Why Jesus Died For Me
Chapter 2
The Foundation
Aside from archaeology much of what we know about the ancient world comes from ancient manuscripts. An author would write a book or collection of books and these would remain in a certain place or travel to different locations to be used. Eventually someone might want to duplicate the original and so they would copy the text and that one would start to be used.
Depending on the amount of use, at some point, the original copy would become useless and fall out of circulation and become lost or destroyed. The copies would then be in circulation and copied themselves and second and third generations would rise up and old manuscripts would pass away.
The manuscripts we have today from the ancient world are not originals but copies of copies several generations deep. There are a few authors who we can look at to gain an understanding of ancient manuscripts and how the Bible compares.
Livy (59 BC-17 AD), Tacitus (56 AD-120 AD), and Suetonius (69 AD-130 AD) were three Greco-Roman historians who were contemporaries of the New Testament authors. They examined the reigns of Roman emperors, and expounded on topics such as politics and philosophy.
Of the surviving works of these men we have 30 manuscripts from Livy which were copied at least 300 years after he wrote his originals. For Tacitus we have three copies which were made 800 years after he wrote his originals. More from Suetonius has survived and we have around 200 copies of his works that were made 800 years after he wrote his originals. For the most part, the accuracy of these writings is not disputed by critics.
The ancient work that comes in at second place for the number of preserved manuscripts is Homer’s Iliad. 643 copies of this work exist of which the earliest copies were made 500 years after the original. You may have guessed that the writings that take up first place are the New Testament manuscripts. Here is a table to show how they compare.
The first complete New Testament manuscript we have is the Codex Sinaiticus and is from the 4th century AD; about 300 years after the originals were written. We currently have over 5,000 manuscripts in Greek which is the language the originals were written in. We also have nearly 10,000 manuscripts which are written in Latin and another 10,000 in various other languages. If that weren’t enough there are one million quotes from early church fathers, enough to practically reproduce the entire New Testament.
In addition, there are many fragments and partial manuscripts that date even closer to when the originals were written. For example, fragment P46 contains most of Paul’s letters and has a date of around 200 AD. P66 has most of John’s Gospel and has a date of around the late 2nd century. P52 is the earliest fragment and contains several verses from John’s Gospel and dates to within 50 years of the original manuscript. Daniel B. Wallace, one of the top New Testament scholars refers to all of this as an “embarrassment of riches.”
But what about all the errors that scribes have made copying and recopying over hundreds of year? There are about 140,000 words in the New Testament and roughly 400,000 errors or textual variants. That’s about three mistakes per word and at first blush would seem that there is no hope for accuracy but that is where the embarrassment of riches makes these numbers easy to swallow. Textual critics have so many manuscripts to cross reference that we can have confidence in knowing that 99.5% of these mistakes look like this… (M*stake) (Mi*take) (Mis*ake) (Mist*ke) (Mista*e)
Less than 1% of textual variants are viable, for example, Mark 9:29 says, “This kind can come out only by prayer.” While some texts say, “… and fasting.” In fact, there are only 40 lines of textual corruption giving the New Testament an accuracy of 99.5%. The Iliad has 764 lines of textual corruption giving it an accuracy of 95%.
What this all means is that our New Testament is not perfect as nothing in this world is; however, none of the core beliefs and teachings of Christianity are impacted in any way by any textual variant and we can be confident that what we have today is accurate and honors what the authors wrote with their own hand.
The Old Testament has the tendency of attaining credibility by default when we examine how many times it is mentioned in New Testament verses. Of the 39 books of the Old Testament Jesus quoted from 24 of them. New Testament authors quoted from a number of other Old Testament books and nearly all of them were referred to in some way.
There are nearly 700 quotes of the Old Testament from the New and if we add in the number of times the Old Testament was referred too, that number jumps to about 4000. Jesus and His apostles, among others, used the books of the Old Testament and expressed no issues with it. Incidentally, any time a New Testament author mentions the “Holy Scripture” he is speaking of the Old Testament.
There are some people who will say that the accounts in the Bible are just a bunch of myths and yet Peter tells us in 2 Peter 1:16, “For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” It is a book full of accounts that were written down by people who were there and saw, with their own eyes, what transpired many thousands of years ago.
The Bible was written by many different authors over a long period of time and yet all of it refers to one person. Surely all of these details should help to demonstrate that at this time we can trust, very strongly, in the reliability of the 66 books that read as though they are one.