In part one of this article, we discussed the manuscript evidence for the Bible, and how the allegation of wholesale editing in the fourth century (which is a very popular argument) does not hold any water. Yet, this is just the shallow end of the pool when it comes to the textual issues of the Bible. There have been more scholarly and nuanced attacks upon the integrity of the New Testament, which carry more weight to their arguments than the average layman who has only heard of Michael Baigent or Dan Brown. To this, we shall now turn.

Textual Criticism and Alleged Corruption

Anybody who knows anything about textual criticism of the New Testament has undoubtedly heard of Bart Ehrman and his bestselling book, Misquoting Jesus. When he published his book back in 2005, Ehrman became one of the oft-cited textual scholars by both atheist and Muslim critics of the bible because of the case that he attempts to present against the textual reliability of the New Testament. Ehrman’s case can be summed up in what he wrote in his introduction to the book:

It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don’t have the originals—so saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have the copies of the copies of the originals, or the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ from one another so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.[1]

This is the man who is often lauded these days as the one who has “exposed” the secrets of textual criticism to the light of day. However, most of the arguments in the book have more to do with shock value (sadly, most Christians are ignorant about these issues, so its easy to shock them with these kinds of things) and misinterpretation of facts (which we will be delving more into as we go along). Most of the things Ehrman says is really nothing new for those who are familiar with textual criticism. Many textual critics, such as the Alands, Nicholas Perrin, Daniel Wallace, and Bruce Metzger (whom was actually Erhman’s mentor), have known about these issues for decades, and they do not interpret the facts the way Ehrman does. Dr. Daniel Wallace, one of the few textual scholars who can hold a candle to Ehrman in terms of influence in the field of New Testament textual criticism, wrote a comprehensive revew of his work entitled, The Gospel According to Bart. Here, Dr. Wallace shows the various flaws in Ehrman’s thinking, especially the unbalanced view that he holds concerning the reliability of the Bible:

What strikes me as most remarkable in all this is how much Ehrman tied inerrancy to the general historical reliability of the Bible. It was an all-or-nothing proposition for him. He still seems to see things in black and white terms… There thus seems to be no middle ground in his view of the text. In short, Ehrman seems to have held to what I would call a ‘domino view of doctrine.’ When one falls down, they all fall down.

…it seems that Bart’s black and white mentality as a fundamentalist has hardly been affected as he slogged through the years and trials of life and learning, even when he came out on the other side of the theological spectrum. He still sees things without sufficient nuancing, he overstates his case, and he is entrenched in the security that his own views are right.[2]

Aside from this, it should also be pointed out that he does not even go as far as many who wish to use his writings to attack the reliability of the Bible go, as evidenced by certain portions of his own writings where he shows a bit more conservatism in his view of the Scriptural text:

These are questions that plague textual critics, and that have led some to argue that we should abandon any quest for the original text—since we can’t even agree on what it might mean to talk about the “original” of, say, Galatians or John. For my part however, I continue to think that even if we cannot be 100 percent certain about what we can attain to, we can at least be certain that all surviving manuscripts were copied from other manuscripts, which were themselves copied from other manuscripts, and that it is at least possible to get back to the oldest and earliest stage of the manuscript tradition for each of the books of the New Testament. All our manuscripts of Galatians, for example, evidently go back to some text that was copied; all our manuscripts of John evidently go back to a version of John that included the prologue and chapter 21. And so we must rest content knowing that getting back to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached back to the “original” text. This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely) related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of his teaching.[3]

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(Note: Due to the length of this article, I am dividing it into two separate posts. This will be part one of the article. Part two will be posted later this week, Lord Willing)

Introduction

In the past few decades, one of the staple arguments used by those who seek to discredit the authority of the Bible has been to allege that the scriptural text has become lost due to corruption. This may have happened over the course of the centuries, or during a decisive period in the history of the Christian church.And this kind of attack can come from almost any angle. Anybody who has encountered Islamic apologists, for example, will undoubtedly have heard the charge that the Bible (which was inspired by God in its original form) has been changed. The level of knowledge these apologists actually have, of course, varies. Some are absolutely clueless regarding the textual history of the bible, and are merely repeating canards taught to them by their imams. Others are a bit more sophisticated, and may rely on liberal scholarship to substantiate their point.

But how well does this argument stand when the claims in question are actually examined? It is well worth going over the textual history of the bible and the manuscripts that have come down to us over the centuries in order to see whether we still have the bible that God originally revealed to us, or whether it has been “lost in transmission” during the course of time.

Counting the Manuscript Evidence

The Bible did not always exist as this book with a leather cover, gold-gilded pages and thumb-indexing that one can simply buy at any bookstore today. Like any other ancient document, the Bible has a textual history. It has been handed down to us through generations of constant copying. The result of this is that we have thousands of manuscripts of the bible. As Drs. Norman Geisler and William Nix put it in  their General Introduction to the Bible,

The fidelity of the New Testament text rests on a multitude of manuscript evidence. Counting Greek copies alone, the New Testament is preserved in some 5,656 partial and complete manuscript portions that were copied by hand from the second through the fifteenth centuries.[1]

And yet we did not always have this wealth of manuscripts. Back in the 19th century, we did not have as many manuscripts available to us. They have been accumulated over the past two centuries by various persons who have worked hard to locate these ancient manuscripts. In The Text of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger recounts the story of how the 19th century textual scholar Constantin Von Tischendorf discovered one particularly important biblical manuscript from an old monastery:

In 1844, when he was not yet thirty years of age, Tischendorf, a Privatdozent in the University of Leipzig, began an extensive journey through the Near East in search of Biblical manuscripts. While visiting the monastery of St. Catharine at Mount Sinai, he chanced to see some leaves of parchment in a waste-basket full of papers destine dto light the oven of the monastery. On examination these proved to be part of a copy of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, written in an early Greek uncial script. He retrieved from the basket no fewer than forty-three such leaves… The forty-three leaves which he was permitted to to keep contaianed portions of I Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther… In 1846 he published their contents…

A second visit to the monastery by Tischendorft in 1853 produced no new manuscripts because the monks were suspicious as a result of the enthusiasm for the MS displayed during his first visit in 1844. He visited a third time in 1859, under the direction of the Czar of Russia, Alexander II. Shortly before leaving, Tischendorf, gave the steward of the monastery an edition of the Septuagint that had been published by Tischendorf in Leipzig.

Thereupon the steward remarked that he too had a copy of the Septuagint, and produced in his cell a manuscript wrapped in a red cloth. There before the astonished scholar’s eyes lay the treasure which he had been longing to see. Concealing his feelings, Tischendorf casually asked permission to look at it further that evening. Permission was granted, and upon retiring to his room Tischendorf stayed up all night in the joy of studying the manuscripts… He soon found that the document contained much more than he had even hoped; for not only was most of the Old Testament there, but also the New Testament was intact and in excellent condition…[2]

Of course, this was not the end of the story. The manuscript came into the hands of the Soviet Union, and remained in their possession until England bought the manuscript for one hundred thousand pounds.[3] Today, this manuscript is known as Codex Sinaiticus, and is one of the most valuable early witnesses we have of the bible.[4]

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If you’ve read the Da Vinci Code or listened to Skeptics and Muslims giving objections to the Christian faith, one argument that you might hear is that doctrines such as the deity of Christ and the Holy Trinity were completely foreign to the New Testament Church and was an invention of Nicea. As an example of how this argument is frequently employed, a certain booklet published by the Islamic Circle of North America contains the following statement in one of its notes:

It was in the ancient city of Nicea (which was located in modern-day Turkey approximately 700 miles or 1100 km NNW of Jerusalem near the eastern Roman capitol) that the First Council of Nicea convened, 325 years after the birth of Jesus. It was at this council that Jesus was declared by the majority of the council members to be divine rather than God’s Prophet and Messenger. The concept of the trinity was established by declaring that Jesus was the same as and equal to God. This is in direct opposition to the Abrahamic principles of monotheism, which Jesus himself called people to and affirmed.[1]

In addition, one can find the following on one of the pamphlets that they often distribute:

With their teacher gone, the devoted followers of Jesus tried to maintain the purity and simplicity of his teachings. But they were soon besieged and overtaken by a flood of Roman and Greek influences, which eventually so buried and distorted the message of Jesus that only a little of its truth now remains. Strange doctrines of Jesus being a man-god, of God dying, of saint worship and of God being made up of different parts came into vogue and were accepted by many of those who took the name “Christians” centuries after Jesus. [2]

Of course, all of this is a misrepresentation of what Christians actually believe, not to mention of the history of the faith. The New Testament provides a wealth of evidence that the followers of Jesus believed He was God from very early on, as can be seen in John 1:1-18, John 20:27-29, Romans 9:5, Colossians 2:9, Titus 2:13, 2 Peter 1:1, Hebrews 1:6-12 and 1 John 5:20. These scripture passages are well-attested not only in the earliest and best manuscripts of the New Testament that we have today, but also in the citations of them by th early church fathers. Now, undoubtedly there are those who will try to skirt around the obvious by attempting to explain away these passages. Their explanations cannot stand without twisting the scriptures, but that will be for another time.

There is also the testimony of the Apostolic and Ante-Nicene fathers, who lived during the first two centuries after Christ walked upon this earth. The Trinitarian formula is clearly present in the writings of Saint Clement of Rome. Ignatius of Antioch frequently refers to Jesus as God in his epistles. The anonymous second century epistle known as 2nd Clement states that “we ought so to think of our Lord Jesus Christ as of God, [and] as of the judge of quick and dead…”[3]. But I believe that the clearest testimony comes from Melito of Sardis, who identifies Christ as God who made the heavens and the earth. This is clear from his Paschal homily, where he writes:

The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.

This is the one who made the heavens and the earth, and who in the beginning created man, who was proclaimed through the law and prophets, who became human via the virgin, who was hanged upon a tree, who was buried in the earth, who was resurrected from the dead, and who ascended to the heights of heaven, who sits at the right hand of the Father, who has authority to judge and to save everything, through whom the Father created everything from the beginning of the world to the end of the age.

This is the alpha and the omega. This is the beginning and the end–an indescribable beginning and an incomprehensible end. This is the Christ. This is the king. This is Jesus. This is the general. This is the Lord. This is the one who rose up from the dead. This is the one who sits at the right hand of the Father. He bears the Father and is borne by the Father, to whom be the glory and the power forever. Amen.[4]

All of the early church fathers I have mentioned lived during the first two centuries of Christianity, so it is clear that the beliefs that they have espoused are not the fabrication of a later age.
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