The Reliability of the Gospels – Part One
This is the first of a two part series on the reliability of the Gospels by Wesley Huff. Wesley is a Canadian apologist and student of the New Testament. You can find his blog here.
When I was young, I remember watching a series of Christian video publications (that I later found out were produced by a fundamentalist King James Only group) that made statements affirming that, “the modern translations had cut out many precious lines of Scripture!” I had grown up with the NIV, which was a “modern translation.” I slowly flipped through the red-lettered words of Jesus in my New International Version, looking through it until all of a sudden, thumbing through the Gospel, there it was. At the bottom of the page, in the Gospel of John, was a particularly strange footnote. It said something to the effect of, “This passage does not appear in some ancient manuscripts, and is not found in the most ancient Christian witnesses.” Why would a note like that be in the New Testament? And it didn’t stop there; many changes were made to the text. For example, in 1 Timothy 3:16, in the KJV it says that, “God was manifest in the flesh,” but most of the modern translations read, “He who was manifest in the flesh.” In Revelation 22:19 the KJV has reference to the “book of life” while almost all of the modern versions have the “tree of life” in its place. So what’s going on? Could this mean that we don’t know the whole truth about Jesus? Can a book that may not even contain whole stories be God’s Word?
It was not until years later that I fully realized the answers to these questions, and my faith was not “shaken” in any way during that experience. However, it did make me think twice at times about statements like “the Bible is God’s Word.” What I found out years later, both in my own personal study and formally within academia, was that these issues actually strengthen the validity of the biblical New Testament, not compromise its integrity.
A Long Long Time Ago… The Earliest New Testament Manuscripts
More than once, both in high school as well as in university, there were times where I would be writing an essay or assignment, and foolishly forgotten to hit the “save” button at the top of the screen. Only to have something go wrong, the Word document would crash, and everything I’d written be lost to the same place that the socks in the dryer go. As far as we know, the original writings of the NT have likewise been lost to the sands of time. Many, many copies were made, but since it was in an age far before the invention of computers or the advent of the printing press, the only way we know they existed is due to the copies we now possess. The question then arises, how do we know that what we have today is what they wrote back then? What safeguards existed that prevented one individual from changing the text? What assurance do we have that somewhere along the line individuals didn’t insert words into the mouth of Jesus, having Him claim to be God, making statements about his death, the afterlife, and so on, when He himself never said any such things. Could it be that the text was corrupted over time and the modern reader just doesn’t know it? The answer to that question is a resounding no. We know this for a few very specific reasons.
An Oldie but a Goodie…
First, the copies we posses are old. Really old! In fact, the oldest surviving manuscripts we posses of the New Testament go all the way back to the beginning of the second century. Some might argue that because Jesus and the apostles lived in the first century, that these manuscripts we have simply aren’t old enough. However, we need to keep in mind that we’re talking about ancient history, and having manuscripts exist within decades of the original writing is unheard of in the ancient world. The New Testament exists in a league of its own when it comes to textual reliability. We see this fact most vividly when we compare the New Testament with other works of the ancient world.
After the New Testament, the most preserved document is thought to be Homer’s Iliad. To date, we possess a few hundred copies of the Iliad. However, our oldest copies of the epic come a whole 500 years after the original was written. And it gets worse! For writers like Plato, we’re waiting over 1000 years after the original was written before we start seeing reliable copies. Yet, virtually no scholar today doubts that we have the words of the Iliad, or that we can know what Plato really wrote.
In fact, our oldest copies of the New Testament were most likely copied when the originals were still being read in churches. Meaning that, it would be pretty far-fetched to think significant changes crept into the NT so soon after the apostles died while their original writings remained in circulation. Plenty of people who knew the apostles firsthand lived into the second century and could have verified the copies that were being copied and circulated; something that we cannot say for any other document of the ancient world.
The second instalment will appear tomorrow.
