the integrity of Scripture despite all the years of copying. And most important of all, the message of the Bible has survived unscathed despite the text being handled by humans for so many generations before the advent of the printing press, which finally made it easy to produce thousands and millions of identical copies of the sacred text.
Even though the autographs are gone and most of us can't fathom the original Hebrew and Greek of all those copies, God has also made sure that we have sufficiently accurate translations into English (and many, many other languages) that the message we read today is the same one written into those original manuscripts.
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