Were Jesus' Biographies Reliably Preserved for Us?

When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 3. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.

Is it possible that the Bible I hold in my hand today bears any resemblance to what the authors originally wrote? This isn’t a question unique to the Bible; other documents from antiquity raise the same concerns.

But what the New Testament has in its favor is the unprece-dented number of copies that have survived. Why is that important? Because the more copies that agree with each other, especially if they come from different geographical areas, the more you can cross check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way they’d agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts.

And the age of the documents helps - again this favors the New Testament. We have copies commencing within a couple of generations of the originals. With other ancient texts, 5, 8 or even 10 centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy.

In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations into other languages - Latin, Syrian, Coptic - at a relatively early time. Beyond that we have what may be called secondary translations a little later, like Armenian and Gothic, and a lot of others - Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety. But how does that help? Because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, we could piece together the entire New Testament from these translations that have relatively early dates. In addition, if we lost all Greek manuscripts AND the early translations, we could still reproduce the New Testament from the multitude of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters and so forth of the early church fathers.

So how does this compare with other ancient books that are routinely accepted as reliable by scholars? Consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about 116 AD. Books 1-6 exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied in about 850 AD. Books 11-16 are in another manuscript dating from the 11th century. Books 7-10 are lost. So there is a long gap between the time Tacitus gathered his information and wrote it down and the only existing copies.

Josephus, the 1st-century historian, wrote The Jewish War. We have nine Greek manuscripts, and these copies were written in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. There is a Latin translation from the 4th century and medieval Russian materials from the 11th or 12th century.

So how many New Testament Greek manuscripts do we have? More than 5,000 have been catalogued. The next greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer’s Iliad. There are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of it today - some are quite fragmentary. They come down to us from the 2nd and 3rd century AD and following. When you consider Homer composed it about 800BC, you can see there’s a very lengthy gap - a thousand years!

The earliest New Testament manuscripts are fragments of papyrus - there are now 99 fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one or more passages or books of the New Testament. Most significant are the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, discovered about 1930. Number 1 contains portions of the four gospels and the Book of Acts, and it dates from the 3rd century.

Number 2 contains large portions of 8 letters of Paul, plus portions of Hebrews, dating to about the year 200. Number 3 has a sizeable section of the book of Revelation, dating from the 3rd century.

Another group of important papyrus manuscripts was bought by a Swiss bibliophile, M. Martin Bodmer. The earliest of these, dating from about 200, contains about two-thirds of the gospel of John. Another contains portions of Luke and John and dates from the 3rd century.

But what is the oldest? What’s the farthest back we can go? A fragment of the gospel of John, chapter 18 - 5 verses, 3 on one side, 2 on the other - measures 2.5 x 3.5 inches. It was purchased in Egypt as early as 1920, but sat unnoticed for years among other fragments of papyri. Then in 1934, C.H. Roberts of Saint John’s College, Oxford, was sorting through them and immediately recognized it as part of the gospel of John. He dated it between 100-150 AD. Prominent paleographers Like Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir Harold Bell, Adolf Deissmann, W.H.P. Hatch, Ulrich Wilcken, and others have agreed. Deismann was convinced it goes back to at least Emperor Hadrian (117-138AD) or even Emperor Trajan (98-117AD). It was found in a community along the Nile in Egypt, far from Ephesus in Asia Minor, where the gospel was probably originally composed.

Ancient copies were also written on parchment, made from the skins of cattle, sheep, goats and antelope. There are 306 uncial manuscripts (all-capital Greek letters), dating to the 3rd century. The most important are the Codex Sinaiticus, which is the only complete New Testament in uncial letters, and Codex Vaticanus, which is not quite complete. Both date to about 350 AD.

A new style of writing (more cursive in nature) called miniscule, emerged in roughly 800 AD. We have 2,856 of these manuscripts. There are also lectionaries, which contain New Testament Scripture in the sequence it was to be read in the early churches at appropriate times during the year - 2,403 have been catalogued. That puts the grand total of Greek manuscripts at 5,664.

There are thousands of other New Testament manuscripts in other languages. There are 8,000 - 10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts. There's a total of 8,000 in Ethiopic, Slavic and Armenian. In all, there are about 24,000 manuscripts in existence.

In terms of the multitude of manuscripts and the time gap between the originals and our first copies, we can have great confidence in the fidelity with which this material has come down to us, especially compared with any other ancient literary work. F.F. Bruce said, “There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.” Sir Frederic Kenyon said, “In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.” And, finally, Bruce Metzger had this to say: “The last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.”

But what about discrepancies among the various manuscripts? In the days before print and photocopying, manuscripts were hand-copied by scribes, letter for letter, word for word, line by line, in a process that was ripe for errors. With the similarities in the way Greek letters are written and with the primitive conditions under which scribes worked, it was all but inevitable that errors would creep into the text. In fact, there are tens of thousands of variations among the ancient manuscripts we have.

But does that mean we can’t trust them? No. As Bruce Metzger said, “Eyeglasses weren’t invented until 1373 in Venice, and I’m sure astigmatism existed among the ancient scribes.” This was compounded by the fact it was difficult to read faded manuscripts on which some of the ink had flaked away. And there were other hazards - inattentiveness on the part of the scribes, for example. So, yes, while the scribes were meticulous for the most part, errors did creep in.

But there are factors counteracting that. For example, sometimes the scribe’s memory might play tricks on him - between the time it took to look at the text and write it down, the order of the words may have gotten shifted. But that’s nothing to be alarmed about since Greek is an inflected language and word order makes no difference - one word functions as the subject of a sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence.

That's all well and good, but there are more than 200,000 “variants” or differences among manuscripts - how can we possibly trust them? The number sounds big, but it’s a bit misleading because of the way variants are counted. For example, if a word is misspelled in 2,000 manuscripts, it’s counted as 2,000 variants.

When all is said and done, there are ZERO doctrines in the church in jeopardy because of variants. The variations, when they do occur, tend to be minor rather than substantive (but even more significant variations pose no doctrinal threat). Scholars work very carefully to try to resolve them by getting back to the original meaning.

Any good Bible will have notes that will alert the reader to variant readings of any consequence - and again, these are rare. Norman Geisler and William Nix: “The New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in purer form than any other great book - a form that is 99.5 percent pure.”

What about allegations that church councils squelched equally legitimate documents because they didn’t like the picture of Jesus they portrayed? The early church used 3 criteria in determining the canon (cannon means “rule,” “norm,” or “standard”).

1. The books must have apostolic authority - it had to have been written by an apostle (eyewitness) or by followers of apostles.

2. Conformity to what was called the rule of faith - was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative?

3. Whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.

Even though fringes of the canon remained unsettled for a while, there was actually a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament within the first two centuries, and this was true of very diverse congregations scattered over a wide area. British commentator William Barclay said, “It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.”

Groups like the Jesus Seminar charge that the Gospel of Thomas was purposefully excluded by church councils in some sort of conspiracy to silence it. That’s just not historically accurate - the synods and councils simply ratified what had been accepted by high and low Christians alike. It is not right to say Thomas was excluded by some council fiat; the right way to put it is the Gospel of Thomas excluded itself! In some cases it seems to correctly report what Jesus said, with slight modification.

But then there are things completely alien to the canonical gospels. “Split wood, I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.” That’s pantheism, the idea that Jesus is coterminous with the substance of this world. “Let Mary go away from us, because women are not worthy of life… Lo, I shall lead her in order to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself a male will enter into the kingdom of heaven.” This is not the Jesus we know from the four canonical gospels!

We must understand that the canon was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics; rather, it is the separation that came about because of the intuitive insight of Christian believers. When the pronouncement was made about the canon, it merely ratified what the general sensitivity of the church had already determined. The canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn’t derive their authority from being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together. The early church merely listened and sensed that these were authoritative accounts. For example, what if I said, "Let’s get several academies of musicians to make a pronouncement that the music of Bach and Beethoven is wonderful." Well, duh, we already know that; we know because of sensitivity to what is good music and what is not.

As for books like James, Hebrews and Revelation that were more slowly accepted into the canon, that just shows how careful the early church was. They weren’t gung ho, sweeping in every document that happened to have anything about Jesus in it - this shows deliberation and careful analysis.

Benjamin Warfield: “If we compare the present state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must… declare it to be marvelously correct. Such has been the care with which the New Testament has been copied - a care which has doubtless grown out of true reverence for its holy words…. The New Testament [is] unrivaled among ancient writings in the purity of its text as actually transmitted and kept in use.”