New Testament Part 3
Time Proximity & Manuscript Quantity
The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it.
–Napoleon
When it comes to the authenticity of the New Testament there are three things that should be considered.
- Time Proximity
- Manuscript Quantity
- Manuscript Accuracy
Time Proximity
Despite the breadth of eyewitness accounts that make up the New Testament collection, however, many people still argue the reliability and authenticity of the New Testament books. One of the most popular arguments against the New Testament is that “it was either written too long after the life of Jesus and the boom of the early churches, or the earliest remaining documents are so far after the originals that they cannot ”
Truth be told, this argument is nothing more than a straw man, propped up in an attempt to scare off would be seekers by making them think that the books were written by crazed men, too far removed from the time of the events to know what they were talking about.
William Foxwell Albright, one of the world’s foremost biblical archaeologists, said: “We
can already say emphatically there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about AD80, two full generations before the date (AD130-150) given by the more radical New Testament Critics of today.”
Albright reiterates this point in an interview for
Christianity Today, 18 Jan 1963: “In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and eighties of the first century (very probably some time between about AD50-75). Thanks to the Qumran discoveries, the New Testament proves to be in fact what it was formerly believed to be: the teaching of Christ and His immediate followers between cir. 25 and cir. 80 AD.”
Dr. John A.T. Robinson, comes to some startling conclusions in his groundbreaking book
Redating The New Testament. His research has led to the conviction that the whole of the New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD.
Dating of New Testament Books
WORK CONSERVATIVE DATING LIBERAL DATING Paul’s Letters AD 50-66 AD 50-100 Matthew AD 70-80 AD 80-100 Mark AD 50-65 AD 70 Luke Early AD 60’s AD 70-90 John AD 80-100 AD 90-100
The Number of Manuscripts and Their Closeness to The Original
“On the basis of manuscript tradition alone, the works that make up the Christians’ New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely circulated books of antiquity.”
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. Today, we now have more than 5,686 known Greek manuscripts, over 10,000 Latin vulgate, and almost 9,300 other early version manuscripts of the New Testament. Combined, this is nearly 25,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today.
No other document of history even begins to approach such numbers and attestation. In comparison, Homer’s
Iliad is second, with 643 manuscripts that still survive. The first complete text of Homer dates from the thirteenth century.
Type of Manuscript # of Copies in Existence Extant Greek Manuscripts
Uncials 307 Minuscules 2,860 Lectionaries 2,410 Papyri 109
SUBTOTAL 5,686 Manuscripts in Other Languages
Latin Vulgate 10,000+ Ethiopic 2,000+ Slavic 4,101 Armenian 2,587 Syriac Pashetta 350+ Bohairic 100 Arabic 75 Old Latin 50 Anglo Saxon 7 Gothic 6 Sogdian 3 Old Syriac 2 Persian 2 Frankish 1
SUBTOTAL 19,284+
TOTAL ALL MANUSCRIPTS 24,970+ The importance of the sheer number of manuscript copies cannot be overstated. As with other documents of ancient literature, there are no known extant (currently existing) original manuscripts of The Bible. Fortunately, however, the abundance of manuscript copies make it possible to reconstruct the original with virtually complete accuracy.
taken from
New Testament Part 3… Time Proximity & Manuscript Quantity « Following The Way
