Are the Gospels Reliable History?: Has the Testimony Been Changed?

-Last class we asked “Can the Witnesses be Trusted?” 

 We learned that the evidence says: Absolutely Yes.

The gospels sound like written history. The writers say it's written history. And the accounts have the feel of written history.

 Finally even critical historians like Bart Bierman, take the gospels as written history.

-But now we have another challenge Listen to the words of Newsweek journalist Kirk Eichenwald:

“No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelistic politician. Neither has the pope. Neither have I. Neither have you. At best we've all read a bad translation - a translation of translations of translations of hand copied copies of copies of copies of copies and on and on hundreds of times”

 Is Eichenwald?

Has the testimony been changed?

 This is our second big question on gospel reliability.

-The first thing I want to do is see how people misunderstand how ancient documents are handed down. 

 You might call it the telephone game…. One person whispers a sentence to his neighbor. That person whispers what he thought he heard to his neighbor, and down the line the saying goes. The last person announces what he thought was whispered to him and it's absolutely ridiculous and makes no sense and has nothing to do with the original. Then everybody has a big, huge laugh. That's how many people think the gospels were passed down. It makes sense. Doesn't it? Well sure, but it's wrong….

-There's a fundamental misunderstanding with the telephone game illustration. It assumes a line of people, passing the message by voice from One person to the next. But that's not how it's done. Let me give you a better illustration. 

Okay say you have Mrs Thompson's third grade class of 40 students. She writes a long paragraph on the board and she tells her students to carefully copy the paragraph, word for word on a sheet of paper. She says their grades going to depend on how well they copy the paragraph. How accurate it is. When they're done Mrs Thompson erases the board. And what happens to the original? Well it's gone forever. Now she tells the students to exchange the papers and repeat the exercise. This time using the other students' copy. When they're finished she tells them to tear up that first copy and exchange their second copies. Then they do the exercise again. The teacher repeats the exercise five more times. Each time having the students destroy the previous copies when they're done.

Where's the original? It's gone…long gone. Where are the five generations of copies? Well they are gone too. All they have are copies of copies of copies of copies.

-Here's the key question: Do you think Ms Thompson's third graders will be able to reconstruct the original paragraph? Of course they can! How will they? They simply compare the 40 copies that were made. Will there be some differences? Probably. But Even if there are some mistakes, by closely comparing all the copies It'll be pretty obvious where all those mistakes are. Even if some knucklehead third grader messes up, the rest of the class will see the mistakes right away. They'll jump out at them. 

-Two questions now. One, do you see the difference in the telephone game and how the exercise went with the third graders? Second, do you see how it's relatively easy to reconstruct the original even if you don't have the original, but you just have copies of copies of copies? So Scholars reconstruct the original text basically the same way the third graders did.  In our illustration they take all the known copies of any ancient work and then they compare them to see how well each copy matches. 

-There's two important elements to this process. First, how many copies do we have for comparison? You see the more copies we have, the better. Lots of copies make it easier to reconstruct the original. Second, how close are those copies in time to the original? The smaller the time gap between the copies and the original, the better. Because there's less time for errors to be created. It's pretty simple when you think about it.

-So now how many copies of the gospel documents do we have for a comparison? Well, we actually have a lot. Between the 1st and 15th centuries, we have thousands and thousands of copies of pages, of partials and complete New Testament manuscripts. 

-And how close in time are those copies to the originals? We have portions of the gospels that date within 100 years of the originals. That's amazing! We have full complete copies of the New Testament dating between 300 And 350 AD.

Codex Sinaiticus 330-360 AD 

Codex Vaticanus 300-325 AD

Codex Alexandrinus 400-440 AD

And we have more discoveries every day it seems like!

-So what's the significance of this large number and relatively early dates of the Gospels? We know the significance by comparing the gospels to other works of antiquity. The average time gap for ancient writers between the original and the earliest copy is around 500 years. 

-We have Herodotus Histories, a core work in the early histories of civilization. The earliest copy is more than a 1000 years removed from the original.

-What about Tacitus The Annals? This is the pinnacle of Roman history in historical writing. The earliest copy we have is 750 years removed from the original. 

-The gospel evidence is overwhelming by comparison. Manuscript expert Daniel Wallace says this about it: 

“We have more and earlier manuscript evidence about the person of Jesus Christ then we do anyone in the ancient world Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great anyone”

-But what about the differences? Remember when I said I was an atheist? And I raised the objection “136,000 Words in the New Testament, 300,000 - 400,000 variants…” Here's what I didn't understand. There are three types of variations.

-First variations: That do not matter. The vast majority of the variations are like this. Spelling differences, abbreviations, nonsense readings, like a skipped line, insignificant changes in the word order (like Christ Jesus versus Jesus Christ) These variances have absolutely no bearing on our ability to reconstruct the original text. The variation doesn't change the meaning. 

-Second variations: That matter but they are not viable. Yes they give us a different understanding of the text but no it's not a problem because they're obvious mistakes. Like your one knuckleheaded third grader who forgot a sentence in his paragraph. There's errors everyone knows about… The long ending of Mark 16 for example, The woman caught in adultery in John 8.

-The Third Kind of variations are: The ones that matter and are viable. This is where the craft of textural criticism comes in with sophisticated procedures that help weed out the mistakes. In the entire New Testament of 20,000 lines, only about 40 are doubted. About 400 words. And none affect any significant doctrine. 

-Our chief question has been “Can we reconstruct the original New Testament?” The simple answer is yes, we can.

-Peter Gurry in his book Myths and Mistakes-The New Testament Textual Criticism.  He writes this

“We are safe to claim that neither the Christian faith nor the Bible's inspiration is threatened by textural variants”

The gospels haven't been changed.  Period.

-In our next class, we're going to ask the third question about the Gospels ‘Is there corroborating evidence?’