It follows that an essential
factor in determining whether Christianity is true is examining the reliability
of the New Testament. Although the whole Bible is important to examine, the New
Testament is particularly critical to Christianity because it provides the
historical accounts of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection as well as the
complete written teaching of the early Church. Is the New Testament accurate
history, something that would make a good journalist proud? Or is it nothing
but a compilation of first-century tabloid tales rejected by the National
Enquirer?
In order to determine the New
Testament’s reliability, one must explore two questions:
Are the ancient manuscripts
reliable?
I address these questions in the
two sections that follow.
Evaluating the reliability of New
Testament manuscripts
Christians believe that the
apostles and early Church leaders, after several years of sharing with others
around them the Good News of Jesus Christ, realized that they had to do more
than communicate verbally (see the sidebar, “Before the Internet existed:
Communication in the ancient days”). They needed to document a full written
account of Jesus’ life and his teachings to reach people they couldn’t get to
because of geographical limitations and to reach those who would live in the
future. Two of Jesus’ disciples (Matthew and John) and two others (who had
direct access to the disciples and other eyewitnesses) wrote individual
accounts of Jesus’ life (called Gospels). During this same era, the apostles
also put Christian teachings into writing and distributed them as letters to
different churches across the Mediterranean region. These letters, written by
Paul , Peter, and other apostles (see the section, “Assessing New Testament
authors’ credibility,” later in this chapter), fill in the cracks on Christian teachings
that the Gospels and Acts, a book that records the history of the early Church,
don’t discuss. All together, 27 books form the New Testament.
Obviously, the writers couldn’t
just print the books out on their inkjet printers and then run to the nearest
copy shop to buy 1,000 collated copies of their work in shiny plastic spiral
blinders. The New Testament writers had to write the accounts on papyrus, a
paper-like material that’s even more prone to deteriorate than that cheap
recycled stuff I buy at a discount at the local office supply store. And in
order to preserve and distribute an original manuscript like this, the early
Church had to make copies of these originals the old-fashioned way: one copy at
a time.
The people who did this work were
known as scribes, and based on accounts of them, they were a special breed of
people. Think of them as accountants on steroids: mind-bogglingly exact in
transcribing an original to a duplicate. They made sure that every letter,
word, and syllable was kept intact from the original to the copy. And, rumour
has it that if a coffee stain or jelly smudge marked the original, they’d
purposely spill on the new copy as well. (Okay, I made that part up, but you
get the idea.)
The scribes’ attention to detail
is crucially important to Christians today, because the original manuscripts of
the New Testament books no longer exist – at least any that people know about. On
first take, that news seems unsettling, because it means that the Christian faith
isn’t just reliant on the original testimony of the apostles, but on copies of
that testimony. However, before you call the Gideons and tell them to stop
distributing their Bibles at Motel 6, consider this: To historians, this is
standard fare when looking at documents from the ancient world, whether they’re
parts of the Old Testament (see the section, “Examining artefacts,” earlier in
this chapter) or New Testament or are the writings of Plato and Homer.
Because the original writings don’t
exist anymore, you examine the reliability of the manuscripts by looking at
The number of copies that exist
The time gap between when the
original was written and when the first known copy was made
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