The Bible is accurate (Was "Why no Trinitarian...")

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> >This is an impossibel task for man. No one really knows, unless some new
> >discovery is brought to light. weither the Bible is accurate or not.
> 
> The Bible is accurate.

[250 lines of text follow.]

Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

by Greg Koukl

In the spring of 1989 I listened to syndicated talk show host Larry
King interview Shirley McLaine about the New Age.  When a Christian
caller contested her view with an appeal to the New Testament, McLaine
brushed him off with the objection that the Bible has been changed and
translated so many times over the last 2000 years that it's impossible
to have any confidence in its accuracy.  King was quick to endorse her
"facts."  "Everyone knows that," he grunted.

This appeal to common knowledge is enough to satisfy the ordinary,
garden variety, man-on-the-street critic of the New Testament.  One
need only appeal to the common party game "telephone" to demonstrate
how reasonable this objection is.  Whisper a message to one person and
let it be transferred from person to person in a circle and compare
the message's final form with the original.  The difference is usually
good for a few laughs and is enough to convince the skeptic that the
New Testament documents are equally unreliable.

As you can see, the argument against authenticity can be simply
stated.  How can we know that the documents we have in our possession
accurately reflect the originals that were destroyed almost two
millennium ago?  Communication is never perfect;  people make mistakes
and those errors are compounded with each successive generation.

But offering evidence on its behalf is much more difficult.  Usually
the objection is raised by people who have very little understanding
about the real issue.  Like many issues relating to the validity of
historic Christianity, this objection is based on ignorance.  I don't
mean to be pejorative here.  I'm simply making the point that this is
not really a religious question at all but an academic one,  one that
can be answered in an academic way totally unrelated to spiritual
convictions.

The concern about authenticity can be answered with an apologetic
technique I simply call "Just the Facts, M'am."  The response is
neither a religious or philosophic argument, but a simple appeal to
facts.

The objection, at first glance is compelling, but it's really based on
two misconceptions about the process of transmission.  The first
assumption that the transmission is linear, more or less, as in the
telephone example--one person communicates to a second who
communicates to a third, etc.  In a linear paradigm you are left with
one message and many generations between it and the original.  Second,
the example involves oral transmission which is more easily distorted
and misconstrued.  Neither assumption applies to the written text of
the New Testament.  The transmission was not linear but geometric, and
it was done in writing.  Written manuscripts can be tested.

Let me illustrate how such a test can be made.  Pretend you wrote a
letter to your Aunt Martha in which you revealed the meaning of the
universe.  She was so touched by it she hand wrote three copies and
sent them to friends (Aunt Martha is still in the technological dark
ages--no Xerox).  They were equally moved and each penned three new
copies and sent them off to others.  One day aunt Martha's pet
Schnauzer eats your original.  Beside herself, she contacts her three
friends who contact their three friends.  They round up all the
manuscript copies, nine in all.
When she lays them out on the bed she notices eight of the nine are
exactly the same, but one has two misspelled words.  Do you think she
could accurately reconstruct your original?  Of course she could.

If you carry the analogy out further by extending the copies for a
couple more generations, you might have 75 copies, 67 exactly alike,
four with misspelled words, three with some phrases inverted and one
that had one sentence that was completely unique.  Could you still
reconstruct the original?  Certainly.  The errors could be noted by
comparing the existing manuscripts, provided there was some
significant agreement among them.  The misspellings would be obvious
errors, the inversions would stand out and be easilly restored, and
you'd rightly conclude that it's more plausible that one sentence be
accidentally added to one copy than omitted from 74.


Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

by Greg Koukl  (part 2)

As you can see, it's entirely conceivable that with the right textual
evidence, we can be confident of reconstructing an original.  This, in
simplified form, is the science of textual criticism, the academic
discipline of reconstucting a missing original from existing
manuscripts that are generations removed from the autograph.
According to F.F.Bruce, "it's object {is} to determine as exactly as
possible from the available evidence the original words of the
documents in question."[1]

The science of textual criticism is used to test all documents of
antiquity, including historical and literary writings.  it's not a
theological enterprise based on haphazard hopes and guesses; it's a
linguistic exercise that follows a set of established rules.  It
allows an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption
of any work.

The ability of any scholar to do effective textual criticism depends
on two questions.  First, how many existing copies are there to
examine and compare?  Second, how close in time are the oldest
existing documents to the original?  if the numbers are few and the
time gap wide, the original is harder to reconstruct with confidence.
If there are many copies and the oldest existing copies are reasonably
close in time to the original we can have much more confidence in our
ability to pinpoint the exact wording of the autograph.

To get an idea of the significance of the New Testament manuscript
evidence, note for a moment the record for non-biblical texts.  The
important first century document The Jewish War, by Jewish aristocrat
and historian Josephus, survives in only nine complete manuscripts
dating from the 5th century. [2]  Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome is
one of the chief historical sources for the Roman world of New
Testament times yet, surprisingly, it survives in partial form in only
two manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages. [3] Thucydides' history
survives in eight copies; there are 10 copies of Caesar's Gallic Wars,
eight copies of Herodotus' History, and seven copies of Plato, all
dated over a millennium from the original.  Homer's Iliad has the most
impressive manuscript evidence for any secular work with 643 existing
copies. [4]

Bruce's comments put the discussion in perspective: "No classical
scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus
or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest manuscripts of their
works which are of any use to us are over 1300 years later than the
originals." [5]

For most documents of antiquity only a handful of manuscripts exist,
some facing a time gap of 800-2000 years or more, yet scholars are
confident of reconstructing the originals with some significant degree
of accuracy.  In fact, virtually all of our knowledge of ancient
history depends on these documents.

By comparison, the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is
stunning.  The most recent count shows 5,366 separate Greek
manuscripts represented by early fragments, uncial codices
(manuscripts in capital Greek letters bound together in book form),
and miniscules (small Greek letters in cursive style)!

Among the nearly 3,000 miniscule fragments are 34 complete New
Testaments dating from the 9th to the 15th centuries. [6]

Uncial manuscripts provide virtually complete codices back to the 4th
century, though some are a bit younger.  Codex Sinaiticus, purchased
by the British government from the soviet government at Christmas,
1933, for L100,000 [7], is dated c. 340.[8]  The nearly complete Codex
Vaticanus is the oldest uncial, dated c. 325-350 [9].  Codex
Alexandrinus contains the whole Old Testament and a nearly complete
New Testament and dates from the late 4th century to the early 5th
century.


-----------------
1 Bruce, F.F., The New Testament Documents:  Are They Reliable? (Grand
Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1974), p. 19.

2 Barnett, Paul, Is the New Testament History? (Ann Arbor:  Vine
Books, 1986, p. 45.

3 Geisler, Norman L., Nix, William E., A General Introduction to the
Bible (Chicago:  Moody Press, 1986), p. 405

4 Ibid., p. 408.

5 Bruce, op. cit., pp. 16-17

6 Geisler, op. cit., p. 402.

7 Metzger, Bruce M., The Text of the New Testament (New york and
Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 45.

8 Geisler, op. cit., p392

9 Ibid., p. 391.

-----------------------End of Part2--------------------------------

Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

by Greg Koukl  (part 3)

The most fascinating evidence comes from the fragments (as opposed to
the codices).  The Chester Beatty Papyri contains most of the new
Testament and is dated mid-third century. [10]  The Bodmer Papyri II
collection, whose discovery was announced in 1956, includes the first
fourteen chapters of the Gospel of John and much of the last seven
chapters.  It dates from about A.D. 200 or earlier [11].

The most amazing find of all, however, is a small portion of John
18:31-33 discovered in Egypt. Known as the John Rylands Papyrii, it's
barely three inches square and represents the earliest known copy of
any part of the New Testament.  The papyrii is dated on
palaeographical grounds at around A.D. 117-138 (though it may even be
earlier)[12], showing that the Gospel of John was circulated as far
away as Egypt within 30 years of its composition.

Two other cross checks on the accuracy of the manuscripts remain:
ancient versions and patristic quotations.

Early on Greek documents were translated into Latin and by the 3rd and
4th centuries into Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, etc.  They
helped missionaries reach new language groups in the vernacular as the
gospel spread and the church grew. [13]  These translations of the
Greek manuscripts (called "versions") help critics answer textual
questions about the underlying Greek manuscripts.

In addition, there are ancient extra-biblical sources--
characteristically catechisms, lectionaries, and quotes from the
church fathers--that faithfully record the Scriptures.  Paul Barnett
says that the "Scriptures...gave rise to an immense output of early
Christian literature which quoted them at length and, in effect,
preserved them."[14]  Metzger notes the amazing fact that "if all
other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were
destroyed, (the patristic quotations) would be sufficient alone for
the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament." [15]

What can we conclude from this evidence?  When comparing all known
manuscript copies of the New Testament, there is total agreement on
roughly 85% of the text.  Of the remaining differences, 13% are
trivial and easily corrected.  Of the 2% of significant textual
problems left, 1.89% yields to vigorous textual criticism.  This means
that our New Testament is 99.9% pure.  In the entire text of 20,000
lines, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), and none affects
any significant doctrine.

This issue is no longer contested by non-Christian scholars, and for a
good reason.  Simply put, if we reject the authenticity of the New
Testament on textual grounds we'd have to reject every ancient work of
antiquity and declare null and void every piece of historical
information we have written sources prior to the beginning of the 2nd
millennium A.D.

Has the New Testament been altered?  Critical, academic analysis says
it has not.


-------------------
10 Geisler, op. cit., p. 392.

11 Metzger, op. cit., p. 39040.

12 Geisler, op. cit., p. 388.

13 Barnett, op. cit., p. 44.

14 Ibid., p. 46-47.

15 Metzger, op. cit., p. 86.


------------------------------------The End--------------------------