Hence, copies were called manual-scripts or manuscripts. Professor F F Bruce has written, "The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much Whatever manuscript tradition we use as the basis for a given translation, the outcome will be substantially the same because the text is basically the same. 18. (Hindi). For this reason, their prolific writings remain an important witness to the New Testament. Other notable Bible scholars, such as Ezra Abbot, figured the copies of the New Testament manuscripts are 99.75 percent accurate.17 Westcott and Hort calculated the New Testaments accuracy at 98.33 percent by asserting that only one-sixteenth of variants rise above the level of trivialities.18 Greek scholar A.T. Robertson places the transmission rate at 99.9 percent accurate, believing only a thousandth part of the New Testament text was of any real concern.19 Even New Testament critic Ehrman, writes, in his Misquoting Jesus, Most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology.20. The earliest published New Testament manuscript fragment we possess today, the John Rylands Fragment (also called P52), contains a small portion of John 18. Second, Greek expert Ezra Abbott said about 19/20 (95 percent) of the readings are various rather than rival readings, and about 19/20 (95 percent) of the rest make no appreciable difference in the sense of the passage. A NEWLY released edition of the New Testament in Greek is believed to be the most accurate ever published, after ten years of work by biblical scholars to correct errors made by scribes thousands of years ago. Chester Beatty Collection, Bodmer Collection, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus). 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. They derive for the most part from attempts by scribes to improve the text in various ways. The lines are different in form but not in content. Again, the facts speak otherwise, as Michael Holmes explains: Occasionally the text was altered for doctrinal reasons. 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. Because there were no copy machines available in ancient times, the tedious transmission process had to be accomplished by the scribes own hand. Only about 400-600 variant readings seriously affect the translational sense of any passage in the entire New Testament.11. Adding Manuscript Images to Presentations or Documents 5. If we insist on perfection or nothing, then well end up with nothing. 1) Majority Text (Textus Receptus) - originally known as the Received Text, which was compiled between 1514 and 1641. In fact, thousands of New Testament manuscripts have survived from the first few centuries after Jesus. Other variations came about intentionally, as New Testament Greek scholar J. Harold Greenlee notes. Many say it's not reliable as a historical document despite having over 5,600 Greek copies in possession today, which is more than we have of the work of Homer, Plato, Lucretius, and Aristotle. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus probably date to the mid-4th Century. Most importantly, you should know that not a single variation in these thousands of manuscripts has been shown to affect a theological issue in any way. Sceptics will tell you there have been so many changes in transmission we cant have any confidence in the text. Articles, 2022 Defending Inerrancy | Who We Are | Contact, Historical Timeline of the Debate about the Reliability and Inerrancy of the Bible. The oldest complete manuscript is the Codex Sinaiticus (330-360AD) but nonetheless there are even older fragments. Sceptics too can distort the evidence, though perhaps not quite as much. New Testament Manuscripts Accuracy The New Testament is indeed historically accurate, that is the hallmark of authenticity. The abundance of manuscripts, the dates from the original manuscripts to the earliest copies available, and the high degree of accuracy in the manuscripts, are all factors that prove the accurate preservation of Gods inspired Word. The text was carefully copied, and discerning Christians, who were dispersed throughout the entire Roman Empire, would have made it difficult for malicious changes to be introduced. Additional witnesses to the accuracy of the New Testament text, which are among the Greek manuscripts, are the lectionaries. Ancient Versions and Patristic Quotations All those interested in New Testament textual criticism will find this as an essential tool. 1:16. He currently hosts Pastors Perspective on KWVE 107.9 FM Radio. By Christopher on Reliability of the Bible, Textual Criticism tagged Textual Criticism. When a manuscript(s) differs in wording from the base text, the result is known as a variant reading. Because of the innumerable times the New Testament has been copied over the last 2,000 years, these variants have crept into the text. Whatever manuscript tradition we use as the basis for a given translation, the outcome will be substantially the same because the text is basically the same. It contains most of the New Testament. That is little more than 25% identity of letters and numbers, yet the message is 100% the same. P 45 (ca. The manuscript contains almost all of the (4th century) New Testament and over half of the Old Testament. 1. It was originally published in 1963 and was revised in 1995. Benjamin B. Warfield, Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907), 14. The Bodmer Papyri are dated from AD 175-225, and the Chester Beatty Papyri date from about AD 250. 2. In 1982, German scholar Carsten Thiede supported OCallahans earlier findings in The Earliest Gospel Manuscript? These fixed portions are known as lectionaries. 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. This means that our New Testament is 99.5% textually pure. Alternatively, if any ancient work were to come down to us in only one copy, there would be nothing with which to compare that copy. For Caesar's Gallic War (composed between 58 and 50 BC) there are several extant MSS [manuscripts], but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar's day. The library . 8 Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (German Bible Society, 1994), 3-4. Dr Dirk Jongkind, viceprincipal of the institute, explained . Nevertheless, a few books (Revelation, 2 & 3 John, Jude, 2 Peter) were often disputed. 7 J. Harold Greenlee, Introduction To New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964), 66. The historical reliability of the Gospels is the reliability and historic character of the four New Testament gospels as historical documents. The lines are different in form but not in content. It seems unfortunately true that many christian apologists accept what previous apologists have written without verifying sources. Erastus the City Treasurer: His inscription was found at Corinth and dates to the 1st century AD. Bruce notes the following summary of events verified in the extra-biblical documents in his work Jesus & Jewish Origins Outside the New Testament: Also, the New Testament scholar Gary Habermas adds, Altogether, there are even about a dozen and a half non-Christian sources that mention Jesus within the first 150 years after his death. A full list and discussion of these sources are available in his book The Historical Jesus. Data is no longer gathered as a collation of witnesses against a standard base text, Ephraemi, the more dependable the copy. Furthermore, the variant readings, whether intentional or unintentional, exist in only a very limited portion of the New Testament. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple-slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort of another (Misquoting Jesus, 55). 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. For this reason, their prolific writings remain an important testimony to the New Testament. Christians can truly appreciate the excellent position the New Testament occupies regarding the early dates. The Length of Time Between the Original Autographs and Earliest Copies of the New Testament Depending on how you define "manuscript" there are more than 5,000 Greek New Testament examples, but these are not evenly spread across the New Testament. (Stuttgart, Germany: German Bible Society, 1994), 3-4. Only about 400-600 variant readings seriously affect the translational sense of any passage in the entire New Testament.12. Thank you for listening! This book is both scholarly and easy to read (mostly). He is mentioned in Acts 13:6-12. 20 Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York, NY: Harper San Francisco, 2005), 55. 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 more than 24,000 New Testament manuscripts! 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 check and balance when comparing and contrasting the various manuscripts. Powered by WordPress. 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! Thus, the intentional variations, for the most part, were the work of scribes attempting to make the text more readable, not change the meaning. ARE THE CANONICAL GOSPELS TO BE IDENTIFIED AS A GENRE OF GRECO-ROMAN BIOGRAPHY? Sometimes sceptics and christians alike give single dates at the end of the range that most suits their purposes. THE EARLY CHURCH FATHERS SAYS NO, On the Robust Reliability of the Gospels: Phil Fernandes Interviews Lydia McGrew, A Tribute to Norman Leo Geisler (1932-2019), The Harvest Handbook of Apologetics (2019), A Review of, Billy Graham, Evangelism, Evangelicalism, and Inerrancy. See the Signatures Daniel B. Wallace, The Number of Textual Variants: An Evangelical Miscalculation at https://danielbwallace.com/2013/09/09/the-number-of-textual-variants-an-evangelical-miscalculation/, accessed on July 27, 2017. Every time he cited Scripture we can observe the Greek text he was using. In fact, we find that many of those New Testament manuscripts - the ones we consider to be most reliable - are among the most ancient. 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. In those seven letters, Ignatius quoted from 18 different books of the New Testament. For example, if one manuscript is missing a passage of Scripture, a scholar needs only to consult the numerous other copies. Thus, the intentional variations, for the most part, were the work of scribes attempting to make the text more readable, not change the meaning. Bible scholars have claimed that they have used early Greek manuscripts to create a more accurate version of the New Testament. 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. 5. For example, consider the following illustration that describes the relationship between variant words and meaning: 2. Consider also this message with two lines and two errors. But now that has all changed, as I was given Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (2019) edited by Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry as a Christmas present. Orthodox and heretics alike leveled this charge against their opponents, though the surviving evidence suggests the charge was more frequent than the reality.9 The amount of intentional variation to the text was minimal. His disciples believed He rose from the dead. 19. How do we know the Bible is the Word of God? Despite these variants, scholars have recognized the great accuracy with which the New Testament manuscripts were copied. Hickie, The New Testament in the Original Greek (New York, NY: Macmillan Co., 1951), 2.2. Furthermore, the variant readings, whether intentional or unintentional, exist in only a very limited portion of the New Testament. Only about 50 manuscripts contain the entire New Testament, though most of the other manuscripts contain the four Gospels. The text was carefully copied, and discerning Christians, who were dispersed throughout the entire Roman Empire, would have made it difficult for malicious changes to be introduced. Many claims are made about the number and significance of these variants, but few explain how such a number is estimated. A.T. Robertson, An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), 22. The Manuscript Record More than any other ancient Latin or Greek literature, the Bible has tremendous historical and manuscript evidence for its reliability. A Note on the Percent of Accuracy of the New Testament Text. Solutions to Bible Errors There is simply no evidence of widespread altering of the text for doctrinal reasons. They could creep into the text through fatigue or through faulty sight, hearing, writing, memory, or judgment on the part of the scribe. This false assumption emerges from the notion that all New Testament copies produced through the centuries must be exact replicas of the original text. Individuals and groups who desire to preserve New Testament manuscripts and provide tools to ensure accurate translation of the New Testament have joined with us in the great efforts to find and digitize manuscripts. These comprise a significant, although a much less numerous, group of errors than the unintentional changes. In comparison, The Iliad by Homer, one of the greatest works of ancient literature, stands in second place with only 643 ancient manuscripts. The time span for most of the New Testament is less than 200 years (and some books are within 100 years) from the date of authorship to the date of our earliest manuscripts. 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 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 thatNew Testament specialistsnot 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 occuryielding to the common danger of failing to see the forest for the trees.14. Philip Schaff estimated that of the thousands of variations in all the manuscripts known in his day, only 50 were of real significance and of these not one affected an article of faith. Even agnostic NT critic Bart Ehrman admits that In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. 18 Brooke Foss Westcott, Fenton John Anthony Hort, and W.J. Even if the texts were all copied accurately, how do we know the right books are included? Some fragments contain just a verse or two, but still count as a manuscript. So the New Testament text can be reconstructed with over 99 percent accuracy. It contains most of Johns gospel and have been dated from 150 to 200 AD. 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. 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. Another early witness to the accuracy of the New Testament text comes from the prolific writings (of hundreds of thousands of quotations of Scripture) of the ante-Nicene fathers of the church. Here we are even more sure of the message with two errors in it. Some apologists and sceptics will favour the statistic that most agrees with the view they are promoting. The New Testament has well over 1,000 times as many manuscripts as the works of the average classical author.1 In other words, [] It was highly recommended by New Testament scholar the late Larry Hurtado, whose blog I used to follow and who I greatly respected. These fixed portions are known as lectionaries. 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. 4 because the textual agreement between almost all manuscripts and editorial reconstructions is around 90% (and even higher in many cases), the most efficient way for That is an amazing accuracy. 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. Phillip Schaff, A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (New York: Macmillan, 1877), 177. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, The reliability of the New Testament text, All change because the world is changing. Hebrew and Aramaic texts known at that time. But it also indicates that the text is well preserved with few important texts in doubt. Ways to Share