Reliability of the New Testament

CSNTM.org is the website. It's been in existence since 2002, a nonprofit organization that has the primary goal of digitizing every single Greek New Testament manuscript in the world and putting the images on our website.

I'd pick these New Testaments up. I'd buy them for $0.25 a piece, paperbacks. I'd buy 'em by the box-load from a fellow that had a real estate office. He had a huge billboard over his real estate office that said, "Jesus Saves." So I figured, "Well, this guy must be a Christian."

So I'd go down there and get Today's English Version from him, and he'd talk about how Jesus was not God. That really disturbed my faith, and I thought, "If I'm gonna make this commitment to Christ, I sure hope he's worth it." And so we'd have these dialogs back and forth, and it really convinced me that I needed to know more about what's going on in the New Testament.

So I went to Biola College and studied under Harry Sturz, who was a great textual critic, learned Greek grammar from him, textual criticism, and a little bit about exegesis there. But I decided I'm gonna devote a large part of my career to working with manuscripts and working with Greek grammar.

With the New Testament, the originals disappeared within a century of writing. They were probably copied so much that they just wore out. All of the manuscripts have differences between them. So we have to do textual criticism to try to ascertain the wording of the original.

Let's talk a little bit about what that involves, the picture-taking that's involved, the kind of equipment that you're using, what it takes to get permission. I know that there's stories there. Let's say you're going to Athens. What does that involve or what did it involve?

In September 2014, we were invited to go to the National Library of Athens – National Library of Greece in Athens and meet the director of the board – the chairman of the board. We gave a presentation to them. Halfway through the presentation, they stopped us and said, "Okay, we want you to shoot our manuscripts. How soon can you start?"

I said, "Well, it's gonna take some time to raise the money."

It took two years to do, and I spent 100 days in Athens, over 100 days in 2015 alone. I'd live there for three or four weeks and then come home. Sometimes I'd speak somewhere in the country and then fly back, but always would visit my wife for a little bit. So she'd be happy about that.

But I was preparing the manuscripts for photography. It takes two to three hours to prepare each manuscript to be photographed. And then the teams would come in for the whole summer of 2015 and '16 and other times of the year. We trained 45 people to shoot their manuscripts.

They have 300 Greek New Testament manuscripts. A manuscript by definition is a handwritten document that's not based on a printed document. So typically we're talking about 2nd through the 16th century. They don't have any 2nd century ones, but they've got plenty of manuscripts, 300 of 'em, 150,000 pages of manuscripts to digitize.

We have state-of-the-art equipment that is 50-megapixel cameras where the images are 300 megabytes apiece. Three of them equal a gigabyte. They're huge. Not only do we have those images, but we shoot them on what's called a Graz Traveller's Conservation Copy Stand designed in Graz, Austria, by a manuscript professor.

These things hold manuscripts. They're designed specifically to shoot manuscripts. They hold them open at 105 degrees, no more. They have exact distances for the camera, exact lighting, all this. If you want to shoot manuscripts in Europe today, you'd better have one of these, and we have four. They're very expensive, and he makes them by hand for every institute that wants them.

So we trained 45 people. Seven to eight were working there each summer fulltime, and I was working there during the summers as well as other times. But we got it all done.

But what it takes to prepare a manuscript, the first and most important thing is to count how many pages are in there. If I have 271 pictures on the right side, I'd better have 271 on the left side. So I count them. Now most manuscripts, they're already numbered by the leaf. It's the right page is numbered, and most of the time that numbering is off at some point. Either leaves stick together or they wrote the same page twice – the same leaf number twice.

So I list what is actually written on the leaf and then I list how it's to be corrected. We also count as a leaf anything that has at least one-half of a letter on it. That counts as a leaf for our purposes. So we have to shoot that without shooting the leaf behind it. It's really tricky to do that.

But I count the leaves. I count how many lines are per page, the dimensions, the height, the width, and even the depth, which is how thick that manuscript is if it's laying down, not counting the covers, looking at the bottom and looking at the top.

What's fascinating is about 95 percent of all manuscripts, they're a little bit thicker on the top than they are the bottom. We do it by way of centimeters. But every once in a while, you get the bottom that is wider than the top, and that usually means that that manuscript was stored upside-down for more than half its life because they fan out.

When you pull a book off the shelf, it fans out on the top. These didn't have any names on the spine. You've got a 1,000-year-old manuscript that's been stored upside-down for 600 years. It's pretty amazing to find those.

They didn't do that. But they took a blunt instrument, and they indented the lines and they traced the letters out beneath that line or sitting on it. That actually tells you, whether it's sitting on the line or hanging from the line, what the date is. The tenth century is the cutoff. If it's hanging from the line, it's later; sitting on it, it's earlier.

You couldn't tell that on older pictures, and consequently you need very good pictures to help date the manuscript, just that alone. And then there's erasures, there's marginal notes where the scribe writes in really tiny letters, and all sorts of things that tell us is this what's called the hair side or the flesh side. Hair side is the outside of the animal skin. They scrape that as clean as they can but you can see the hair follicles there if you've got good enough pictures.

So a scribe, say he's writing out the gospels. He comes to the end of John's Gospel, and he gets through John 19. He says, "I don't have enough leaves for the rest. I can go kill a goat, scrape the darn thing, and tan it and skin it and make a really fine parchment, or I can just cannibalize this older manuscript that nobody's read in a few centuries. Look at it, it's upside-down." They could do that, and so we get a lot of manuscripts that are done that way.

Now Charlemagne prohibited that. He said, "No more of this kind of stuff." But they still continued to do that, and we find manuscripts like that. In order to see that under-text, though, which has been erased or scraped off, you need UV light at least, which it helps you to see some of it. But the best way to do it is with multispectral imaging, which takes the whole gamut of the spectrum. We don't have multispectral imaging equipment yet, but we're raising the money to get that right now.

They would take strips of it and lay it down. It's got real long fibers, and these things would grow very, very tall. They'd lay these strips down diagonally and beat it with a mallet, and the sap from the papyrus would naturally adhere to the others so they could make long rolls of this stuff. That was the writing that was used for our earliest manuscripts.

Then parchment became of use starting in the 3rd century, really. But when we get about to the 4th century, that's when most of the manuscripts begin to be on parchment. That's animal skins. It could be a goat. It could be a deer, a lamb, cows.

There's a library in Florence, the Medici Library, that the Medici family owned, and they had Michelangelo design it. It's the only library he ever designed. He had in this library on the floor pictures of skulls of cows, and the ceiling it mirrored that. When we shot there, we said, "Why did he do this?" To honor the cows who gave their lives to produce the manuscripts. That's what he did that for.

So parchment comes from animal skins, and then later, starting in about the 10th century, just a trickle of them, we get manuscripts on paper when it came from China through Egypt, and then through the rest of Europe it was used. But even some of our latest manuscripts are on parchment. That's the most durable material.

But it's also the one where sometimes it's hardest to read because the kind of ink they had to use on parchment was iron gall. It's iron-based, and that adheres to the parchment, but it also rusts. You've got parchment that may start out as kind of white and it turns brown, and this ink that starts out as black, and it turns brown. So you've got brown on brown, which ironically the parchment manuscripts may be 1,000 years later than the papyri. But the papyri are often more legible than the parchment.

It's a way of undercutting the idea that the Bible that I have in my hands is not necessarily the Bible that existed originally, or even some people even question whether you can even frame the question that way. So help us through that morass. I didn't actually ask you how manuscripts you have actually photographed. I'm assuming you have at least a ballpark number for what that is.

But when you begin to look at it in detail, you begin to realize – you count a textual difference if even a single manuscript has a spelling difference from another one. I did an experiment a few years ago where I wrote out how many ways you can say, "John loves Mary," in Greek. It took me about eight hours, and I came up with 384 ways to say, "John loves Mary," in Greek. Then I decided, "I know there's about another 150, but that's enough to prove the point."

Now here's the way this relates to us. Bart Ehrman in his Misquoting Jesus says there are so many variants that we could go on practically talking about them forever and yet we wouldn't get done with it. They're not just in the hundreds, but in the thousands.

Well, he's right. But the vast majority of them are of that sort. You can't even translate the differences. There's different ways to spell John, different ways to spell Mary. You can put it in a different word order, same verb, 384 ways I produced. And I've shown that every time when I give lectures on this.

You stack those up, and they'd be about four feet high. If you stack up the New Testament manuscripts, the Greek ones as well as early translations which all count as manuscripts in Latin and Coptic and Syriac and Georgian and Gothic and Ethiopic and all that, it'll be about a mile and a quarter high, four feet versus a mile and a quarter.

So we have a lot more manuscripts than they do. We have an embarrassment of riches, and they have a dearth of evidence. But besides that, the average classical author, we're waiting 500 to 1,000 years before we even see one copy. For the New Testament manuscripts, we're waiting a mere two or three decades and then we get our first copy.

There's what's called a colophon. It's a personal note that a scribe often puts at the end of a manuscript. There's one that happens on occasion that I had the opportunity to see when I was in Athens a couple years ago. The scribe wrote, "The hand that wrote this is rotting in the grave, but the words that are written will last until the fullness of times." And it was dated AD 1079. I'm looking at this manuscript that's over 1,000 years, and I said, "Yeah, I'm sure he's rotting, and yeah, this thing is still here."

But in summer of 2006, the publishers put in an appendix that had – they wanted to beef up the sales, so they put it in a paperback edition. One of the questions they asked him in there, just to get people to look at this appendix and, "Oh, I want to buy this book," was, "Why do you disagree with your mentor, Bruce Metzger, about cardinal doctrines being changed in the original New Testament from these scribes who came along later?"

He said, "I actually don't agree with Dr. Metzger. No essential doctrine – "

Take, for example, the deity of Christ. In 1 Timothy 3:16, the King James, it says, "God, who was revealed or manifest in the flesh." Modern translations, instead of having "God," say "who was manifest or revealed in the flesh."

In Greek, the difference is really a single letter. It's either the word theos, the word "God," written as two letters – I won't get into the whole issue there – or hos, the word __.

Well, they're not doing anything of the sort. What they're doing is representing what the early manuscripts say. To say "who is revealed in the flesh" is not a denial of the deity of Christ, it's just not an explicit affirmation of the deity of Christ.

D.A. Carson wrote a book in 1979 on the King James Version debate where he gave a chart of affirmations of the deity of Christ. He said most modern translations actually affirm the deity of Christ more than the King James. But you don't have manuscripts that say Jesus is not God. There's nothing that does that. It's either an affirmation or not an affirmation, but it's not a denial.

In Mark 16, if the gospel ends at verse 8, it says that an angel appeared to the women and told them to go tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee, and they did nothing for they were afraid, period, end of the gospel. What great news that is. It looks like a downer. There is no resurrection appearance by Jesus if the gospel ends there. He is still raised from the dead, as the angel tells the women that that's the case. But is he seen by the disciples?

So I think early scribes wanted to put in an ending to say absolutely they did see him, and so we have four or five different endings that were added to that. It's not just those 12 verses that we find in the King James, and modern translations will have them, but they'll either put it in brackets or a smaller font, or they'll put in a footnote saying, "Ancient authorities don't have this. The most ancient don't."

But when you look at the style of the wording and you look at the vocabulary, the syntax, the theological viewpoint, it doesn't match with Mark's gospel.

You come to this ending that's kind of open-ended. We've got the declaration of the resurrection. We've got the empty tomb. We've got those elements. Now I call this the "you make the call" part of the New Testament, and that's how Mark's ending. What are you gonna do with this? You've got an empty tomb. You've got witnesses to an empty tomb. You've got a declaration that Jesus is raised from the dead. What are you gonna do with this?

That's what Mark I think is doing is, "You're persecuted Christians. You've gotta own this and not just read this and casually be a Christian. If you're gonna be a follower of Jesus, you really better follow him, and that includes suffering."

So I would say that this gets a little complicated, but it was a conflation between East and West, two different areas that came up with the story in its current form that we have in our New Testaments. The current different forms where Luke had a more vanilla kind of a story, this woman was caught in some sin. You don't have the Pharisees peeling out from the oldest to the youngest. Luke probably didn't include it because it wasn't all that significant or interesting.

But it has the earmarks of historicity, and we need to make a distinction between whether something is canonical and whether it's historical. Is it inspired? Did that biblical author write this or is it just historical? And those are two different questions.

I'd say the story of the woman caught in adultery is my favorite passage that's not in the Bible, and the basic theme it teaches is that Jesus forgives sin. Is this the only passage we have that teaches it?

I point to these examples because they illustrate something, the point that we're trying to get at as we're asking the question what was an original part of scripture. An awareness of variants lets us know what the possibilities are. Sometimes when you hear this conversation, the idea is, "Well, we have maybe 95 percent of our Bible," or 98 percent, whatever percentage you want to put on it.

The way I like to spin this, and I am spinning it, is to say the problem is not that we have less of the Bible than we ought to have. The problem is we have too much, and we're trying to work our way back to what was the original. And the variants are the pileups that give us the "too much."

Now this is a little more sophisticated kind of issue and question. But how does one respond to the idea that, "Well, we've got lots of manuscripts, but we don't have a lot of them are extremely early"?

I've figured out the numbers, that we have as many, at least as far as have been published today, a dozen manuscripts from the 2nd century. By 300, before the Council of Nicaea, we have as many as 65 manuscripts. By 400, we have about 120 manuscripts. We have the whole New Testament duplicated several times over by 400.

Now compare that to the average classical Greek or Latin author, and we've got nothing 400 years later. When you compare it to these other writings, the New Testament shines so much better. Nobody in their right mind would ever say the New Testament is worse off than the others.

On top of that, I think here's another significant factor to keep in mind. That is in the last 130 years, that's when all the papyri have been discovered and published, about 138 of them, something like that right now. Not a single wording from any of these earliest manuscripts has been a new wording that we have not seen before and we now think that's the original.

Yes, there's gonna be some unusual wording sometimes that changes from what we have from other manuscripts. But it hasn't changed what we think the original is and that, "Here's a brand-new variant that we've never seen before. We have to publish this as the text."

What the papyri do is they confirm the later manuscripts from the 4th century and the 5th century especially, and they say, "Now we have more evidence that what that manuscript said is right." But it doesn't give us a brand-new variant that we've never seen before.

So we're actually ending up being able to trace, and the advantage we have of having so many that come later is it helps us to understand the quality and the nature of what came earlier that led to those copies being made.

Now those two manuscripts are the most closely related manuscripts we have of the first 800 years of the Christian era, and yet we know that Vaticanus is not a copy of P75 because some of the wording that we see in Vaticanus is actually prior to what we have in P75. That tells us that both of them go back to an ancestor that's very deep in the 2nd century, probably the first or second decade of the 2nd century. So that early papyrus, which is enormously important, is something that confirms the wording that we have in Vaticanus.

I do hope that you've got a sense as we've talked about this about how trustworthy the text is, that some of these numbers are exaggerations, that the differences that we're talking about are differences in particularities but not differences in the whole, all those kinds of things that feed into what the New Testament is about. So thank you, Dan, for coming in and being a part of the conversation.