I have shown
in previous blogs that it is reasonable to conclude that the New Testament
documents were written
early, and that they are reliable
in that they are corroborated by outside sources and they have not changed over
time. The next question of
reliability comes from the fact that we do not have any of the original
documents. So, how do we know that what
we have now says the same thing as the original?
The answer
comes from the method used to reconstruct ancient texts. Greg Koukl, from Stand to Reason, uses recreating an old
recipe as a good example of how we can know that we have an accurate copy of
the original writings.[1] Suppose you lose your copy of a family recipe
that has been handed down to you from your great-great-great grandmother 200
years ago. Luckily, several hand-written
copies have been made throughout the years (before copy machines) and handed
down to all the ancestors, so you call all your relatives and collect all their
copies – let’s say you are able to collect 25 hand-written copies. After all are collected, they are all
compared – but immediately you notice some differences! 20 of the copies are virtually identical
except for some misspellings or abbreviations.
Of the remaining 5 copies, one lists the ingredients in a different
order, another two have phrases inverted (“mix and chop” instead of “chop and
mix”), one includes adding cayenne pepper (an ingredient that isn’t on any
other copy), and one leaves out cumin (an ingredient that is on every other
copy).
From just
these 25 copies, is it possible to reconstruct the original? Most of the
differences in the copies are inconsequential. The misspellings, the different
order of ingredients, and the abbreviations all have exactly the same meaning. The inverted phrase and the different
ingredients can all easily be resolved by looking at the other copies. It is more probable that 1 or 2 people would
make copying errors instead of 23 or 24 people making a mistake. Even if there were more mistakes, you could
still reconstruct the originals to a high level of confidence by comparing all
the copies.
You would
have more confidence in reconstructing the original documents if you had more
copies and if those copies were dated more closely to the original
writings. So, just how many copies of
the New Testament documents do we have? There
are about 5700 hand written Greek manuscripts and over 9000 manuscripts in
other languages such as Syriac, Coptic, Latin, and Arabic. Included in these manuscripts are hundreds of
copies of the gospels. The earliest surviving copy is dated to within 25 years
of the original writings. Not all of these ancient manuscripts are complete New
Testaments, and some are dated as late as the tenth century, but the point is that
there are a lot of copies that were spread out over the Middle East, Europe,
Asia, and Northern Africa. With so many copies, it is easy to reconstruct what
the original documents must have said.
Many have heard the textual critic Bart Ehrman disagree about
the accuracy of the current New Testament; he gives the impression in his
popular writings that what we have now is corrupted and uncertain. It turns out
that Bart Ehrman misrepresents the data to lay audiences. In his scholarly
papers – the writings that must be peer reviewed – he agrees that textual
scholars have been able to reconstruct the New Testament documents to about 99%
accuracy.[2]
Daniel B. Wallace, director of the
Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, says of Ehrman’s popular
writings:
This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. Even Ehrman
admitted in the appendix to Misquoting Jesus, “Essential Christian beliefs
are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New
Testament.” The extent to which, the reasons for which, and the nature of which
the orthodox scribes corrupted the New Testament has been overblown. And the
fact that such readings can be detected by comparison with the readings of
other ancient manuscripts indicates that the fingerprints of the original text
are still to be seen in the extant manuscripts.[3]
Because of the tremendous
numbers of surviving copies, it is reasonable to conclude that we have an
accurate copy of the original New Testament documents.
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