I was waiting for someone at a local coffee shop when a gentleman at an adjacent table struck up a conversation. I had been reading in preparation for an upcoming Bible class, and the page showed a picture of an ancient clay tablet. The man was intrigued and asked what I was reading.

He explained that he was an agnostic. As we discussed the Bible ever so briefly, he commented in an inquisitive way, "hasn't the New Testament been translated several times." His question is an interesting one. I think what he meant was a reference to the notion that scribes from antiquity to the middle ages recopied and rewrote the text of the New Testament. The simple answer to his actual original question is yes, the New Testament has been translated from koine Greek to a great variety of languages both ancient and modern. However, at the heart of what I think he was asking is, how reliable is the New Testament?

 

If it is true that the New Testament was copied and recopied by an unknown number of scribes over hundreds of years, is it possible to say the text we have today is reliable? How can Christians be certain today that the text they are reading and believe to be authentic is authentic? This is what we might call the reliability of the New Testament, and it is an important question. If Christians are going to hold the New Testament as authoritative or the standard for living godly lives and for the work of the church, then the New Testament must be authentic or as some would say, reliable. I believe that it is both reliable and authoritative. Let's consider the question of the reliability of the Greek text.

Many times when someone asks "hasn't the New Testament been copied and recopied hundreds of times?" or "has the New Testament been rewritten several times?" a certain perception comes to mind. What is envisioned is scribes copying portions of the New Testament and perhaps adding or modifying portions of the text haphazardly or even deliberately. The thought is that this was done so commonly that a great range of variations exist. For many skeptics of the New Testament, the belief is that so many variations exist that it is impossible to know what the original autographs may have said as copy after copy was altered. Is there ample evidence to support this view?

Textual Criticism is the science of comparing manuscripts of ancient literature. Textual critics compare various manuscripts of a work to determine what an original work may have said and seek to understand why a scribe would have altered a text. With many ancient works such as Plato's Republic, Thucydides' History, or Herodotus' History few ancient manuscripts survive which textual critics may analyze. But the New Testament provides textual critics with well over 4,000 texts in Greek. On top of this, the New Testament was translated from Greek into ancient languages such as Coptic (Egyptian), Old Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Old Slavonic. Existent Greek manuscripts date from roughly 150 AD ("John Rylands") to the sixteenth century.

 
 
 
Textual critics are able to know the age and origin of ancient manuscripts by comparing the writing material and type of writing with their contemporary secular literature. They can know, for instance, that papyrus was used in the first and second centuries but began declining in use as better writing materials were developed in later centuries. They also know that due to the scarcity of writing materials, literature in the first and second centuries AD used "uncials" capital Greek letters with little space in between letters in order maximize space on a page. They know when the transition began from scrolls to "codex" or books as we have them today. There are a number of factors that help textual critics know when a manuscript was written.

Textual critics are able to compile all the known copies of a text and compare them. When a new manuscript is identified, it is compared to those already known to exist. There are two ways in which scribes copied texts. One way was for a single scribe to sit down with an older text and copy it on to a clean page. The other way was for several scribes to gather together and as a reader read aloud from an older text the scribes would write what they heard. Some manuscripts have notes in the margin left by a scribe to explain why he copied what he copied. What have textual critics found?

Skeptics of the New Testament may believe the a wide range of variants exist. But this is not the case. Most variants are misspellings or instances in which a scribe accidentally copied the same line twice or perhaps dropped a line. At times it is clear that a scribe who transcribed as another read, copied a similarly sounding word to the one which was read aloud (i.e., "their" versus "there"). Since an older text was used as the basis for a new copy, these mistakes were sometimes duplicated into the new copy. In many cases, textual critics are able to trace these backwards and group them into "families" of texts.

 

 
But what textual critics have not found are striking variations in the events, teachings or doctrine, and theology of the New Testament. For the most part, there is little variation among the known copies of New Testament books other than the minor ones already mentioned. Textual critics have not found diverse versions of 1 Corinthians, for instance, in which Paul's teaching in one manuscript is different from another manuscript. Of all the manuscripts known to exist, the only significant variations come down to the narrative story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), the ending of Mark (16:9ff), and a variation of 1 John 5:7-8.
 
As we come back to the New Testament found in modern English translations today, can we answer the question "is the Greek text from which the translation is made reliable?" The answer is yes. Textual critics have much greater confidence in the reliability of these texts than they do other "unquestioned" ancient literature. There simply are not competing versions of the substance of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Nor are there diverse versions of Paul's letters, nor those of Peter, James, Jude, or John. With the exception of minor errors such as spelling or lines copied twice, the texts are amazingly consistent.

Christianity works because we can have confidence in the ancient writings of the Apostles and prophets who recorded the divinely inspired thoughts. We don't have to guess at the content as we do with other ancient literature where lines are missing and portions no longer exist. We can trust the New Testament.

To read in greater depth consider these works:

Aland, Kurt and Aland, Barbara. The Text of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans. 1987.

Metzger, Bruce. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed.), Stuttgart, Germany: UBS, 1994.

Metzger, Bruce. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. (3rd ed). N.Y.: Oxford, 1992.

Comfort, Philip W., and Barrett, David P. The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999.

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