Untitled Sermon (4)

Here’s our question today.

How do I know that the New Testament has been reliably transmitted over all these years?

Or another way to ask it

“How do I know that the New Testament hasn’t been corrupted and it’s message changes as some religions like Islam claim?

This is a very important question especially when you look at the following considerations.

Number 1 we do not have any of the original New Testament Manuscripts and so we are relying on copies of the originals.

Number 2 we know that no two manuscripts are exactly alike

Number 3 given the copies we have there are literally 1000s of differences.

That may sound alarming at first until we compare the New Testament manuscripts with other ancient manuscripts.

When we do that rather than seeing the NT manuscripts as unreliable we actually find that we have more certainty about the NT manuscripts than any other ancient manuscripts by far.

Let’s unpack these concerns on at a time.

How about the fact that we only have copies of the originals?

It turns out we also don’t have any original manuscripts from any other ancient manuscript.

But in answering this concern there are two things to consider here.

The number of manuscripts

How close temporally are the manuscripts to the original manuscripts

Take Plato or Aristotle who lived around 350 BC. We have 5-7 copies of their works. What are these copies dated to? The copies we have in existence were written roughly 1300 years later. In other words, the copies of the works of Plato and Aristotle that we have were written around 1000 AD.

What about works that were written around the same time as the New Testament? Tacitus was a historian who lived and wrote his history around 100 AD. How many copies do we have? Three. When were they written? About 800 years after Tacticus lived.

What about the New Testament? How does it measure up?

We have 5700 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. If you taken into account the 7 other languages that the New Testament was translated into early on, we have upwards of 25,000 copies. When were these copies written?

We have 10-15 NT manuscripts that are within 100 years and even though they are fragmentary, there are large portions of the gospels and epistles. Within 200 years we have roughly four dozen manuscripts. Of the manuscripts we have before AD 400 we have 99 including the oldest complete NT the Codex Sinaiticus.

This means that when comparing the NT manuscripts to other Ancient documents on The copies of the average ancient Greek or Latin author’s writings number fewer than 20 manuscripts! While we have thousands of NT manuscripts. Furthermore, on average we have no copies within 500 years of other ancient manuscripts while we have 100 within 300 years and some that may be only a few decades removed.

Furthermore, even if all of these were copies were destroyed, the NT text could be reproduced almost in its entirety by quotations of it in sermons, tracts, and commentaries written by ancient teachers of the church (known as church fathers or Patristic writers). To date, over a million quotations from the NT by the church fathers have been cataloged.

How about the concern of no two copies being exactly alike and that there are thousands of differences between NT manuscripts?

First off, given the astounding number of manuscripts in existence, it’s not surprising that there would be so many variations.

Let me summarize the conclusion first and then we’ll go into detail.

Of all the variations found in the existent manuscripts, less than 1% have anything to do with doctrine, and no doctrine is affected by any variation. We are certain that over 99% of the Bible is faithful to the original manuscripts.

Now digging a little deeper let’s look at the kinds of variations that exist. The largest category of variations has to do with spelling errors and nonsense errors. For example, writing “a apple” instead of “an apple.” An example of a nonsense error would be copying the phrase “we were snuggling together” instead of “we were struggling together.”

The 2nd largest category of variation has to do with minor changes like adding a definite article or changing the word order (which can be done in greek without affecting the meaning).

The third-largest category is variations that are meaningful but not viable, meaning that it is very unlikely they could have been the original wording. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 2:9, we have the original of “The Gospel of God” and the variation reading “The Gospel of Christ.” The greek words for God and Christ are very different so clearly this was a change made to add clarification but was not in the original wording.

The last category which makes up less than 1% of all variations are changes that are meaningful and are viable. One example of this kind of variation is in Romans 5:1 were we have one reading of “We have peace” vs. “Let us have peace.” You can see that this changes the meaning slightly, but it does not affect any doctrines. These are the types of variations found in this category.

In summary then from the ESV Study Bible

“In the final analysis, no cardinal doctrine, no essential truth, is affected by any viable variant in the surviving NT manuscripts. For example, the deity of Christ, his resurrection, his virginal conception, justification by faith, and the Trinity are not put in jeopardy because of any textual variation. Confidence can, therefore, be placed in the providence of God in preserving the Scriptures.”

This means we can trust that the Bible is today what it was 2000 years ago.