Can we trust the New Testament as a reliable document?
Many skeptics say no, and that it is based off of dated copies and filled with errors.
But what does the evidence say?
Christians for centuries have pointed to the evidence that we can trust the new testament is reliable to what it originally said,
So what evidence can we offer?
When it comes to ancient documents the more manuscripts we have the better.
That way there is more to cross check for accuracy and identify changes that may of happened, through the process know as textural criticism.
So we would obviously want more to compare with so we can get back to the original.
So what do we have of the new testament?
Of the original language of the new testament, we have over 5800 Greek manuscripts.
In latin we have over 10000 manuscripts. In varies other early languages we somewhere between 5000 and 10000 manuscripts.
So we have an extremely wide variety of new testament manuscripts from across the ancient world we can study and compare,
and with more manuscripts the more accurate we will be in reconstructing the original through textural criticism.
But even if we didn't have any manuscripts we would still have the entire new testament preserved in the writings of the church fathers.
It is estimated there are over 1 million new testament quotes in the church fathers alone.
If there was large amounts of accidental or intentional corruption of the text it would be easy to trace through comparing manuscripts of different regions
Dr. James White (During his debate with Bart Ehrmant): There was never a time when any one man or group of men had control over the text of the New Testament
there was never a Christian Ummah [Is an Arabic word meaning "community"]
All assertions regarding adding doctrines, changing theology, removing teachings etc are without merit.
the Christian Church was a persecuted minority without power to enforce a uniform textual transmission as in Islam.
This is far more than any other ancient document. The second most widely attested would be Homer's Illiad with only 643 copies
and then Suetonius with around 200 copies.
So if one is still skeptical of the new testament after knowing of how widely attested it is then they should be even more skeptical of other ancient works.
As Scholar Dan Wallace says: They have never thought about this other ancient literature and reflecting on what that would be like
if I'm going to be skeptical about the New Testament and I apply that skepticism to other ancient greco-roman literature. guess what? we immediately go back into the dark ages.
We've eclipsed all knowledge in the last 500 years
But not only do we have a large amount of manuscripts,
but we have very early complete manuscripts and even earlier fragments.
The oldest complete new testament is within 300 years of the original. The closest of any ancient document.
But we even have early witnesses in fragments, like this one,
P52 from 90 AD to 125 AD, and others like these (P46, 66, 67) from approximately 170 AD to 220 AD.
We also have a larger fragment from around this time in P75 which has 102 survived pages from Luke and John.
Comparing this to other ancient documents the earliest copy of the Illiad is far of with 500 years from the original
and Suetonius is 800 years from its original.
As you can see the new testament is by far the closest to its original than any other ancient document.
So if we are to be skeptical of the new testament then we should be even more skeptical of all other ancient literature.
In fact we have about a dozen fragmented manuscripts dating to around the 2nd century, which represent about 40% of the entire new testament,
and we have 120 manuscripts within 300 years of the original. Which is incredible compared to other ancient documents.
But despite this some scholars still argue the new testament copies are too late and full of errors.
The leading critic, Bart Ehrman says, "Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the original.
We don't even have copies of the copies of the original, or copies of copies of copies of originals.
What we have are copies made later–much later… And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places." [Misquoting Jesus. Page 10]
Well this seems like an odd things to say given the evidence we just discussed.
So let divide his objection into two parts and deal with each appropriately.
The first is that our earliest manuscripts are extremely far off from the originals, not even copies of copies of copies of the originals.
Well this doesn't make sense considering our earliest fragment is within 70 years or less of the original.
And several larger fragments are 140 to 160 years of the original. So why would these not be 1st or second generation copies from the original?
A papyrus manuscript in public use will last on average for more than 100 years.
There is also no reason to assume the originals or first generation copies were copied once and thrown away or lost.
In fact Ehrman acknowledges that a manuscript can likely be a direct copy of one from 100 years prior to it [The Text of the New Testament Page 91].
Every time somebody translates the Bible. They don't say: "Well. I've got to take this manuscript that I translate from and destroy that now"
That's stupid. We don't do that. It's never been done in the history of the church
There is no reason to assume the originals were just copied once and forgotten or that scribes only had one copy to pull from.
In fact, early church father Tertullian even seems to suggest the originals where still around when he was writing at the end of the second century,
"Come now, you who would indulge a better curiosity, if you would apply it to the business of your salvation,
run over to the apostolic churches, in which the very thrones of the apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings are read."[Prescription against Heresy. Chapter 36]
The latin word for "authentic" normally refers to original documents.
So it appears Tertullian is saying the originals were still in churches to that day.
He specifically refers to the letters of the Corinthians, Philippians, Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Romans and urges readers to visit the places to see the authentic writings for themselves.
Even if Tertullian didn't mean the original scrolls the apostles wrote on,
his testimony still tells us Christians in his days were concerned with having accurate writings and they were not discarding their copies as valueless, as skeptics suggests.
It reasonable to suggest if the manuscripts were read often they were copied often,
and in fact the amount of manuscripts we have today obviously suggest that.
Ehrman's reasoning seems to imply new testament copying was like a game of telephone,
where a 4th century copy is a copy of one from the 3rd century, which in turn is a copy of one from the 2nd century,
which is a copy of one from the first century, which was a copy of the original.
But there is no reason to suggest the originals, or the first copies of the originals were simply lost after they were copied once.
Scribes could always go back to the earliest copies in their day that had survived and simply copy from that.
St Irenaeus even says he had access to early copies of the book of Revelation.
Suggesting early copies were being preserved for accuracy and transmission.
And the testimonies of early church fathers indicate how sacred they considered this documents,
so they were not frivolously being copied, but being held in high regard to preserve the faith past down from the apostles.
In fact, scholars Darrell Bock and Dan Wallce note the earliest manuscripts we have probably go back to the around 100AD.
Two of the oldest manuscripts we have (papyrus 75 or P75 and codex Vaticanus or B) have an exceptionally strong agreement
And they are among the most accurate manuscripts that exist today. P75 is about 125 years older than B,
yet it is not an ancestor of B. Instead, B was copied from an earlier ancestor of P75
(See the detailed work of CL Porter) [Papyrus Bodmer XV and the Text of Codex Vaticanus and An evaluation of the Textural Variation between Pap75 and Codex Vaticanus in the Text of John].
The combination of these two manuscripts in a particular reading must surely go back to the very beginning of the second century."
So the idea that our copies are far too late doesn't stand up to evidence. And textual criticism demonstrates, [that] we are not too far off from the originals.
So what about Ehrman's other claim? That all our manuscripts have much variation and differ from one another in thousands of places?
Ehrman and other skeptics will usually throughout the fact that there 400,000 variants across new testament manuscripts, which is in fact true.
However when you look at the details. This isn't a big deal
For example, the reason we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts.
That would be expected which such a high number of manuscripts.
But even with that, remember we have close to 6000 new testament greek manuscripts
which comes to about 2.6 million pages of the new testament. If you do the math that is one variant per 6 and half pages.
Not really that much
Second what kinds variants are there? Well, 75% are simply spelling errors, which do not affect the meaning of the text.
15% are variations in Greek synonyms and transpositions, which cannot even be translated.
Over 9% do affect the meaning of the text, but they are from very late dates and obviously resolved by looking at the earlier manuscripts.
Then less than 1% do actually do affect the meaning of the text and are from early manuscripts.
But None of these variants actually challenge or affect essential Christian doctrines.
As Bart Ehrman even admits, "The position I argue for in 'Misquoting Jesus' does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger's position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament." [Misquoting Jesus. Page 252]
Dan Wallace: This Is the guy on whose works Muslims and atheists are basing their wild claims that the Orthodoxy have been so corrupt of the text that it must not have been Orthodoxy at all originally
They don't know what they're talking about
But they're basing it on Dr. Ehrman's work
He does know what he's talking about
I have happened to disagree with him about a number of things
But I don't disagree with him over this.
In fact in our three debates at the end of each debate I say:
"by the way. I think you agree with me, Bart, the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by texture variance"
And I've put this screen up. He's never disputed it. He said it. It's in print. You can't deny himself
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest Christian doctrines are affected by variants in manuscripts
and there next to zero evidence to suggest we cannot get back to the originals.
In fact, given all the evidence there are only 40 lines of the new testament unresolved by textural criticism giving it an accuracy of 99.5%,
which is by far, the best of any ancient document. [The second best is, yet again, the Illiad with 764 lines of corruption with an accuracy of 95%.]
Now obviously there is still debate over what a handful of passages were originally, and no Christian scholar argues we have exactly word for word what the original authors wrote.
But in light of this evidence we should also avoid radical skepticism, that we can certainly never know anything of what the original authors wrote.
It simply doesn't stand up to evidence.
the overwhelmling amount of scripture isn't even debated, and no textural evidence threatens the origins of any essential Christian doctrines.
So is the new testament reliable? The obvious answer is yes!
And we have barely scratched the surface of evidence.
The onus is on the skeptic. The New Testament sets the standard of providing clear evidence of its trustworthy
If that is not enough. is it possible the skeptic has set a standard that is unreasonable? and if so why?
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