It's Not a Book, It's a Bible (Part 1 of 2): Is the New Testament Full of Errors?

We began this series of investigative posts with, historically, the most important event of all time: the resurrection of Jesus Christ (http://goo.gl/uV8ZiQ). We concluded that this event, in rock-solid fact, really did occur. Naturally we then dug into each major world “religion”, to see which accepted His resurrection as core doctrine (http://goo.gl/YwUByL). Only Mormonism and Biblical Christianity made it to the next step. Starting with Mormonism, we studied their most cherished scriptures and concluded that they were nothing short of wishful thinking and fairy tales (http://goo.gl/BkS7QC). Logically one could determine that Biblical Christianity has both the correct Scripture (the Bible) and the correct doctrine, but it would be a disservice if we did not continue our investigation to see if this, too, is a historical fact.

“The mere fact that the Bible claims to be the Word of God does not prove that it is such, for there are other books that make similar claims. The difference is that the Scripture’s contain indisputable evidence as being the Word of God,” says Josh McDowell. Similarly, Daniel B. Wallace states: “The Judeo-Christian scriptures are the only ones in the world that are intended to subject themselves to historical inquiry. If God became man in time, space, and history, then he’s inviting us to examine the historical evidence.” Before making our overall conclusion, there’s much for us to historically observe within Biblical Christianity.

Let’s start with a crucial question: Could you give a reasoned answer for why we can trust that the Bible is actually true? “Because the Bible says so” is not good enough for today’s marketplace of ideas. After all, we’ve just been over that Mormons say we should trust their scriptures. Muslims say the same thing. And so on.

Non-believing scholars today are, seemingly, never ending in their pursuit to discredit the life and teachings of Jesus. And so, in the next six posts investigating Biblical Christianity, we will specifically see if the New Testament text, the location of these two topics, holds up to both the tests of historical accuracy and of historical reliability.

We’ve already seen that Jesus' resurrection is historically sound, but what about His life and teachings? You’ll be pushed out the door of modern academia if you use the classic line: “Jesus never existed!” Non-believers know this and, therefore, they target the next best thing -- His Word: “How can we be sure if the New Testament of today actually resembles what was originally written?” they ask. Non-believers, sadly, aren’t alone with this idea. In fact, it was in my very first college classroom that I heard Christian students going along with the teacher: “Yeah, after nearly two-thousand years of surely countless translations, there’s just no way that the text could be the same!”

The fashion in which we have obtained the New Testament through the centuries has been likened to the children’s game of “telephone.” That’s where the first child in a line is given a short, verbal message to whisper to the next child, who then passes on what they’ve heard, and so on. And by the time the last child in line says it out-loud, the message hardly resembles at all what the first child was told. For an example of this, check out this quick video from “The Octonauts & the Combtooth Blenny” (from 5:54 to the end http://goo.gl/1PKyQ3).

It’s with this assumed method of transmission that people believe the New Testament message has been garbled from generation to generation, therefore becoming less and less like the original over time. Fortunately, the New Testament has not been passed down to us in this way. But how has it been transmitted?

Well, rather than a spoken tradition, as seen with the telephone game, the transmission of the New Testament deals with a written tradition. Even after the first Greek New Testament was produced on a printing press (newly invented by Gutenberg) in the fifteenth century, scribes would painstakingly make careful, handwritten copies of the books of the New Testament. So, if each child in the line instead wrote down what they read from the person in from of them, and so on, the chance for garbling the message would be incredibly small (and the chance that children would want to replay such a boring game would be incredibly small as well!). Naturally, as the early Christian church grew, more and more copies were made to meet the demand.

But, as atheist C.J. Werleman writes, "We do not have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible. The originals are lost. What we have are copies of copies." Agnostic, Bart (not Simpson) Ehrman goes even further: "Not only do we not have the . . . first copies of the originals . . . We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals.”

Is that true? Do we really not have any of the original writings of the books of the New Testament in our possession? The answer is no, we do not. But this is not unique to the Bible. In fact, this is the exact situation of every ancient work of literature. In the field of ancient history, no original writings (technically called autographs) exist today. Virtually all autographs were written on a thin, paper-like material called papyrus. The problem with papyrus, being susceptible to moisture and time itself, is that it had a relatively short life span. These texts would be handled, copied, recopied, and soon would wear out and disintegrate. Every ancient work has been passed down in to us in this fashion through handwritten copies (technically called manuscripts).

And so, no, we don’t have in our possession any autographs of the New Testament. Therefore can we be confident that we are reading, like the college students going along with the teacher said, what was originally written nearly two-thousand years ago?

Of course we can. Accuracy of the New Testament, as with any ancient work, deals with what’s known as Textual Criticism. This is the science that tries to determine the exact wording of a work that no longer has autographs, but that has manuscripts that have been passed down to us. The more manuscripts we have in our possession to compare, especially having been written from different geographical locations and in different languages, the better it is to accurately reconstruct the contents of the autographs.

To illustrate this, here are some notable examples in order to help give us an idea of just how few manuscripts we have of ancient works:

    7  --  Plato

    7  --  Pliny the Younger

    8  --  Herodotus

  10  --  Julius Caesar

  20  --  Tacitus

  49  --  Aristotle

643  --  Homer (not Simpson)

The average number of surviving Greco-Roman works is no more than one or two; these are just examples of exceptions. Yet, while only having so few manuscripts to compare, modern scholars unquestionably accept each of these works as being authentic to their autographs.

What about the New Testament (not including the Old Testament)? How many manuscripts of it do we have in our possession to compare?

           31,000+

At last count, this number includes 5,854 Greek manuscripts, at least 10,000 in Latin, and at least another 15,000 in other various ancient languages. Rulers throughout history have constantly tried to wipe the message of Jesus from the face of the earth. And yet, to this very day, this constantly growing number of discovered manuscripts has survived for us to compare! Richard Bentley writes: "It is good . . . to have more anchors than one; and another manuscript to join the first would give more authority, as well as security." Well how about over 31,000!

Like the common infomercial says, “But wait, there’s more!” Ancient church fathers, from the   first century to the thirteenth century, directly quoted (in sermons, commentaries, letters, etc.) the New Testament so often that all but eleven verses could be reproduced from their writings alone. Ehrman himself admits this, saying these surviving texts would be “sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” As Wallace states: “All told, there are more than one million quotations.” These writings can then be compared with the 31,000+ manuscripts we possess, therefore making the wording of the autographs virtually certain.

It’s obvious that the New Testament fares very well in regards to quantity of manuscripts, but what about quality?

Ehrman, in his book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, writes “The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes.” “We have only error-ridden [manuscripts], and the vast majority of these are . . . different . . . in thousands of ways” (200,000 to 400,000 to be exact). Quotes such as these absolutely shocked readers. In fact, the book would go on to be a long-held New York Times bestseller.

So the New Testament manuscripts we possess today really don’t say the exact same thing? No, they do not. And is this number true? Yes, it is. Now, if we were to conclude with those two facts, this would be the message you get from Ehrman and Werleman (etc.) today. But there is a whole other side to the story that they don’t tell you. But before we start, and in order to continue addressing the accuracy of the New Testament, we first need to clear up the word “errors” concerning its manuscripts.

There are not any “errors” in the New Testament manuscripts; there are “textual variants.” A textual variant, defined by Wallace is: “Any place among [a manuscript] in which there is variation in wording, including word order, omission or addition of words, (and) spelling differences.” And so, no, the New Testament manuscripts do not say the exact same thing. Nor do any manuscripts of any ancient works. If they did, the science of reproducing the wording of autographs through Textual Criticism wouldn’t exist!

While the likes of Ehrman would love for their readers to believe that the Christian church has controversially been hiding information of “errors”, this is a very old story to anyone who understands Textual Criticism. And while the statistic of 200,000 to 400,000 is accurate, and sounds big, it’s very misleading to those not familiar with the nature of textual variants and how they are counted.

It’s simple; the more manuscripts, the more variants. Although scribes were very careful, in this human process of making many hand-written manuscripts, it was obviously ripe to result in many variants. If you, yourself, were to perform the work of a scribe from ancient history, states Lee Strobel, “even with good lighting and a brand new pen, you’d find out pretty quickly the enormous amount of concentration and skill required to complete the job, to make it look nice, and most importantly to keep from making mistakes. . . . You might look up, for instance, and realize you’d skipped a whole line when you stopped to rub your eyes. You duplicated a word. Probably misspelled a few. Got tired and sloppy. Lost your train of thought. Any of these things could happen. And what if . . . you weren’t copying down what you saw in front of you but rather what was being read to you aloud? That’d make the job even tougher, wouldn’t it? Sometimes they were copied as a person read aloud what the rest said and multiple listeners each made a copy.” And, unlike today’s writers, scribes did not have the convenience of a backspace key or spell-check!

Textual variants can be divided into three different categories. First, there are spelling variants.

These alone make up roughly 80% of those found in the New Testament manuscripts. Other than general misspellings, let’s look at two specific, common examples. One includes what is referred to as a “movable nu.” In Greek, this is similar to using “a” or “an” in English. If one manuscript were to say “a apple,” and the others “an apple,” it means the exact same thing, but any instance that differ within the manuscripts counts as a variant. Another example is that, in Greek, the name “John” can also correctly be spelled “Johnn.”  This makes no difference at all when translated into English, but any instance that differ counts as a variant. You can see how these quickly add up!

Second, there are minor changes that do not affect meaning.

Let’s look at three specific, common examples. One includes the use of synonyms (a word with the same meaning as another word). For instance, there are verses in some manuscripts that say “Jesus” while others say “God.” Both refer to the same person, but every instance that differs counts as a variant. Another example includes the use of definite articles with names. For instance, some manuscripts might say “Jesus” or “John” while others say “The Jesus” or “The John.” Again, both refer to the same people, but every instance that differs counts as a variant. Another example includes word-order differences. Bruce Metzger states, “Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language. Meaning it makes a whale of a difference in English if you say, ‘Dog bites man’ or ‘Man bites dog’ – sequence matters in English. But in Greek it doesn’t. One word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence. (Therefore), the meaning of the sentence isn’t distorted if the words are out of what we consider to be the right order.” In fact, there are sixteen different ways in Greek to say, for example, “Jesus loves John”, but every instance that differs counts as a variant.

Third, there are changes that could affect meaning.

These are the smallest group of variants. As Wallace states, they make up roughly “1/4^th of 1%” of all found in the New Testament manuscripts. Let’s look at two specific examples. One is from Revelation 13:18, “The one who has understanding must calculate the number of the beast, because it is the number of a man. His number is 666.” Two manuscripts that we possess say that the number of the beast is “616”. While the vast majority says “666”, this is an example of just how careful the science of Textual Criticism must be in determining the wording of the autographs. Another example is from 1 John 1:4, “We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” We possess manuscripts that say both “our joy” and “your joy”. But for which either way is true to the autographs, the meaning of the verse is the same; that the writings bring us joy.

Within this group of “1/4^th of 1%”, it is evident that these variants are very minor. In fact, within our 31,000+ manuscripts and 1,000,000+ ancient quotations of the New Testament, not a single variant has ever made us question a single core doctrine of Christianity; that Jesus is God, Jesus defeated death through His resurrection, and trust in Jesus is the only way to eternal salvation. In the appendix of his book Misquoting Jesus, when the editors ask Ehrman is any of these core doctrines are questioned by variants, he writes: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” Enough said!

An assertion that one could make at this point could go something like this: “Fine, scribes made incredibly accurate manuscripts that have been transmitted to us today. But how do we know that these manuscripts weren't based from autographs full of legendary content? In other words, perhaps the New Testament was written down so many years after the events that the authors simply felt it safe to exaggerate Jesus from a wise teacher into the 'Son of God.'" We will continue our investigation in part 2.