Is The New Testament Accurate?
I grew up in a Christian home and have been a regular church attendee for my entire life, and with that, I have always believed that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. However, upon leaving my small-town bubble to start college, I quickly realized that I was in the minority when it came to my beliefs about God and the Bible. I discovered that the Bible has a lot of critics whose questions I wasn’t particularly equipped to handle. I knew my Bible well, but I also knew that the phrase, “because the Bible says so” was not a great answer for those who do not believe the Bible is true. So, how can we begin to answer some of the difficult questions skeptics have concerning the Bible? What evidence is there for the truth and authority of Scripture? In an effort to keep this somewhat brief, I would like to address just two simple, but important, questions regarding this topic:
1. How can we be confident that the Bible we have today is the same as the original writings?
2. How do we know that the original writings were true to begin with? (I’ll address this question in Part Two)
**A quick note: Assessing the historical reliability of the entire Bible would require more space than I have room for, so I will be focusing primarily on the New Testament and the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - to get an accurate representation of Jesus. Jesus is the center of all Christian belief and He made it clear throughout the Gospels that He believed in the authority of Scripture. If we can reach the conclusion that the Bible accurately recorded Jesus’ words, then we can trust His endorsement of the rest of the Scripture.
How can we be confident that the Bible we have today is the same as the original writings?
You might be surprised to learn that we do not possess any original writings of the New Testament, and yet historians still consider the Bible to be one of the most reliable and credible documents from ancient history.[1] Why is this? There are a number of different reasons that we’ll get into, but historians believe in the accuracy of the New Testament in large part because of the sheer number of ancient manuscripts (a.k.a. handwritten copies) we have in our possession. Essentially, the more manuscripts we have to compare, the more confidently we can conclude that they match the original writings. In her book, Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity, Alisa Childers uses an old family recipe to illustrate this concept.[2] Allow me to quickly summarize her analogy:
Imagine a cherished apple pie recipe that has been passed down through your family over several generations. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of handwritten copies exist between children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. However, at this point in time, the original copy has long since been lost. If someone wanted to verify that their recipe matched the original, what would be the best way for them to do so? There would be no way of knowing with just one copy - they would have to compare as many copies as possible, preferrably using the oldest copies that were written close to the time of the original. After comparing all available copies, they might notice a few differences between them. A few recipes misspelled the word “apple,” while some listed the ingredients in a different order. One might be difficult to read because someone spilled coffee on it, while others are torn and missing some information. However, despite these differences, the overwhelming majority of similarities between the copies would make it easy to recreate and verify the original, authentic recipe. Childers writes, “In fact, because there are so many manuscripts that are overall so reliable, it would actually be quite difficult to get the recipe wrong.”[3]
Of course, comparing ancient New Testament manuscripts is much more complicated than comparing simple recipes. However, there are two factors that work in the New Testament’s favor: the number of manuscripts available, and the age of the earliest surviving copies. Currently, historians have found close to 5,800 New Testament Greek manuscripts, and when you add manuscripts from other languages, the total comes to about 24,000![4] Additionally, the earliest surviving manuscripts were written just a few generations after the originals (the earliest undisputed manuscript is dated 50-100 years later).[5] Sir Frederic Kenyon, the author of The Palaeography of Greek Papyri, has stated, “In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.”[6] In fact, the New Testament has “more manuscripts, earlier manuscripts, and more abundantly supported manuscripts than the best ten pieces of classical literature combined.”[7] For comparison, let’s check these same numbers with a few other historically trusted ancient writings:[8]
The New Testament
- Number of manuscripts: ~ 5,800 Greek (~ 24,000 total)
- Earliest surviving copy: 50-100 years from the original
Homer’s Iliad
- Number of manuscripts: ~ 1,800
- Earliest surviving copy: ~ 1,000 years from the original
Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome (Books 1-6)
- Number of manuscripts: 1
- Earliest surviving copy: ~ 730 years from the original
Josephus’ The Jewish War
- Number of manuscripts: 9
- Earliest surviving copy: ~ 900 years (Greek translations) and ~ 300 years (Latin translations) from the original
Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ, comments:
“There [is] in fact no comparison: the manuscript evidence for the New Testament [is] overwhelming when juxtaposed against other revered writings of antiquity – works that modern scholars have absolutely no reluctance treating as authentic.”[9]
At this point, most critics would correctly assert that if there were thousands of handwritten copies circulating around the ancient world, there would have to be a large number of copy errors in the manuscripts. After all, the copyists were only human, right? The truth is that there are indeed a large number of copy errors contained within the ancient manuscripts (some estimates count as high as 400,000!).[10] Does this destroy the Christian belief that the Bible is infallible? Don’t get too excited. Most biblical scholars – liberal and conservative – don’t seem to be concerned. Renowned biblical scholar Bruce Metzger explains that the astronomical number of variants is misleading because of the way in which they are counted. If a single copy error is repeated in two thousand manuscripts, it is counted as two thousand errors.[11] Also, virtually all of these errors do not affect the meaning of the text (much like the misspelling of the word “apple” doesn’t affect our apple pie recipe). Even Dr. Bart Ehrman, a distinguished atheistic biblical scholar, doesn’t put much stock into these copy errors. He writes:
The vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of differences are completely and utterly unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter at all. By far the most common differences simply show us that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than most people can today (and the scribes didn’t have spellcheck!). If we really want to know what the apostle Paul had to say about the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, does it matter to us how he spelled the word “resurrection”? Probably not. Moreover, lots of other kinds of differences in our manuscripts – as we will see – are easy to explain and don’t affect the meaning of the writings in the least.[12]
However, there are a handful of differences in some manuscripts that are more substantial than simple copy errors. These “meaningful variants”[13] actually do affect the meaning of the text, and they may or may not be included in the original writings. It should be noted that no “meaningful variant” of any length contradicts any biblical doctrines - most only affect a few words here and there. The two variant passages that are of considerable length can be found in Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11. It is here that nearly every Bible you read today contains a footnote that reads something like, “The earliest manuscripts do not contain [insert passage].” These passages are still included because scholars agree that most manuscripts do include the passages in question – only the earliest do not. Alisa Childers argues that the existence of meaningful variants is actually good news! She says:
“Because we can identify them, we can actually know how accurate our copy of the New Testament is. The good news? Our New Testament has been copied with an astounding degree of accuracy. No other work of ancient classical literature even comes close….Because scholars know what the meaningful variants are, we can be assured that not one of them changes any core Christian doctrine.”[14]
So what are we to make of all this information? If you were to compare the enormous amount of New Testament manuscripts to one another - all from different languages, time periods, and geographical locations - you would find an astounding level of unanimity between them. That is why Bible scholars, historians, and Christian believers have concluded for centuries that the Bible we use today is virtually identical to the original text. Benjamin Warfield, the author of Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament, put it this way:
“If we compare the present state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must…declare it to be marvelously correct. Such has been the care with which the New Testament has been copied - a care which has doubtless grown out of true reverence for its holy words….The New Testament [is] unrivaled among ancient writings in the purity of its text as actually transmitted and kept in use.”[15]
So, the next time someone asks you, ”Hasn’t the Bible been changed and manipulated so many times that the original meaning has been lost?” feel free to pass this information along!
**I would like to note that this is simply a “bird’s eye view” of the historical reliability of the Bible. If you would like to explore this subject more (without wading through too much academic jargon), I would highly recommend that you check out the following books:
- The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus by Lee Strobel
- The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity by Mark Clark
- Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity by Alisa Childers
- The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller
- I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler & Frank Turek
- Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace
Notes
[1] Mark Clark, “The Problem of the Bible,” in The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), Hoopla Digital Library.
[2] Alisa Childers, “For the Bible Tells Me So?,” in Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2020), Hoopla Digital Library.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Bruce Metzger, interviewed by Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 66.
[5] Alisa Childers, “For the Bible Tells Me So?,” in Another Gospel?, Hoopla Digital Library.
[6] Frederic Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 5, cited in Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 67.
[7] Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 225.
[8] Bruce Metzger, interviewed by Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, 63-64.
[9] Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, 64.
[10] Alisa Childers, “For the Bible Tells Me So?,” in Another Gospel?, Hoopla Digital Library.
[11] Bruce Metzger, interviewed by Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, 68.
[12] Bart Ehrman, “New Testament Manuscripts: Good News and Bad News,” The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History and Literature of Early Christianity, July 18, 2015, https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-manuscripts-good-news-and-bad-news/, cited in Alisa Childers, “For the Bible Tells Me So?,” in Another Gospel?, Hoopla Digital Library.
[13] Alisa Childers, “For the Bible Tells Me So?,” in Another Gospel?, Hoopla Digital Library.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Benjamin B. Warfield, Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907), 12-13, cited in Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 74.