Think Spot: Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

How do you know that the bible hasn’t been changed over time? After 2000 years of copying, translating and copying some more how can it be the same book?

At first glance the objection is compelling isn’t it? However, the argument is actually based on 2 misconceptions and I hope this post will inform you as to why and allow you to answer this challenge reasonably

The Telephone Game

The first misconception is that people think the New Testament has been passed down more of less in a liner transmission, like the telephone game where one person tells another who in turns tells another and so on. In this example people are left with one message and many generations between it and the original. Second, the telephone game example depends on oral transmission which is more easily distorted and misconstrued than something written.

Neither assumption applies to the written text of the New Testament.  First, the transmission was not linear but geometric–e.g., one letter birthed five copies which became 25 which became 200 and so on.  Secondly, the transmission in question was done in writing, and written manuscripts can be tested in a way that oral communications cannot be.

Aunt Sally’s Letter

An illustration of how such a test can be made.  It will help you to see how scholars can confidently reconstruct the text from existing manuscript copies even though the copies themselves have differences and are much older than the  original.

Pretend your Aunt Sally has a dream in which she learns the recipe for an elixir that would continuously maintain her youth.  When she wakes up, she scribbles the directions on a scrap of paper, then runs into the kitchen to make up her first glass.  In a few days her appearance is transformed.  Sally is a picture of radiant youth because of her daily dose of what comes to be known as “Aunt Sally’s Secret Sauce.”

Sally is so excited she sends hand-written instructions to her three bridge partners (Aunt Sally is still in the technological dark ages–no photocopier) giving detailed instructions on how to make the sauce.  They, in turn, make copies which each sends to ten of her own friends.

All is going well until one day Aunt Sally’s pet schnauzer eats the original copy of the recipe.  Sally is beside herself.  In a panic she contacts her three friends who have mysteriously suffered similar mishaps.  Their copies are gone, too, so the alarm goes out to their friends in attempt to recover the original wording.

They finally round up all the surviving hand-written copies, twenty-six in all.  When they spread them out on the kitchen table, they immediately notice some differences. Twenty-three of the copies are exactly the same.  One has a misspelled word, though, one has two phrases inverted (“mix then chop” instead of “chop then mix”) and one includes an ingredient that none of the others has on its list.

Here is the critical question:  Do you think Aunt Sally can accurately reconstruct her original recipe?  Of course she could.  The misspelled words can easily be corrected, the single inverted phrase can be repaired, and the extra ingredient can be ignored.

Even with more numerous or more diverse variations, the original can still be reconstructed with a high level of confidence given the right textual evidence.  The misspellings would be obvious errors, the inversions would stand out and easily be restored, and the conclusion drawn that it’s more plausible that one word or sentence be accidentally added to a single copy than omitted from many.

This, in simplified form, is how the science of textual criticism works.   According to New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce, “Its object [is] to determine as exactly as possible from the available evidence the original words of the documents in question.”

The science of textual criticism is used to test all documents of antiquity–not just religious texts–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.  Textual criticism allows an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption of any work.

The Biblical Manuscript Evidence

By comparison with secular texts, the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is stunning.

• In 1980 there were 5,366 separate Greek manuscripts represented by early fragments, uncial codices (manuscripts in capital Greek letters bound together in book form), and minuscules (small Greek letters in cursive style)
• nearly 3,000 minuscule fragments are 34 complete New Testaments dating from the 9th to the 15th Centuries
• Uncial manuscripts provide multiple books of the New Testament bound together into one volume back to the 4th Century, though some are a bit younger.
  • The nearly complete Codex Vaticanus is the oldest uncial, dated c. 325-350
  • Codex Sinaiticus, is dated c. 340
  • 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.

The most fascinating evidence comes from the fragments .  The Chester Beatty Papyri contains most of the New Testament and is dated mid-3rd Century. 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 A.D. 200 or earlier.

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

Keep in mind that most of the papyri are fragmentary.  Only about 50 manuscripts contain the entire New Testament, though most of the other manuscripts contain the four Gospels.  Even so, the manuscript textual evidence is exceedingly rich, especially when compared to other works of antiquity.

The Verdict: 99.5% pure

What can we conclude from this evidence?  New Testament specialist Daniel Wallace notes that although there are about 300,000 individual variations of the text of the New Testament, this number is very misleading.  Most of the differences are completely inconsequential–spelling errors, inverted phrases and the like.  A side by side comparison between the two main text families (the Majority Text and the modern critical text) shows agreement a full 98% of the time.

Of the remaining differences, virtually all yield to vigorous textual criticism.  This means that our New Testament is 99.5% textually pure.  In the entire text of 20,000 lines, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), and none affects any significant doctrine.

Greek scholar D.A. Carson sums up this way:  “The purity of text is of such a substantial nature that nothing we believe to be true, and  nothing we are commanded to do, is in any way jeopardized by the variants.”

This issue is no longer contested by non-Christian scholars, and for 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 from written sources prior to the beginning of the second millennium A.D.

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

So what do you think? I’d be interested to know your thoughts.

Article adapted from Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason : http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6068