Introduction

 

The intent of this essay is to explore the historically reliability of the New Testament.  I am not so much concerned as to whether or not you believe its message.  The specific issues I want to address are (1) how close where the writers to the events they write about and (2) how faithfully have their writings been transmitted to us over the years.

 

Before discussing these points I would like to briefly talk about the topic of inspiration of the scriptures and formation of the New Testament.  Mormons believe that their primary holy book was given to them in a completed form and only required translation into English.  Moslems believe the Koran was spoken to Mohamed by the angel Gabriel and that he passed it on to friends to write down.  In both cases they believe that the very words they have are exactly as God gave them.  I do not believe that to be the case with the New Testament, or the Old for that matter.  I do not believe that the authors knew that what they were writing would later be a part of the Bible.  I do believe God in some way inspired them in the writing, but the words were their own.  Also, unlike the Book of Mormon and the Koran, the New Testament is a collection of writings that took shape over a period of time.  There were many other writings that were at one time or another or by differing groups thought to be equal with what was ultimately included in the New Testament.  This canonization process of the New Testament is actually another topic and will not be addresses here, other than to acknowledge that it is not really correct to say that the New Testament was written at some point in time.  Rather that collection of writings that came to be called the New Testament was produced during some period of time.

 

Who Wrote it and When?

 

So, point #1, when were the writings of the New Testament produced and by who.  In general there is not much agreement as to when.  The primary exception to this is some of Paul’s writings.  Over half of the letters that are attributed to him are universally accepted as being written by the Apostle Paul.  And since he died in the mid 60’s they must have been written by them.  But of most interest to this discussion are the historical books; the four Gospels and the book of Acts.  None of these books directly identify the author.  The gospel of John comes the closest to identifying its author with the claim to being written by the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’.  This is generally believed to refer to the Apostle John.  John is believed to have lived until near the end of the 1^st century and his writings seems to deal, at least to some extent, with an emerging threat from Gnosticism coming at the end of the 1^st century and into the 2^nd.  So it is likely that the gospel of John is written toward the end of the 1^st century and by the apostle John   

 

The only other internal clue I am aware of concerning authorship is the Luke – Acts set.  They seem to be written by the same person who claims, in the book of Acts, to have traveled with Paul a few times.  The physician Luke is traditionally credited with writing this two volume set.  Based on Paul’s letters, Luke was a sometimes companion of Paul and these writings seem to bear the mark of someone familiar with medical practice at the time, so it is not unlikely that Luke was the author of both.  When Acts, volume 2 of the set, came to a conclusion, Paul is under house arrest in Rome.  Paul is killed in Rome in the mid 60’s and no mention is made of that in Acts, the second half of which covers Paul exclusively.  So it is quite likely that Luke – Acts was written prior to that event.  An interesting tidbit that Luke gives us at the beginning of his gospel account is that many others had undertaken to record the events in the life of Jesus.  Luke, apparently not satisfied with any he has seen, undertook to thoroughly research and write an account himself.  What these other accounts are he does not specify but Mark was likely one of them.

 

Matthew is a hard gospel to date and identify an author for.  The apostle Matthew is typically credited with the composition but I think it unlikely.  The author seems dependant on other sources that would not seem likely for a first hand witness.  The primary dating event for Matthew concerns the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.  This occurred in A.D. 70 after a Jewish rebellion was put down by the Romans.  The 24^th chapter of Matthew records a discourse given to Jesus disciples in response to their question about the destruction of the temple.  Was this written before the temple was destroyed or after?  I am inclined to see it as before.  There is much in this discussion that does seem to have happened during the siege and capture of Jerusalem.  But there is also much that did not.  If the author is looking back at the event he did not do a very good job of making the prediction.  The author of Matthew seems to use Mark as a source, copying nearly all of Mark as well as other sources.  The author of this gospel could actually been an editor who took other sources and merged them together into a single account.

 

That leaves us with Mark.  Tradition has it that this gospel was written by the John Mark who spent some time with Paul and whose parent’s house Jesus likely used for the last supper before his crucifixion.  That tradition claims that the apostle Peter, while in Rome, told Mark the stories of his experiences with Jesus and that Mark used that as the basis for his gospel.  Most scholars today believe that Mark is a source that was used by both Matthew and Luke.  If that is the case then Mark would have had to be written and in circulation prior to the others, giving a fairly early date for its composition.

 

So, in my opinion, for what it’s worth, we have one gospel written by a primary source (John), one written by a secondary source (Mark) and two written by a likely combination of secondary and tertiary sources (Matthew and Luke).

 

This web site, http://www.errantskeptics.org/DatingNT.htm, provides a listing of the dates given by a variety of scholars, both liberal and conservative, for the writing of the New Testament books.  The following range of dates is given for these five books.

 

Matthew: as early as 40 to as late as 100 with most somewhere between 60 and 80

Mark: as early as 40 to as late as 90 with most between 60 and 70

Luke: as early as 53 to as late as 100 with most somewhere between 60 and 80

John: as early as 65 to as late as 100 with most somewhere between 85 and 95

Acts: as early as 62 to as late as 96 with most somewhere between 62 and 85

Another scholarly source for information about the New Testament documents is a book by FF Bruce, “The New Testament Documents; Are They Reliable”.  This can be found online at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/ffbruce/ntdocrli/ntdocont.htm.  Of particular relevance to this discussion are chapter 2 – ‘The New Testament Documents: Their Date and Attestation’ and chapter 4 – ‘The Gospels’.

 

Before leaving the topic of dating the gospels I would like to respond to the question of why they waited so long before writing.  It would seem logical that the life and teachings of Jesus would have been so significant that they would have been recorded earlier rather than later.  But something that is not commonly considered is that the early church lived in expectation that Jesus would be returning within their lifetime.  And with that thought there was no reason for them to commit to writing the life of Jesus.  After all there were many first hand witnesses who could share that story and few believers would have been able to read it if it was written down.  But as it became obvious to them that Jesus return was not as soon as they expected, it became more important to have written accounts that would survive the apostles and others who had known Jesus.  Given that I think it is altogether reasonable that the gospels did not begin to appear until close to 30 years after Jesus death around A.D. 30.

 

Transmission of the Texts

 

Transmission of the New Testament deals with the path it took from the original writings to what we have today.  I want to look at three topics in this discussion:  copyist errors, the number of copies, and textual criticism.  My goal through this discussion will be to demonstrate that the New Testament documents that we have today are substantially the same as the originals.  I am much indebted to Bruce Metzer’s book “The Text of the New Testament:  It’s Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration”.  This is, as far as I have been able to determine, a classic in the area of textual criticism of the New Testament.

 

Up until the invention of the printing press all books were copied by hand.  This was a slow and tedious process and extremely difficult to do without any errors.  Whether one person reads and many write or one person reads and then writes there were common errors that crept into the reproduction.  Most generally these errors amount to simple spelling errors or replacement of similar sounding words.  Occasionally a distracted scribe would forget where they were and skip a section or repeat a section already copied.  Frequently these errors would be caught either by the copyist or a reviewer, but not always.  At other times it appears that the copyist made intentional changes; likely because they thought they were correcting an error that had been introduced earlier.  Some of these changes would be corrections of spelling errors or word replacement described earlier.  Other times the change had more significance.  If the scribe or monastery they worked in felt that Jesus or Paul or another author could not have possibly said something as recorded in the manuscript they might feel the need to change the words to better reflect what they believed he would have said. Over the years these generally minor, although occasionally major, changes accumulated.  As the originals disappear followed by the original copies and the copies of the copies, etc, we end up with several families of manuscripts from different locations none of which completely agree within the manuscript family and sometimes have great variance between families.

 

I am sure you have heard some pretty large numbers connected with New Testament manuscripts.  There are between 5 and 6 thousand Greek manuscripts, and twice that number in other ancient languages.  In addition, there are thousands of manuscripts that include quotes from the New Testament.  But these numbers, while real enough, seem a little deceptive to me.  Most of them are from the 8^th century and on and most are considered of little value for determining just what the original writings said.  So far there are no first century manuscripts and only a handful from the second.  There are quite a few from the 3^rd through 5^th centuries, including some complete copies of the New Testament from the 4^th and 5^th.  In addition the translations into other languages, while not useful for determining specific words, are good for verifying the basic content and ordering of events and speeches.  A third source useful for reconstructing the originals are early Christian writings that include quotes from the New Testament documents.  Metzger comments that there are enough of these quotes from antiquity that the entire New Testament could be reconstructed from them.  These are also subject to scribal copy errors as well as incomplete or inaccurate quotes so care must be taken with these.  All in all there are several dozen good Greek manuscripts as well as other sources from the first 5 centuries that are useful in textual criticism. 

 

I had wanted to give a brief description of textual criticism but find that I am unable to distill this very complex process into a short paragraph.  Instead, if you are interested, you can review http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/intro.html for a brief (10 pages or so) description of this topic.  In a sentence, textual criticism is the process of comparing manuscripts to determine, as closely as possible, what the original text said.  The end result of this process is a Greek New Testament that is a close approximation of the original.  Included with this Greek NT is a list of all of the alternate readings along with the manuscript(s) the alternates come from.  These ‘close to original’ Greek New Testaments become the basis for the modern translations that we use today. 

 

I frequently hear the charge that the New Testament has been translated so many times that there is no way to tell what the original was.  The truth is that our modern translations have only been translated once, from the reconstructed Greek to English (or other language). 

 

Another charge is that the text has been altered so much that it does not resemble the original.  While this can not be completely refuted, it is highly unlikely.  For this to occur it would have had to happen prior to more than a handful of copies of a document being made.  As copies are made they were dispersed around the Roman Empire.  Alterations made to one copy would be reflected in subsequent copies of that copy, but would seldom make it into other ‘families’ of manuscripts.  And with the seeming inability of the early church to completely eliminate Gnostic versions of the gospels and other writings it would seem far-fetched to think they could have eliminated all copies of some orthodox manuscript that they wanted to alter. 

 

The process of textual criticism is used, not just on the Bible, but all ancient manuscripts.  It has become a very structured process and as best as I can tell there are few scholars familiar with the process who question the ability, given enough material to work with, to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of an original.  The New Testament has many more ancient copies that any other work from antiquity and copies from closer to the original.  While I believe numbers like 99.5% complete reconstruction are not likely, I do believe that what we have today is a pretty close copy of the original autographs and that it is safe to believe that what I read today is, to all intents and purposes, the same as what was originally written. 

 

Summary

 

By no means does this essay prove that the New Testament is true; only that it was written close to the events that the Gospels and Acts describe and that what we have today is a faithful reproduction of what was originally written.  Ascertaining the truth of what was written, or more properly that the authors believed what they wrote to be true, is another topic.

 

Appendix A - Redating the New Testament by John A. T. Robinson

This book, published in 1976, is frequently referenced on web sites when you go looking for dating of the NT works.  I have just finished reading it and thought it would make an interesting addition to this page to include the conclusions he came to.  This was a very scholarly work, referencing a multitude of other scholars with every possible view of dating and authorship for the NT books.  By no means do all, or even many, scholars come to the same conclusions he has.  But it is an interesting and, IMO, a well argued book.  The below list is reproduced from his book, providing the writings and their approximate dates in the order that Mr. Robinson has argued for in the book.  Note that 4 of them are not included in the NT canon, although they were considered.

 

James - c. 47-48

I Thessalonians - early 50

II Thessalonians - 50-1

I Corinthians - spring 55

I TImothy - autumn 55

II Corinthians - early 56

Galatians - later 56

Romans - early 57

Titus - late spring 57

Philippians - spring 58

Philemon - summer 58

Colossians - summer 58

Ephesians - late summer 58

II Timothy - autumn 58

The Didache - c. 40-60

Mark - cc 45-60

Matthew - c. 40-60+

Luke - -57-60+

Jude - 61-62

II Peter - 61-62

Acts - -57-62+

II, III & I John - c. 60-65

I Peter - spring 65

John - c. -40-65+

Hebrews - c.67

Revelation - late 68 (-70)

I Clement - early 70

Barnabas - c. 75

The Shepherd of Hermas - -c. 85