Essentials of Apologetics - Lesson 15

Evidence for the Bible (Part 2)

Sean McDowell
Lesson 15
Essentials of Apologetics

Let's continue our conversation about the reliability and evidence for the New Testament. In our first session we looked at the character test, reason to believe that the writers report at least what they think is true. Then we started to look at the copy test, and we looked at how early some of the manuscripts are. Now the second question is how many manuscripts do we have? Now, in principle, the more manuscripts we have, the greater chances we have of reconstructing the original. If you have a hundred versus two, then you can compare and contrast with more. But when you have more than what happens? There can be also greater differences. We'll talk about that.

Well, let's look at some context compared to some other writings that are contemporary with the New Testament. If you takes Caesar, there's 10 existing manuscripts we've been able to document. Plato leaves his Tetralogies, seven manuscripts. Now, some ancient writings are more than this, but these are two prominent examples of the number of manuscripts that we have. Now in evidence that demands a verdict, my father and I spent a lot of time researching with an assistant, trying to figure out how many handwritten copies of manuscripts do we have, and we were able to document over 24,000 handwritten copies. Now, this could be in Coptic, could be in Latin, could be in Greek. Some are early, some are later, but the numbers compared to other books tells you something about the care and the widespread distribution of this message.

Visually, it might help to compare it this way on a chart. You look at the New Testament, over 24,000, the Iliad, which in many ways was considered another version of the Bible, so to speak, from a very different worldview, 1,900, Sophocles 193, and then it goes down to Caesar and Plato. It's not even close when you numerically compare the New Testament with other writings. So if we were to average out the typical classical writer, adding those to the lot, the typical classic writer has about 20 copies. That's an estimate.

Now, how high would that be? If you stacked them up together, given the way they were written that would be about four feet high. So it'd be probably about this high if you stacked up all the handwritten copies we have for the average classical writer. How tall would it be if we took all of the writings of the New Testament and put them together? According to Dr. Dan Wallace, over one mile high. Four feet on average, compared to a mile, not even close. You're comparing apples and oranges. Now, if we narrow down, because the New Testament was originally and primarily written in Greek, that's in some ways our earliest testament. How many Greek manuscripts do we have? Well, a typical estimate would be about 5,700 plus. About 5,700 Greek manuscripts.

Now, according to Bart Ehrman, who is probably one of the most influential skeptics today, atheist/agnostic, went to Moody Bible, Wheaton. Former Christian is how he defines himself, has rejected his faith. He wrote a book called, Misquoting Jesus, a number of years ago that really became, I think, a New York Times best-selling book, if not close to it. And he said this. He said, "There's more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." Now, let that sink in for a second. He said when we compare all these different manuscripts, these thousands of manuscripts, there are more differences across them than there are words in the New Testament alone. According to his estimate, that would mean for every word there could be two or three other words.

Now, if you let that sit right there, that's a little bit unsettling, isn't it? That makes you think we can't have any confidence in any word in the New Testament, let alone the New Testament as a whole. I'm not sure this is the kind of comparison that we should be using though. Why does it matter how many variants we have across manuscripts to the number of words in the New Testament alone? Why that comparison, it's fair to ask? But more significantly, in their excellent book, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, by Hixson and Gurry, James Prothero has a chapter and writes this. He says, "Most of these are inconsequential changes in orthography or word order. There are so many errors to speak of across a textual tradition that has so many handmade copies." He's exactly right. In some ways, it's surprising we don't have so many more variants and differences, given how many copies we actually have.

Now, let's break this down a little bit to be helpful. According to Peter Gurry, he would estimate there's roughly 500,000 non-spelling variants across Greek manuscripts. So those 5,700 manuscripts, if you take non-spelling ones, there would be half a million. Now, again, if you let it sit right there, that feels like a lot of variance, doesn't it? But let's give a couple examples of what we mean by these kinds of non-spelling variants.

Now, if you've read the Gospel of Mark and studied it, the Gospel of Mark has a theme that runs through it that makes it unique compared to the other gospels, and it's about the identity of Jesus being the Son of God. So the book climaxes in Chapter 15, when even the Roman centurion says, "Surely he's the son of God." That's where the book comes full circle and says, it's not just the apostles, it's not just his followers, now even the Romans can see it.

Well, here's an interesting variant across manuscripts. It's in Mark 1:1. It says in the beginning of the gospel, "Jesus Christ, the son of God, as it is written in Isaiah, the prophet." Now, in manuscripts some contain son of God, some don't. That's a variant or a difference. As far as I'm aware we don't really know if that phrase was at the beginning or if it wasn't at the beginning. This is a variant. This is a difference. Now, here's the interesting question. What's at stake with this difference? Is it that Mark starts out his gospel and says he's the son of God and tells us right at the beginning exactly who he is, or did a later scribe come along and add this clarification because that's what Mark teaches? We don't know the answer, as far as I'm aware, but nothing significant is at stake. There's no doubt that this is what Mark teaches about the identity of Jesus, and there's no doubt that it's like a drumbeat running through the gospel.

Now, as we discover more manuscripts, earlier manuscripts, different lines of tradition, there might become a point where we know exactly what Mark 1:1 said, and we can cross this off our list. But this is the kind of variant that really doesn't prove anything about the unreliability of the Gospel of Mark.

Another example, I saw a debate of a friend of mine who was debating with an atheist. And at one point the atheist, they were debating the Trinity, and he goes, "Give me one verse that proves the Trinity." Now, if I was there I would've said the doctrine of the Trinity doesn't rest on one verse. Where do we get the idea that every doctrine should be found in a verse? The idea of verses was added long after the New Testament was written anyways. But he could have pointed to 1 John 5:7. Look at this passage. It says, "There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one."

Now, if that's not an individual verse for the Trinity I don't know what is, but the problem is there's serious doubt whether this was actually in the original 1 John. So some of your Bibles will skip from verse 6 to verse 8. Now, if you're reading it's like, ah, what happened to verse 7? Are they taking the holy word of God out? No. Take a deep breath. There's textual debate about whether this passage was in the original or not, and as far as I'm aware, it seems like most scholars are saying it was probably added later.

Now, what's interesting is first off we recognize this so we can draw attention to it. The second, it proves nothing about the doctrine of Trinity being taught or not. It's an example of a passage for which there's textual debate and discussion, and textual critics continue to work and try to get a better reconstruction of what 1 John actually said.

Now, there's actually only two disputed verses in the New Testament that are more than two verses in length. That's it. There's only two passages that are disputed, more than two verses. One is the last 12 verses in Mark, Mark's version of the Great Commission. And the other one is, and this saddens some people who are not aware of this, is John 7:53 through 8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery when Jesus leans down to write in the sand. Most textual critics would argue that the end of Mark was probably added later, and that that story in John likely was not in the original.

Now, what follows from this? Is this a follow that we can't trust Mark? Is it a follow that we can't trust John? In fact, if you open your Bibles right now, guess what you'll find? You'll find footnotes if you have a decent Bible referencing this. There's no conspiracy here. What Bart Ehrman did effectively is bring attention to the church certain challenges that have always been there, nobody's been hiding it, but sometimes we've told people the Bible just floated down from heaven in New King James only English, and just appeared. Didn't happen that way. And so when we don't help people understand the nature of textual criticism, when they hear these challenges it can become very unsettling.

Now, in his book, Can We Still Believe The Bible, Craig Blomberg, a New Testament scholar, I think captures it well. He says, "No Orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording. There are always undisputed passages one can consult that teach the same truths." In other words, nothing essential to the faith rests upon a contested passage. Nothing. There are some contested passages. Now, what a lot of scholars will tell us is the true words are out there in the manuscripts, we just have to keep working away and plugging away to get greater and greater confidence in them.

So one way to think about this, you might be tempted to think these events took place 2,000 years ago, the further we get away from them the less confidence we have in them. But it's actually the opposite. The further we get away, the more ancient manuscripts and discoveries we make, and our technology also increases. So some recent discoveries have been aided by drones, aided by artificial intelligence. It's incredible to see is as technology increases it actually increases our confidence in the word of God. Now, it's amazing. It's not just New Testament scholars saying this, but this is a remarkable claim from Giorgio Pasquale, who's not a New Testament scholar. But he says, "No other Greek text is handed or handled so richly and credibly as the New Testament. Even classical scholars recognize how carefully the New Testament was passed on."

So if we take a step back we see the apostles have the character report the truth. We have good reason to believe that these documents were copied carefully from generation to generation. And by the way, we haven't even talked about some of the writings in the New Testament as recorded in Church Fathers, that also help corroborate the New Testament writings themselves.

The third C is what we call corroboration. Now is when we look outside of the writings themselves and say, is it corroborated in the historical record? Now, one way to do this would be to look at other ancient writers, and we talked about that a little bit earlier, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, et cetera. The other way is to look at archeology. Now, we could spend, you probably have an entire class here just on biblical archeology, you can buy an entire archeological study Bible. We certainly haven't found everything, and some of this is for political reasons in many parts of the Middle East and in Israel, but what we find as a whole consistently matches up with what the Bible teaches, from Genesis all the way through the New Testament.

So a couple of examples that I find fascinating. One is this record called the Pilot Description, many would say, an inscription referencing Pontius Pilate. Now, for years the only evidence for Pontius Pilate was literary, but then a number of decades ago in Caesarea Maritima to the place and the time we find this inscription referencing Pontius Pilate to the place and time and position as the New Testament teaches. These are the kinds of findings that emerge over time that helped corroborate the New Testament.

Another one, on a trip not long ago in Israel I had a chance to go to Bethesda, where in John 5, and in some of the early chapters in John, you see these miracles that Jesus performs, but it's described that there's five porticos, like five colonnades. But for a long time skeptics would look at this and say, wait a minute. This is describing a structure that doesn't seem to match up with the way structures were done, and tell what happens many times in ancient times, they would build a city on top of a city, on top of a city because you had protection, you had a water source, you had a good foundation.

When they started to dig down into Bethesda guess what they found? I'll tell you what they didn't find. I had a student doing a report on this, and she goes, "Yes, they dug down in there and they found five porpoises." Somehow porticos or colonnades got transformed into porpoises. They didn't find dolphins. But they found the exact kind of structure, which you can somewhat see now, it's been a little bit changed because of the dig, as described in John Chapter 5.

This is two quick examples, but literally month by month, if you follow these, you hear new discoveries coming up being made that consistently are confirming the New Testament. So my father and I put it this way, we would say in evidence demands work archeology provides one important piece of evidence that helps confirm the New Testament record.

Now, here's one big objection, then we'll take your questions. This is what I call the Spider-Man objection. It's people say, well, wait a minute. Think about the story of Spider-Man. It's totally fictional, it's totally invented, took place in New York City with other real people, other real places, so archeology in New York in no way shows that the claims of Spider-Man is true. That's a fair important objection, but there's a few distinctions to draw out. Number one, the kind of realistic fiction that we see today was not a staple in the first century. It wasn't written in the same way, and we have to be careful to assume that it was. But more importantly, Spider-Man exists in comic books. We know the genre is fiction, and nobody above five thinks it's real. But the gospels are historical biographies, and they tell us these events as if they're real, as if they're historical. So when we go find them and confirm figures like Caiaphas, figures like Herod, this helps corroborate the testimony of the gospel writers.

Taken as a whole, these three C's are a good way of beginning to make a case for the New Testament. The gospel writers had the character to record truth, who was copied carefully and faithfully. And we find corroboration not only in other writers, but in archeology.

Questions and challenges related to this, or to the New Testament? Yes.

Who made most of those errors or additions? Because I know the scribes were very precise with things like that, so who was doing this kind of thing?

Well, probably it was some of the scribes. So some of the scribes of the Old Testament. We see a little bit of a shift when we get to the New Testament, but what we can tell is there's still very careful scribes who want to preserve truth. So in many cases they don't tell us exactly who and why they did it. We have to look at it, and guess, and compare, and contrast, and some would do it for different reasons. But I don't see the large-scale evidence of just forgery and trying to deceive behind this. Some are accidental and some may have been intentional, but that doesn't mean they had bad intentions in doing so.

For example, the story in John Chapter 8. In certain manuscripts it shows up in different places, and sometimes it shows up in different books. We're just not really sure why. Does that mean the story happened and they don't know where to place it? You just have to come up with different theories. This is what textual critics do. But in a sense, a book written 2000 years ago, copied by hand in so many different places and different times, you would expect to have to piece a few of these kinds of things together. People get lost in these differences and miss how much commonality we have. That's the key. So we have to admit that there's some differences, but bring the focus back to the confidence of what we do have preserved and passed on amidst some of these challenges. It's a good question.

One more. Go.

When you guys, you and that staff person were looking at the manuscripts, what was the parameter? How far back in time did you put it off? Was it like it had been handwritten, and up until this point in time when you came up with that [inaudible 00:20:11]?

Oh, so from the last lecture, the number of 24,000. We're talking roughly up to the time of the printing press. So that's a long period there. So obviously, some of the later ones are probably going to have less value than some of the earlier ones. Not necessarily so, depending on which line they had been copied through. But yes, that's roughly the time period it would go through. It'd be awesome if it was all the first century, but that's just simply impossible.

Yeah?

Yeah. Were there any, at the time of Christ, were they still using some scrolls? Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found everything there in Isaiah. Are there any scrolls? Is that the general assay, and nobody used scrolls by that time. Like the Dead Sea, something like that? [inaudible 00:20:55] we couldn't find scrolls someday?

Yeah. Christians started primarily using the Codices, an ancient version of a book. And in many ways the use of the book was brought to the surface by Christians, interestingly enough, but people would write on all sorts of things. You had scrolls, people wrote on parchment, on leather. In many ways you just had to write on what you had available. But you see the Christians, and in many ways the Jews, being very careful. They believe this is the word of God. They believe that the words mattered. And given the difficult circumstances of passing this on, did a really remarkable job of doing so. So we can hold in our hands a Bible with a high degree of confidence that it's been passed on carefully.

On this last test, it's amazing how much people have found and made cases for Sodom and Gomorrah. I've interviewed people on YouTube that make a case for Sodom and Gomorrah, make a case for the Jericho Conquest, a case for the Exodus. And even some Christian scholars will disagree about this stuff, but the field of archeology is growing and it's burgeoning, and it's an exciting world we need a lot of Christians to enter into.

Well, let's do one more. Go ahead.

Hi. For the Old Testament, you didn't cover that how many copies were found, that you know of, of the Old Testament?

When we look at the transmission of the Old Testament we have to approach it a little bit differently than we do the New Testament, mainly because of how far back it goes in time. And also, some of the earlier times, like during the time of Moses, they're not going to be writing and preserving them with the same technology that we have. So the New Testament is going to be a very, very... We're going to have to look closely at how carefully these were copied. We're going to have to look at the archeological evidence. It's going to be a little bit of a different task to get to the Old Testament. But you could also look at the New Testament and say, if we have the words of Jesus recorded accurately how does Jesus view the Old Testament? If we have his words accurately, and he's the son of God, and he holds it with a level of authority which we see all the way through the New Testament, that can also give us a confidence in the Old Testament itself. Good question.

Yeah?

So apologetically would you use the Dead Sea Scrolls to talk about the accuracy of the scribal [inaudible 00:23:27]?

Sure, yeah. I've interviewed scholars on this. These are three archeological friends of mine, one on the archeological evidence for Jesus, in the middle, Joel Kramer on the archeological evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the bottom right, Anthony Ferguson, he's not an archeologist but he did his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I think the Dead Sea Scrolls are very significant in some of the transmission of the Old Testament. Now, they don't contain any New Testament books because they were buried obviously before that time, but they're a huge piece. Probably the greatest archeological discovery of the 20th century and beyond, so for sure.