As mentioned earlier, Jesus’ teachings were first made known to people through word of mouth. For example, the apostle Paul spoke to large numbers of people during his missionary trips and the other apostles verbally presented the Gospel during their travels. But as the church grew and the Apostles weren’t available (or began to pass away), it became necessary to have a written record of these teachings. These written records form the New Testament that we read today. This time around, we’ll take a look at the reliability of the New Testament writings that have been handed down to us.
The Original Writings
Scholar-types refer to the original Biblical writings as autographs. Now this isn’t the type of autograph that you get from a celebrity or an athlete- it’s just a fancy way to refer to the first-generation Biblical writings. Early copies of the original autographs are called manuscripts.
One of the first things that we should remember about the original Biblical writings is that none of them have survived to our present day. In other words, we can’t go back and look at the original Gospel of Luke or Paul’s actual letter to the Ephesians because those writings simply don’t exist anymore. This means that the New Testament that we have today is made up from copies of those original writings.
Now this might sound like it could be a real problem, doesn’t it? After all, a copy usually isn’t as good as the original, right? Well, before we make a final conclusion, let’s first consider a few things about the New Testament.
Short Time Frame Between The Originals And Copies
First, we should remember that the New Testament writings were all produced within a period of about fifty years during the first century and copies began to be passed around shortly after that. While fifty years might sound like a pretty long time, it’s actually just a very short time when it comes to ancient literature. A short time span between the original writings and their copies means that there was little time for mistakes and errors to creep into each reproduction.
Preservation Of The New Testament Copies
Many of the New Testament copies were originally written on papyrus, a paper-like material that was made from a marshy plant. Papyrus had the advantage of being inexpensive but its major weak point was that it wore out quickly. However, a few papyrus fragments have been found with small portions of handwritten Biblical text dating back to the second century A.D. One such fragment was found in Egypt which means that the New Testament writings had already spread to a pretty big area by early in the second century.
Another ancient writing material was called vellum or parchment. This was made by processing animal skins into a material that could be used for writing. One advantage of vellum was that it was a lot more durable than papyrus. This is important when talking about the reliability of the Scriptures because vellum was the writing material used to produce many of the ancient New Testament copies we have today. This leads us to the…
Manuscript Evidence
Did you know that over 20,000 ancient copies of the New Testament exist today? This includes both complete manuscripts and portions of other ancient manuscripts. These writings consist of more than 5000 copies of the New Testament written in Greek, 10,000 copies written in Latin and over 8000 copies written in other languages.
This means that the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is greater than that of any other piece of ancient literature. This tremendous amount of evidence is very important because the large number of manuscripts helps scholars to construct the original writings with great accuracy.
Writings From Ancient Christian Leaders
Besides the ancient copies that have we have today, we also see the New Testament reflected in the writings of church leaders from the first, second and third centuries. These people are known to us today as the Apostolic Fathers and their writings cover the period between 90 and 200 A.D. These guys used so many New Testament quotations in their writings that almost the entire New Testament can be put together simply by using what they wrote.
In fact, scholars tell us that there are only 11 New Testament verses (mostly from 1 and 2 John) that have not been found within the writings of these men. Some of the earliest church leaders personally knew the Apostles themselves which means that there is practically no chance that a bad copy of Scripture could ever have been accepted and spread by them.
Variant Readings
People sometimes claim that hundreds of thousands of errors can be found within the early New Testament manuscripts. Scholars call these errors variants and they occur in any place where one manuscript copy does not completely and totally agree with another. For example, let’s say that you wanted to compare two manuscripts against each other. Any single word that is missing or spelled differently between the two would be labeled as a variant reading. Changes in word order from one copy to another or differences in words used, no matter how minor, are also referred to in this way.
This means that many “errors” within the manuscripts are often the result of spelling mistakes or differences in spelling. Others are simply changes in word order that do not affect the meaning of the Biblical text. Nevertheless, each of these variant readings are listed as “errors” whenever they appear. They are then are counted as errors again in every copy that follows and this is how people are able to claim that there are “hundreds of thousands of errors” in the Bible.
The good news is that no Biblical teaching is affected by any of these variant readings. One scholar-type explains it like this…
Next: The Fulfillment Of Biblical Prophecy