At the turn of the twentieth century, a young lawyer turned political activist became a well known writer in New York City. His writing focused on reform and turning away from predatory business practices. One of his most famous lines was, “One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.”
And it’s the need to write down history that brings us back to our fall apologetics series, we’re walking through some of Bart Ehrman’s issues with the orthodox Christian faith. Last week we looked at the historicity of the person of Jesus, because it is central to the faith. Jesus is a historical person, which is important because God coming in the flesh is central to the message of salvation. Barth Ehrman agrees with Jesus being a real historical person, but stops at believing he’s anything but that.
This leads us into our actual first issue from Ehrman, that of the Bible’s corruption. Ehrman states, “It is hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment that I stopped being a fundamentalist who believed in the absolute inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible. As I point out in Misquoting Jesus, the key issue for me early on was the historical fact that we don’t have the original writings of any of the books of the Bible, but only copies made—in most instances, centuries later.”
There are two issues that Bart Ehrman brings up in this quote: The inerrancy of the Bible, and the original writings. We’ll look at inerrancy next week, but today, we’re going to tackle Ehrman’s issue that we cannot know what we have today is the same as the Apostle’s or whoever wrote the New Testament books, wrote. To address this issue, we’re going to separate it into two categories: This week, we’ll look at the external evidence of the Bible, and then next week look at the internal evidence. Form these two parts, we’ll come to a conclusion on inerrancy at the end.
Let’s begin within the external. Ehrman is correct that we do not have any of the original manuscripts. However, we need to put that into the perspective of the historical record. Let’s look at a timeline of history. We’ll begin with the time frame of the New Testament. The numbers I’m about to give you are not exactly what I would date the books of the New Testament, but rather are averaged out between scholars, both conservative and liberal.
Jesus is crucified in roughly 33AD. The first book of the the New Testament, written most likely by James, is written somewhere between 40-50AD. Roughly a decade after the crucifixion. Paul begins his writings around the middle part of the 40s. Paul’s writings end with his death around the mid 60s. The Synoptic Gospels are written somewhere between 60-90AD, with there most likely being a Hebrew sayings version of Matthew dating earlier. Peter’s letters have to be written before his death in the mid-60s, most likely around the early part. John’s writings seem to begin after the destruction of the temple in 70AD and end with him around 100AD. The other books, such as Acts, Hebrews and Jude would be written somewhere in between 40 and 100AD. Our earliest fragment of any New Testament document is called P52, which is a portion of the Gospel of John, in 125AD.
The oldest complete New Testament is Codex Sinaiticus which was finalized somewhere between 325-360AD. So we know that the current Bible that we have today, at the very latest, is early to mid 300s.
However, one of the more interesting historical documents is what is referred to as the Muratorian Canon. In the 1800s a French man named Muratori found a fragment of an early Bible list. This fragment included: All four Gospels, Acts, All of Paul’s writings, Jude, two letters of John, but no specific on which ones, and John’s Revelation. It also includes, the Revelation of Peter, Wisdom of Solomon, which is an intertestamental book which predates the New Testament, and the Shepherd of Hermas. We’ll tackle why these books were not include in the Bible in our fourth week, but for now, it is important that, out of the 27 New Testament books, we have at least 22 being acknowledged within around one-hundred and fifty years of Christ’s crucifixion. I saw at least, because, what was found was another fragment.
What we need to realize, is that we have a lot of manuscripts and fragments between 125AD and the mid 300s.
Now it might seem odd that we have such a large range away from the dates of the actual writing to the completed work. In fact we could say that between the writings themselves, and the time we have a complete copy to the New Testament, there is about 260 years. That’s from when the last writing was composed to when we have the entire New Testament.
On it’s own, it seems like a huge amount of time. But let’s put it into historical perspective. One of the oldest written works of ancient Greece is Homer’s Iliad. It was written in around 900BC, the oldest surviving manuscript of the Iliad is from 500 years later in 400BC. Around 400BC you have Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle lived and wrote. Their surviving works come between 900-1,100AD, which is around 1,400 years later. Julis Caesar lived between 100-44BC, with his surviving works coming a little under 1,000 years later. The historian Livy, lived between the first century BC and the first century AD, with his earliest manuscripts surviving from the 300sAD. Josephus and Tacitus both lived in the first century AD, with their earliest surviving copies, again, are in the 900sAD.
Out of all these surviving copies, the New Testament at its very latest is still about 2 decades closer to the events they write about, than these other ancient surviving manuscripts. And yet, these other documents are not held to the same standard as the New Testament. Those who purport to have written the other historical documents, are not scrutinized as closely as the New Testament writers have been.
But this is just scratching there surface. Let’s take a moment and look at how many surviving copies of these manuscripts we have. Starting from the least to the greatest, Plato’s manuscripts are about 7, Thucydides about 8, Caesar is about 10, Livy is about 20, as is Tacitus’. Aristotle is about 49, while Josephus jumps to a wapping 120. But Homer’s Iliad trounces all of them with 643 surviving manuscripts. When we compare these to the New Testament, we have roughly 5,500 Greek manuscripts and fragments starting in 125AD and going up. To put that into perspective, stacked on top of each other, it would be almost four Empire State buildings high.
Ehrman is correct, we do not have the original hand written books of the New Testament. But put into persecutive, unless something was written on stone, we have very few ancient documents. And the ones that give us the writings of such influential people as Plato, Aristotle, and Caesar are roughly a thousand plus years after those people lived. Whereas the New Testament, at it’s latest, is within two centuries.
But let’s just say, that we did not have one copy of the New Testament, or we only had a handful of copies like we have of Plato, did you know that we could still reconstruct the New Testament? From early church writings, there are enough quotes from the New Testament to reconstruct it. Something that Bart Ehrman agrees to. In his coauthored book, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Metzger and Ehrman put forth that these early church citations, “would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of the entire New Testament.”
What we have when it comes to the New Testament is a treasure trove. Not only do we have documents extremely close to the events of history, we have an abundance of them. In that abundance we can actually tell and trace linages of manuscripts. Scholars can see how the manuscripts were preserved and corrupted.
If we only had a handful we couldn’t tell if there were changes, because there wouldn’t be enough to let us know. However, we can see scribeable errors, variation of words and sentence structures. Because of this we can get closer to the originals than any other ancient document. Scholars Köstenberger, Bock, and Chatraw in their book Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible write, “It is more likely that we have the changes and the original in our manuscript tradition since we have so many other copies. In other words, we have too much of the text, not to little. We could well say that it is more likely that our problem is that we have 105 percent of the text, not that we have lost some of it.”
In other words, scholars have to reduce the amount of information they have, not expand it. And with so many manuscripts, the consistency of the Scriptures is revealed. Something that we will dive a little deeper into next week, when we look at the internal correctness of the Scriptures.
For now, we’ll end with this challenge, Ehrman states that if God wanted us to know his words, why didn’t he persevere the originals. Well, God did something greater. If we just had a few, the challenge would be, “we don’t have enough.” Now that we have an overwhelming amount, the accusation is, “why don’t we have the originals.” For skeptics like Ehrman, its a catch 22, there’s no way of winning. Yet God gave us more than any other historical document to show us his truth. To work through human sin, and incompetency. Because of this we can trust God to preserve our salvation. If God says he will bring about eternal life in all those who trust in him, he will do it. It might not be the way we want it, but his way will bring about a greater life.
So this week, take your doubts at how God works out this plans to him. Seek him to bring the peace that passes understaffing into you life as you struggle with doubt. Whether that doubt is with his word, or the situation you find yourself in. If God can work through roughly two-thousand years to persevere his word, we can trust him to work through our lives to bring us into full salvation.
Let us be a people of unwavering trust in the Lord. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment