Because of this, any impartial person cannot help but be impressed with their abundant testimony. They derive for the most part from attempts by scribes to improve the text in various ways. All In such a case, there would be no way of knowing whether the scribe was incompetent, for the text could not be checked against another copy. In the entire text of 20,000 lines, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), … This article contains little that is not debunked by material we have above, but there are a few points we'd like to address even so. A podcast hosted by Scott Cunningham and Chaz Celaya interviewing worship leaders, songwriters and artists. This is the important difference between updating the text (editing) and altering its meaning (redaction). Hort, The New Testament in Greek (New York, NY: MacMillan, 1957), 565. The authenticity of the New Testament text we have today rests on the foundation of a massive amount of … 2019. Your email address will not be published. The Bible (Old Testament and New Testament) outstrips every other ancient manuscript in sheer numbers and in the dates of composition from the time of its original writing. For example, the second-most-supported work behind the New Testament is Homer’s well-known poem Iliad, with more than 1,900 manuscripts.3 Ancient literature was rarely translated into another language—with the New Testament being an important exception. In other words, the words may change slightly, but the meaning is still the same. They could creep into the text through fatigue or through faulty sight, hearing, writing, memory, or judgment on the part of the scribe. It is instructive to plumb the dates of the original writings of revered ancients and examine what ancient manuscript evidence we have of them. This is one such book. Here is some of what I have learnt. Apart from the Bible, the works of Demosthenes, a classical writer, have the most documentary testimony. Two of the greatest textual scholars who ever lived, Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, had this to say concerning the amount of variation in the New Testament manuscripts: “If comparative trivialities, such as changes of order, the insertion or omission of an article with proper names, and the like, are set aside, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt can hardly amount to more than a thousandth part of the whole New Testament.”10. We might well wonder if any christian doctrines are thrown into doubt because of the variants. In the case of Homer’s Iliad, the time span is about 400 years, and, as mentioned earlier, is supported by nearly 2,000 manuscripts. The amount of time that has passed between the original manuscripts and the earliest copies available is a crucial element of determining the accuracy of transmission. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, The reliability of the New Testament text, All change – because the world is changing. The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 fragmentary Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian. For example, seven letters have survived that were written by Ignatius (AD 70–110), and nearly every book of the Bible (except 2 John and … We can appreciate the robust number of New Testament manuscripts by comparing it with the number of manuscripts available for other works from the ancient world. In fact, … Furthermore, the variant readings, whether intentional or unintentional, exist in only a very limited portion of the New Testament. Despite these variants, Daniel Wallace of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts writes, “It is quite true that (virtually) no viable variants are major threats to inerrancy…”6. That is, about 19 percent of the letters are the same. However, taking a different perspective, we find that, on average, scribes made one mistake or change in every 400-500 words they copied, which doesn’t sound nearly so bad. The entire scribal process was specified in meticulous detail to minimize the possibility of even the slightest error. To dismiss these areas of support would be self-defeating, for it would mean that every extrabiblical ancient work considered “reliable” by secular scholars—all of which are based on lesser evidence—would need to be brought into question. Some have challenged the accuracy of the New Testament (NT) manuscripts based on a statement in our book A General Introduction to the Bible that inadvertently attributed to Bruce Metzer the figure that the NT is copied with 99.5 percent accuracy. Some apologists and sceptics will favour the statistic that most agrees with the view they are promoting. This book is both scholarly and easy to read (mostly). If we add to this number more than 18,000 New Testament manuscripts written in other languages (translations) besides Greek, the overall count swells to nearly 24,000 New Testament manuscripts! Familiar with the testament codex sinaiticus, and learning from a … Therefore, it is purely an invention of Geisler which he put in the mouth of Metzger. –Daniel Webster. One word of warning must be emphasized in conclusion on the subject of transmission. Evidence that can not be ignored.But what do believers mean when they testify saying that God spoke to them.Does that mean any revelation or the written word impressing something … To understand this issue better, we should familiarize ourselves with the process Bible scholars undertake in their effort to reconstruct the original text. The time span between the date the work was originally completed and the earliest existing copy available to us is significant. Christians can truly appreciate the excellent position the New Testament occupies regarding the early dates. The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) Moody Bible Institute. Constant references to mistakes and divergences of reading might give rise to the … Thus, the intentional variations, for the most part, were the work of scribes attempting to make the text more readable, not change the meaning. Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament | Jason David BeDuhn | download | Z-Library. You can also subscribe without commenting. Visit their website to learn more, and follow Veritas on Facebook. New Testament. Therefore, when all the variants of the New Testament are considered, we are dealing with only 400 to 600 variants that have any effect on the translation of the text. In those seven letters, Ignatius quoted from 18 different books of the New Testament. The book shows this claim doesn’t make sense. Despite these variants, scholars have recognized the great accuracy with which the New Testament manuscripts were copied. ed., The Harvest Handbook of Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2019), 191-198. Here are several reasons: 1) Old manuscripts written on papyrus or leather would age and deteriorate over time. 18 Brooke Foss Westcott, Fenton John Anthony Hort, and W.J. A few dozen variants have significance, though many can be resolved because we have so many copies of each book. The voice of God is heard loud and clear in the text! What is more, church historian Phillip Schaff estimated that of the 400 variants that have affected the sense of the passages in the New Testament, only 50 of these are important.13 Facts like this led textual scholars Kurt and Barbara Aland to make the following observation concerning the text of the New Testament: On the whole, it must be admitted that…New Testament specialists…not to mention laypersons, tend to be fascinated by differences and to forget how many of them are due to chance or normal scribal tendencies, and how rarely significant variants occur—yielding to the common danger of failing to see the forest for the trees.14. … In addition, there are over 19,000 copies in the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic languages. He was a world-renown expert on the Greek New Testament22 and he said this concerning the accuracy of the New Testament scribes. Privacy Policy, The Institute for New Testament Textual Research, “The Bibliographical Test Updated (2014)”, "The Number of Textual Variants: An Evangelical Miscalculation", Christmas Truce: The Day World War I Stopped, From the Christmas Tree to the Tree of Calvary: The Meaning Behind Advent, Thanksgiving: Remembering God's Mercy Toward Calvary Chapel. These scribal changes can be broken down into two basic types: unintentional and intentional. The late Princetonian scholar and renown authority on New Testament textual criticism Bruce Metzger expands upon the intentional variations. 12 Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament In The Original Greek According To The Byzantine/Majority Text Form (Atlanta, GA: Original Word Publications, 1991), xvi -xvii. by Norman L. Geisler . Even in places where loose paraphrases were used, we can still recognize those allusions as Scripture. Other variations came about intentionally, as New Testament Greek scholar J. Harold Greenlee notes. Because there were no copy machines available in ancient times, the tedious transmission process had to be accomplished by the scribe’s own hand. The first question to ask is, “Can we faithfully reconstruct the original text of the New Testament?” Having multiple, early copies gives textual scholars the best chance of success in this endeavor. But many of the conclusions sceptics draw from the evidence appear to have also been insufficiently researched, and some mistakes are also being repeated by them. He writes. Stay current with all things Calvary by subscribing to Is today's new testament the same as the original that was written two-thousand years ago, or has the original been hopelessly lost? That is to say, with regard to the time when the New Testament was originally written until the time the printing press was invented, some have demanded that the scribes copy the text 100 percent accurately, or it cannot be considered inspired or inerrant. It was highly recommended by New Testament scholar the late Larry Hurtado, whose blog I used to follow and who I greatly respected. Yet, despite the bias, the message is 100 percent identical! Complete New Testament manuscripts from ninth to fifteenth centuries: 34 Earliest complete New Testament date: A.D. 340 Oldest fragment of the New Testament date: A.D. 117-138 Translations into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian: A.D. 300-400. There are three main areas of textual evidence to consider when answering the question of whether the New Testament manuscripts were copied accurately: (1) the number of Greek manuscripts, (2) the dating of the manuscripts, and (3) the textual accuracy of the manuscript copies. The entire New Testament text is accounted for in manuscript form within 300 years of the original writing (cf. In other words, the books of the New Testament were written very soon after the events they describe, leaving no room for legend to creep in. 7 J. Harold Greenlee, Introduction To New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964), 66. The lines are different in form but not in content. Most of the New Testament is preserved in manuscripts less than 200 years from the original, with some books dating from a little more than 100 years after their composition and one fragment surviving within a generation of its authorship. Your email address will not be published. Current texts in the woman standing in the lord jesus of his work on the bible and the country. A comparison with other literary works from the ancient world reveals a growing number of New Testament documents and their early dates, as well as the increasing number of manuscripts from the ancient world. Additional witnesses to the accuracy of the New Testament text, which are among the Greek manuscripts, are the lectionaries. I read FF Bruce’s old classic The New Testament Documents: are they reliable?and some of Dan Wallace’s reviews of Ehrman’s claims to get the response of christian scholars. Sceptics have likened copying to a game of Chinese Whispers, where it is easy for words to be mis-heard and passed on inaccurately, justifying this by arguing that the scribes who copied the NT were amateurs, not experienced professionals. Most scholars date the fragment anywhere from AD 117–135, which, at its earliest, is only about 30 years removed from the original writing of the Gospel of John. Whether one prefers to use the Byzantine text-type, which is found in the greatest number of manuscripts, or the Alexandrian text-type, which has fewer but older manuscripts, the final result will be more or less the same. Furthermore, significant checking was undertaken, either by the scribe himself or a supervisor, and many manuscripts contain correction in the margins. We have 5,600 for the New Testament! The internal consistency of the New Testament documents is about 99.5% textually pure. The greatest numbers of variant readings found in the New Testament manuscripts are unintentional variants. Houghton Get PDF (289 KB) Saur Verlag, 2001), 86ff, and the more recent work by Graeme D. Bird, Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad: The Witness of the Ptolemiac Papyri (Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010). When it comes to New Testament manuscript accuracy we can look both to the various versions of the early New Testament collection as well as the … Crucially, the editors right from the start lay out the sceptical and christian apologetic “extremes”, and make it clear that they will be avoiding both ends of the spectrum, and explain why. ), of which very few exist (best case average is approximately 20 … Fortunately, this time span for the New Testament manuscripts is relatively short, with the earliest manuscript copies currently ranging from 30-300 years from the original texts. The dating of a NT manuscript is not a precise process, and the book recommends that a range of dates of at least 50 years should always be used. Recent Post by Page. That is certainly not a small number! When we try to conceptualize how to reconstruct an original after 2000 years of copying, translating, and copying some more, the task appears impossible. Required fields are marked *. The skepticism, though, is ba… I read Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus and Jesus Interrupted to get the sceptical view from an eminent scholar. New manuscripts continue to be discovered, usually in existing libraries or collections. Nevertheless, a few books (Revelation, 2 & 3 John, Jude, 2 Peter) were often disputed. This question takes us to manuscript evidence. The writing, copying and canon processes for the New Testament were less certain and more error-prone than many apologists admit. 17 B.B. Only about 400-600 variant readings seriously affect the translational sense of any passage in the entire New Testament.12. Some scholars believe that many of the variants were not accidental, but the result of trying to harmonise the text with orthodox doctrine. It concludes that the canon lists are the best source of what the early church believed was inspired and authoritative, and these show that most of the present New Testament was widely accepted with little dispute, and a few popular works were widely considered useful but not canonical. Without any doubt, the quantity of New Testament manuscripts, the dates from the original manuscripts to the earliest copies available, and quality of the copies of the New Testament manuscripts all serve as undeniable and powerful witnesses to the accurate preservation of God’s inspired and inerrant Word. Other notable Bible scholars, such as Ezra Abbot, figured the copies of the New Testament manuscripts are 99.75 percent accurate. In the same manner, Christians developed the practice of reading a fixed portion of the gospels and the New Testament letters every Sunday (and on holy days). From the very beginning, Christian missionaries, in their attempts to spread the gospel, translated the New Testament into the various languages of the people they encountered. It can be answered in an academic way totally unrelated to spiritual convictions by a simple appeal to facts, an apologetic technique I call “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” The objection at first glance is compelling. Warfield made a similar assertion when he wrote, “[The New Testament] has been transmitted to us with no, or next to no, variation; and even in the most corrupt form in which it has ever appeared, to use the oft-quoted words of Richard Bentley, ‘The real text of the sacred writers is competently exact.’”11 Textual criticism experts Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont note the following situation in which we find the text of the New Testament: For over four-fifths of the New Testament, the Greek text is considered 100% certain, regardless of which text type might be favored by any critic. 3 See Martin L. West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (Munchen, Germany: K.G. 8 Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (German Bible Society, 1994), 3-4. Accurate Transmission and Variant Readings. Hickie, The New Testament in the Original Greek (New York, NY: Macmillan Co., 1951), 2.2. As a rule New Testament manuscripts on papyrus are not. This book bases its estimate on extrapolating from several NT sections or books which have been well analysed, and concludes that there are about 500,000 variants among about 5,300 Greek manuscripts, which comes out at 3-4 variants per word in the whole New Testament, though there are generally only a few occurrences of most variants. What now becomes unbelievable is that nowhere in this article does Metzger estimate the New Testament accuracy to be 99.5%. The number of quotations from the church fathers is so overwhelming that if every other source for the New Testament (Greek manuscripts and versions) were destroyed, the vast majority of the New Testament text could be reconstructed! For this reason, their prolific writings remain an important witness to the New Testament. Contrary to all other copies of documents of antiquity, such as the ancient classical writers (Aristotle, Plato, Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides, Herodotus, etc. If other languages are included, the number jumps beyond 25,000! In our modern culture, 30-300 years seems like a long time, but for historians of ancient literature, it is like yesterday! 20 Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York, NY: Harper San Francisco, 2005), 55. Scholars diligently work like forensic scientists analyzing a crime scene, carefully examining the evidence left behind so they can reconstruct what originally happened. But with the New Testament, we have complete manuscripts from only 300 hundred years later. Warfield, An Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1886), 13-14. Another early witness to the accuracy of the New Testament text comes from the prolific writings (of more than one million quotations of Scripture) of the early church fathers. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Among all the known copies of parts of the New Testament there are many variant readings, due mainly to wrong spelling, accidentally missing a word, writing the wrong word, or changing the word order. 19 A.T. Robertson, An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), 22. Up until now, I tried to read both sides and then make a judgment. There is no doubt that the scribes who copied the texts introduced changes. The greater number of manuscripts available gives scholars added confidence when it comes to reconstructing the original New Testament text, for it offers a textual “checks and balances” when comparing and contrasting the various manuscripts. Download books for free. I read Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus and Jesus Interrupted to get the sceptical view from an eminent scholar. 16 Bruce Metzger, Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1963), 146. The evidence throws doubt on the idea of a perfect set of original writings, and shows there are uncertainties in the Bible we read. Furthermore, the New Testament is supported by archeological evidence, The New Testament can be said to be true to the originals as supported by the vast quantity of NT manuscripts, the accuracy of the manuscripts, the close proximity to the events which they depict, and even the vast amount of quotes from the early church fathers. Technically speaking, any deviation from the base accepted text is an error, but the kinds of “errors” represented in the New Testament text are not errors of historical, geographical, spiritual, or scientific fact. A Note on the Percent of Accuracy of the New Testament Text. 2 See the tally by The Institute for New Testament Textual Research and to keep updated on the ever-growing tally see the searchable database. That is an amazing accuracy. Discover what's new on CalvaryChapel.com using the convenience of your John Warwick Montgomery comments on the strong bibliographical standing the New Testament enjoys when he says, “To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of the classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.”5. Sometimes sceptics and christians alike give single dates at the end of the range that most suits their purposes. Comments for robotsPlease remove this comment to prove you're human. However, there are several reasons Christians believe the New Testament manuscripts were copied accurately (despite minor scribal mistakes) and why it can still be considered the inspired and inerrant Word of God. This means that our New Testament is 99.5% textually pure. Sceptics too can distort the evidence, though perhaps not quite as much. He currently hosts Pastor’s Perspective on KWVE 107.9 FM Radio. The manuscripts that form the Greek New Testament are scattered throughout the world and are usually only accessible to scholars and professionals. Unfortunately only six of them are extensively preserved. 3) “When manuscripts began to show signs of wear, the Jewish scribes reverently disposed of them because they bore the sacred … But I was still left with a vast difference in conclusions, and had to try to make a judgment based on my own very inexpert assessment. Preserving Ancient New Testament Manuscripts for a Modern World. The New Testament dwarfs other books of ancient history in this criterion. Again, the facts speak otherwise, as Michael Holmes explains: “Occasionally the text was altered for doctrinal reasons. They all tell the same story! Most manuscripts of the New Testament are only manuscripts of part of the New Testament, and providing an exact count of them is a fool’s errand. Because of the great reverence the Jewish scribes held toward the Scriptures, they exercised extreme care in making new copies of the Hebrew Bible. That picture of the church is vitally important today. But if we take it as it is, the New Testament is a generally reasonably reliable expression of what was originally written. Y’ALL HAVE WON $10,000,000 [Notice the Southern bias here], Observe that of the 28 letters in line two, only five of them [in bold] are the same in line three. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. Some apologists claim that even if we had lost the entire set of manuscripts, we could reconstruct almost all of it from the writings of christians in the second and third centuries. Metzger's article - on the other hand … To better understand the scope of the numbers involved, as of 2017, the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, located at the University of Munster in Germany, currently lists the official number at 5,856 partial and complete manuscript copies written in the Greek language.2 These include handwritten copies of the New Testament papyri, parchment and lectionaries. Because scholars do not possess the original writings of the New Testament (known as autographs),1 we must ask: How accurate are the manuscript copies (apographs)? The New Testament has tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts that can be extensively compared to each other; plus, those manuscripts have the earliest dating to its recorded events of any historical book. Few indeed are the evidences that heretical or destructive variants have been deliberately introduced into the mss [manuscripts].7. A careful comparison of the papyrus documents and manuscripts of the second and third centuries has established beyond doubt that about forty Greek papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament date from this very period. 10 B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. So they give many examples of apologetic and sceptical claims that are not supported by the evidence, and then outline what they see as more correct conclusions, supported by impressive references. The end result is that while many errors were made, many were corrected. I have been devouring the book eagerly. Similarly, by evaluating and comparing the textual evidence (known as textual criticism), scholars can then work backward to establish what was originally written. 1 This article first appeared in Joseph M. Holden, gen. Note…that most of the variant readings found in manuscripts of other text types are trivial or untranslatable. The charge that is often made, without qualification—especially by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman—is that copyists radically changed the substance of the text. On this basis, some documents show clear signs of a doctrinal bias in the variant readings, while other variations that are sometimes claimed to have bias are judged not to be deliberate because they are isolated examples. The earliest New Testament manuscript fragment we possess today is the John Rylands Fragment (also called P52) contains a small portion of John 18. They are mainly (apparently) christians, but they believe that christian apologetics has not always been honest in this area. Thus, we can be confident that the text of the New Testament, as it stands today, is essentially the same text that was originally written by the authors of Scripture. In this new series, Cheryl Brodersen interviews different women to discuss their lives, ministries, and testimonies of God's Living Grace. 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