RE: The Bible is Historically Unreliable
These really are the standard lies. No, the New Testament books really were written by eyewitnesses (Matthew, John, Peter, Jude, James, Paul) and those who talked to eyewitnesses (Luke, Mark).
Paul said this,
(1 Corinthians 15:3-8 NIV) For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance : that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, {4} that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, {5} and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. {6} After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. {7} Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, {8} and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
It's also inaccurate to say we don't know if the gospel accounts were accurately transmitted.
Here's a good place to go for the honest skeptic: https://bibleevidences.com/
A common misunderstanding of the Bible by both Christians and non-Christians alike is the mistaken notion that the Bible is a translation upon a translation upon a translation, leading some to believe that the end result is so garbled it hardly represents the original. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Translations such as the King James version are derived from extant copies of old manuscripts such as the Greek Textus Receptus (Received Text) and the Hebrew Masoretic text, and are not translations of a text that had itself been translated from another interpretation. Often, the differences between Bibles with different translations lie only in how the scholars interpreted a word or sentence from the original language of the text source (Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek).1
So how reliable are the manuscripts that all these Bibles are translated from? The evidence is overwhelming and seldom disputed. Manuscripts prepared from different individuals spread over various parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean region agree remarkably with each other. Also, the manuscripts agree with the Septuagint, which was translated to Greek from Hebrew possibly as far back as the 3rd century BC. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 also provided a profound testimony to the reliability of the centuries of transmission of the Bible text, as every Old Testament book found was virtually word for word with today’s Bible! (the few differences were “obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling”2).
The scribes who were in charge of the Old Testament text dedicated their lives to preserving the text’s accuracy when they made copies. The great lengths the scribes went to guarantee the reliability of the copies is illustrated by the fact that they would count every letter and every word, and record in the margins such things as the middle letter and word of the Torah. If a single error was found, the copy was immediately destroyed. As a software engineer, I can personally vouch that the scribe’s method of protecting the text is more rigorous than the common checksuming methods used today to protect software programs from corruption3.
The New Testament manuscript evidence is even more impressive, with 24,000 known copies, 5,366 which are complete, and some that date as early as the second and third centuries. This manuscript authority greatly surpasses all other writings of antiquity, as illustrated in the following table4:
Work When
Written Earliest
Copy Time
Span No. of
copies
New Testament A.D. 40-100 A.D. 125 25 yrs 24,000
Homer (Iliad) 900 B.C. 400 B.C 500 yrs 643
Sophocles 496-406 B.C A.D. 1000 1,400 yrs 193
Aristotle 384-322 B.C. A.D. 1100 1,400 yrs 49
Caesar (Gallic Wars) 58-50 B.C. A.D. 900 1000 yrs 10
As can be seen from the table, Homer’s Iliad, the most renowned book of ancient Greece, is a very distant second to the New Testament in manuscript support, with only 643 copies. Of these copies, there are 764 disputed lines, compared to only 40 lines in the New Testament5. The New Testament even fares better than the 37 plays written by William Shakespeare in the 17th century. Every play contains various gaps in the printed text, forcing scholars in many cases to “fill in the blanks”. With the 24,000 copies of the New Testament, we can be sure that nothing has been lost. It is also very impressive to note that scholars can recreate all but 11 verses of the New Testament by simply piecing together quotations by the early church fathers of the second and third centuries!
The scholar F.F. Bruce, in The Books and the Parchments sums it up well:
There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament6
Hello, @barncat,
I'm just stopping in to say that I greatly appreciate your extensive and well presented response to this article. You've put forth a good defense.
While I have noticed and appreciated your repeated visits to my blog, I'm concerned about the apparently superficial and polemic nature of the replies you've been leaving me.
I know this may be somewhat difficult to believe, but as I look over your work as a whole, and your comments (like this one) elsewhere, I find that you and I likely have more common ground than may appear on the surface.
I'd really like to see a response or two more like this one under any of my articles that seem to trouble you. I have no doubt that there are things that I can and ought to learn from you, given the opportunity.
Peace.
Well I'm happy that you responded to the points in a logical order, but I'm not sure you offered sufficent evidence for your claims. The Synoptic Gospels are anonymous, they were written without anyone signing their name. I could restate everything in my 2nd paragraph, but I'd prefer to see proof for the opposing argument. So without disproving the first part of the thesis, you go on to cite the Bible as evidence for itself. The fact remains that the earliest copies have the most mistakes and discrepancies. They also require interpretation. But let's just go to the second point of my thesis which is very important, and that deals with oral culture. Because you haven't proved authorship, you can't prove that the stories didn't result from an unreliable oral culture. So those are two big hurdles before you can cite the bible as evidence. Once you've done that, you will need to explain obvious falsifications like the story of Jesus and the adulterer, which appears nowhere in the earlier manuscripts. Or the very important one, the doctrine of the trinity, which was fabricated much later. Here is a quote form Misquoting Jesus, which talks about that, "Erasmus and the Trinity, "The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that all these subsequent editions — those of Stephanus included — ultimately go back to Erasmus's editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts — the ones he happened to find in Basel and the one he borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. There would be no reason to suspect that these manuscripts were particularly high in quality. They were simply the ones he could lay his hands on. Indeed, as it turns out, these manuscripts were not of the best quality: they were, after all, produced some eleven hundred years after the originals! For example, the main manuscript that Erasmus used for the Gospels contained both the story of the woman taken in adultery in John and the last twelve verses of Mark, passages that did not originally form part of the Gospels, as we learned in the preceding chapter. There was one key passage of scripture that Erasmus's source manuscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of i John 5:7-8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In the Vulgate, the passage reads: There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one. It is a mysterious passage, but unequivocal in its support of the traditional teachings of the church on the "triune God who is one." Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God. This passage, in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly. But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which in- stead simply read: "There are three that bear witness : the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one." Where did the "Father, the Word, and the Spirit" go? They were not in Erasmus's primary manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally, he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text. More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary, the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. In particular, Stunica, one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, went public with his defamation of Erasmus and insisted that in future editions he return the verse to its rightful place. As the story goes, Erasmus — possibly in an unguarded moment — agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Greeks manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into Greek, giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form. The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth-century production, made to order."" So, it's very obvious the scribes did take liberties with the text. A final point, which I'll just restate, is this, "To suppose that, "since the New Testament is better documented than any other book from the ancient world, therefore we can trust it,"is a leap in logic. "Even if we somehow knew Plato's exact wording of The Republic, it does not mean that we can trust the work any more than we already do. It just means that we know what Plato wrote. Simply because The New Testament is better attested does not mean it is true or authentic."" Thank you for your response, I look forward to hearing more.