Storytellers & the Bible: 2 Reasons to Believe the Transmission of the NT
Living and working in Hollywood, stories matter. What matters even more is truth (see post Apologetics 101: Truth Matters for the Christian Creative). We see many movies and series that are “based on actual events,” but how accurate are those depictions to the real thing? In this Passion Week, it’s always good to review why we as Christians believe what the New Testament says about Jesus. Today we’ll look specifically at why we can trust that the Bible was recorded and passed down with accuracy to the original. It is a whole other discussion to talk about the truth of what those records tell. We can explore that in a later post. For now, here are two reasons why we can rely on the transmission of the New Testament:
Manuscript Corroboration
Early Christian fathers quoted the NT in their sermons and writings. If all the manuscript copies of the NT were destroyed, you could reconstruct nearly all of the NT by writings of the early church fathers
We have accurate, early copies. Though we don’t have any of the original NT documents (called “autographs”), the copies we do have are accurate to the earliest versions that do survive. And even though 500,000 variants are identified within the Greek NT manuscripts, most of these are minor differences like spelling that do not change meaning or alter core doctrine. Remember, these were all handwritten copies before the time of spell check and cut/paste. Also, early Christian fathers quoted the NT in their sermons and writings. If all the manuscript copies of the NT were destroyed, you could reconstruct nearly all of the NT by writings of the early church fathers. Within 50 years we have early fragments of the NT that are accurate to the copies we have; within 150 years we can accurately reconstruct most of the NT; and within 250 years we can reconstruct all of the NT. This is no game of telephone. This is very careful copying.
We have lots and lots of copies. 2.6 million pages in fact. Stacked up, it would be a mile high. An inch and half of that would be the copies containing variants as mentioned earlier. The earliest copy of the NT is dated to 25 years after the original, and we have more copies that match the earliest fragments than any other ancient document, with more than 5,600 Greek manuscript copies and 20,000 in other languages. And this is if you cut off the “early” date to be 400 AD. Critics that would challenge with the “variants” include manuscripts up to 800 AD. To put this in perspective, copies of Homer have 500-year gaps with fewer than 650 copies; Plato’s writings have 1200-year gaps with only 7 surviving copies of the original; and the writings of Roman historian Tacitus have a 700-year gap and only 2 manuscript copies. If we compared stacks of all of these, the Greek NT manuscripts that we have would reach a mile high, while the average Ancient Greek scholar copies would only stack up to 4 feet.
This is Not “Telephone Game”
We have NT Manuscripts from as early as 80AD, and we have millions of pages of manuscripts dated through the early centuries of Christianity.
And so what? Just because we have an accurate copy doesn’t mean what it reports is actually true. But this is a good starting point, to understand the process by which the copy we have today was transmitted through 2 millennia. The big question, then, is “Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” After all, that’s what Christianity is all about. Let’s revisit this next time.