Let’s return to Ehrman’s accusation that the ancient biblical manuscripts contain 400,000 errors. You can see The Chester Beatty Papyri here: In all the four parts total over 200 leaves. This manuscript contains four parts which contain 15 of the 27 New Testament books (part of a codex of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts as well as Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, and Revelation). The Chester Beatty Papyri (which is dated around AD 200) is much bigger. This manuscript is a tiny fragment out of John 18.
The oldest manuscript we have is called the John Rylands manuscript, which is from around 130 AD. Let’s pause and answer the question that you might be asking: what are these manuscripts and what do they look like? Let me give you a glimpse of two very different manuscripts. These are trustworthy sources despite the fact that they have twenty or fewer manuscripts and the earliest manuscripts we have are roughly a thousand years later than the original writings. In my history classes in college I, like many of you, read Pliny, Demosthenes, Euripedes, Tacitus, and others. The earliest manuscript of any other ancient document was five hundred years after the document. When you combine the number of manuscripts we have with how close those manuscripts are to the original we have the ability to get an incredibly accurate picture of what the original texts were. The number of New Testament manuscripts dwarfs the number of any other ancient document.Īnd look at how much closer the New Testament manuscripts are to the original document than any other ancient document. And yet that isn’t to say that Tacitus’s Histories aren’t trusted, they are trustworthy documents.īut then compare the number of these documents to the number of manuscripts we have in the New Testament. What that means is that we are considerably more confident in the reliability of the wording we have in Homer’s Illiad than we are, say, of the Roman senator and historian Tacitus’s Histories. Outside of the New Testament, by far the ancient document with the most manuscript evidence we have is Homer’s Illiad. Let’s take a look at this chart to give us a sense of the comparison. If you look at other ancient manuscripts, you find that for many ancient documents we trust to give us ancient history, we only have a handful of manuscripts and we never have the original manuscript. I want to give you some perspective of how many ancient manuscripts we have.
How in the world can we trust the documents we have, then? But what we do have are many of the copies of a copy of the original. We don’t have the first gospel that Luke wrote. We don’t have in our possession any of the original manuscripts of the New Testament. Copies of those manuscripts were made and then copies of those copies and so on and so forth. Theophilus then read the gospel and was likely so amazed that he decided to have a scribe make copies of the letter to send to his friends so he could share the story with them. Luke wrote out his account of Jesus’ life and then sent it to a man named Theophilus. Let’s take the gospel of Luke, since we’ve previously read from the beginning of his gospel. Let me provide some explanation: the Bible was written by hand and then sent to the intended recipients via the Roman mail system. Let’s respond to this important challenge. Can we trust that the Bible we have in our hands resembles the original writings of the disciples? Is it true as Bart Ehrman said that there are 400,000 errors in the early biblical manuscripts? The final response to the challenge is to address the reliability of the manuscripts. The last two weeks we have considered whether it might be plausible to trust the Bible audacious claim, that it is the word of God. Can We Trust the New Testament Documents? By John Beeson on 08:30 am
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