ARE THE GOSPELS RELIABLE - PART 5

                                        ARE THE GOSPELS           RELIABLE?

         PART 5

   (copied from
     Y-Jesus.com)

Who needs Kinko's

The original writings of the apostles were
revered. Churches studied them, shared them
and carefully preserved them and stored 
them away like buried treasure.

But, alas, Roman confiscations, the passage of
2,000 years and second law of thermodynamics,
have taken their toll. So, today, what do we
have of those original writings? Nothing. The
original manuscripts are all gone. (though 
each week, Bible scholars, tune in  to
Antiques Roadshow, hoping one
might emerge.

Yet the New Testament is not  alone in
this fate. No other comparable document
from ancient history exists today either.
Historians are not troubled by the lack of 
original manuscripts if they have reliable
copies to examine. But, are there ancient
copies of the New Testament available,
and if so, are they faithful to the originals?

As the number of churches multiplied, 
hundreds of copies were carefully made
under the supervision of church leaders. 
Every letter was meticulously penned in
ink on parchment or papyrus . And so,
today, scholars can study the surviving
copies (and the copies of copies and the 
copies of copies of copies - you get it),  to
determine authenticity and arrive at a
very close approximation of the original
documents.

In fact, scholars studying ancient literature,
have devised the science of textual criticism to
examine documents, such as The Odyssey, 
comparing them with other ancient documents 
to determine their accuracy. More recently
Military historian, Charles Sanders, augmented
textual criticism by devising a three-part test, 
that looks at, not only the faithfulness of the 
copy but also the credibility of the authors.
His tests are these:

   .  The bibliographical  test
   .  The internal evidence test
   .  The external evidence test

Let's see what happens when we apply these
tests to the early New Testament manuscripts.

Bibliographical Test
This test compares a document with other 
ancient history from the same period, it asks:

.   How many copies of the original document
    are in existence?
.  How large of a time gap is there between the
    writings and the earliest copies?
.  How well does a document compare
    with other ancient history?

Imagine if  we had only
 two or three of the 
original New Testament 
manuscripts, the 
sampling would be so 
small that we couldn't
possibly verify accuracy. 
On the other hand,
if we had hundreds or 
even thousands, we
could easily weed out the errors of poorly
transmitted documents.

So, how well does the New Testament compare
with other ancient writings, with regard to both
the number of copies and the time gap from the
originals?  More than 5,000 manuscripts of the 
New Testament exist today in the original Greek
language. Many of these manuscripts are merely
fragments, while others are virtually full books.
When counting translations into other languages,
 the number is a staggering 24,000 - dated from
the 2nd to the 15th century.

Compare that with the second-best-documented
ancient historical manuscript, Homer's Iliad,
with 643 copies. And remember that most ancient
historical works have far fewer existing manuscripts than that one does (usually fewer
than 10) . 
New Testament scholar,  Bruce Metzger, remarked:
"In contrast with these figures (of other ancient
manuscripts) the textual critic of  The New
Testament is embarrassed by the wealth of his
material." 

next post 7th March