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| David Wood offers a thorough review of The Case for Christ. |
More than once in the movie, the existence of 5,843 Greek
New Testament manuscripts is emphasized.
Since this is a much greater number of manuscripts than what we have for
any other ancient composition, Strobel accepts this (in the movie, and in the identically titled book) as evidence of
the reliability of the New Testament text.
There is a high risk that this is going to give many audience-members and readers a
false impression – one that is liable to be taken advantage of by aggressive
anti-Christian writers. To acquire a
more focused picture of the New Testament manuscript evidence, and its
implications, here are a few points to keep in mind.
● A manuscript of part of the New Testament is not the same
as a manuscript of the entire New Testament.
For example, the earliest New Testament manuscript is probably either
Papyrus 52 or Papyrus 104 – but they are both small fragments. They tell us nothing about the accuracy of
the transmission of the books of the New Testament that they do not represent. So, comparisons between “the New Testament” collectively, and single compositions from the ancient world, are sort of unfair; it
would be better to separate the individual New Testament books, and go from
there when making comparisons.
● The vast majority of Greek manuscripts supports the Byzantine
Text. Generally, 85% of the existing
Greek manuscripts of the New Testament agree at any given point. If we were to compile a Greek text by
adopting the reading with the most support, the resultant compilation would be
very stable, and even where a measure of instability would still exist (in some cases
where there are three or more rival variants) the options tend to yield trivial
differences in their meaning. The 2005
Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform is such a compilation.
● Most English translations of the New Testament are based
on minority-texts at points where the Byzantine and Alexandrian text-types disagree with one another. The New International
Version, the English Standard Version, the New Living Translation, and the New
Revised Standard Version are all based primarily on editions of the Nestle-Aland
compilation, which, despite being compiled via a method called “reasoned
eclecticism,” almost always rejects the majority-reading (that is, the
Byzantine reading) in favor of the reading in the flagship manuscripts of the
Alexandrian family of manuscripts.
Let me take a moment to zoom in on this point. The King James Version is
sometimes criticized because in a few passages, its base-text (the Textus
Receptus) has little or no Greek manuscript support. However, it is no exaggeration to say that if
one were to select 20 places at random in the Gospels, where the KJV and NIV
are based on different Greek readings that have an impact on translation, we
would find that in 9 out of 10 cases, the reading in the Textus Receptus is supported by at least 85% of the Greek
manuscripts. At some points that percentage rises above 99%.
Promoters of the NIV, ESV ,
etc., have frequently pointed out that during the centuries after the King
James Version was made in 1611, many more manuscripts have been
discovered. What they tend not to say,
though, is that most of those manuscripts contain the Byzantine Text, and thus
agree with the KJV’s base-text much more than they agree with the compilation(s) upon which the NIV, ESV , etc., are
based. My point being that it is
inconsistent to argue for the reliability of the New Testament by an appeal to the existence of 5,843 manuscripts, and then turn around and reject 85% of those
manuscripts by consistently favoring minority-readings, which is precisely what one does
when using the NIV, ESV , NLT, etc.
In his book, Strobel states that the differences between New Testament manuscripts are “as minor as a few typos in a few insignificant words in an
entire Sunday newspaper.” That is simply not true. He also compares the transmission of the New Testament text to a game of telephone in which, at the end of the game, 29 out of 30 telephone-game players say the same thing. The problem is that the illustration does not hold, as far as the base-text of the NIV is concerned: in the base-text of the New International Version New Testament that Lee Strobel uses, 29 out of 30 manuscripts are routinely rejected in favor of Alexandrian minority-readings.
● The compilers of the New Testament base-text of the NIV, ESV ,
etc., consistently rejected the Byzantine Text, favoring the Alexandrian Text
instead – especially when it is supported by Codex Vaticanus. The case for the Alexandrian Text was set
forth in 1881 by F. J. A. Hort – not on the basis of the greater number of the
Alexandrian manuscripts (because then, like now, they formed only a small
minority), and not because of the greater age of Codex Vaticanus (because Hort
granted that manuscripts with an essentially Byzantine Text were circulating at
the same time Codex Vaticanus was made), but on the basis of cumulative evidence drawn from the
intrinsic qualities of rival readings.
Much more could be said about this, but the thing to see today is that
ever since 1881, a working premise of New Testament textual criticism as
practiced by the compilers of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece has been that if one variant is supported
by a thousand manuscripts, and another variant is supported by ten manuscripts,
the variant supported by ten manuscripts is probably original if Codex
Vaticanus is among those ten.
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| Papyrus 52 - maybe the earliest known manuscript with text from the New Testament. |
Papyrus 52 was assigned a production-date in the first half of the second century due to palaeographical considerations – that is, via a comparison of its script to the scripts used in other manuscripts in various eras. But if we reckon that a copyist’s handwriting stayed relatively the same, and that we have no means to deduce how old a copyist was when he made a particular manuscript, and if we also reckon that a copyist might live another 50 years after the beginning of his career as a copyist, then there is potentially a 100-year swing, 50 years each way, built into palaeographically assessed estimates of when a manuscript was made. That is, when other factors are not in the picture, a production-date deduced exclusively from palaeographic evidence could be off by 100 years. So in the case of Papyrus 52, saying that it was made “in about 125” could mean that it was made 50 years earlier (although that is precluded by the point that the Gospel of John itself is traditionally given a production-date around AD 90), or 50 years later.
Thus, while
Papyrus 52 might have been made just
two or three decades after the Gospel of John was composed, it is also true
that Papyrus 52 might have been
produced in the 170’s. To ask for
greater precision in the estimate is like asking researchers to tell us the age
of the copyist.
Meanwhile, consider
Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 412, which consists of a fragment from the composition Kestoi, by the Christian author Julius
Africanus. Julius Africanus died in 240, and probably
wrote Kestoi after 221. This fragment
was a scroll – and in its present condition, while it has part of Kestoi on one side, the other side has a
cursive text that includes its own composition-date, approximately: in the reign of the Emperor Tacitus, who
ruled in 275-276. This means that in
275-276, someone recycled pages from a copy of Kestoi – a composition which had only been composed about 50 years
earlier.
In 1903
when this text was first published in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Series, Volume 3,
Grenfell and Hunt affirmed that “it is separated by little more than a
generation at most” from the time when Africanus wrote it. They also observed that despite its close
chronological proximity to the autograph of Kestoi,
Oxyrhynchus Papyri 412, “The text is far from being a good one; several lines
of the incantation especially are corrupt, and one of them is incomplete.” (Similarly, in Papyrus 52, the copyist seems to have skipped two words in John 18:37, εις τουτο (“for this”). This illustrates a point that should be
taught and retaught: neither the
quantities of manuscripts that favor one variant over its rivals, nor the age
of the attestation of readings, should be considered a sufficient and decisive
factor by itself when comparing textual variants.
So, we have a copy of at least one ancient composition (Julius Africanus’Kestoi –) that is extant in a copy extremely close to the composition’s production-date – probably closer than Papyrus 52 is to the production-date of the Gospel of John. And this is not the only such case: Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 405 (published in the same 1903 volume of Grenfell and Hunt’s series) was not initially recognized by Grenfell and Hunt, who stated that its uncial script “is not later than the first half of the third century, and might be as old as the latter part of the second.” Before the year was over, though, J. Armitage Robinson had not only identified it as a fragment of the Greek text of Irenaeus’ composition Against Heresies, Book Three – to be precise, 3:9:2-3, a passage in which Irenaeus quotes Matthew 3:16-17 – but he also had his findings published in the journal Athenaeum (on page 548 of the October 24, 1903 issue).
So, we have a copy of at least one ancient composition (Julius Africanus’Kestoi –) that is extant in a copy extremely close to the composition’s production-date – probably closer than Papyrus 52 is to the production-date of the Gospel of John. And this is not the only such case: Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 405 (published in the same 1903 volume of Grenfell and Hunt’s series) was not initially recognized by Grenfell and Hunt, who stated that its uncial script “is not later than the first half of the third century, and might be as old as the latter part of the second.” Before the year was over, though, J. Armitage Robinson had not only identified it as a fragment of the Greek text of Irenaeus’ composition Against Heresies, Book Three – to be precise, 3:9:2-3, a passage in which Irenaeus quotes Matthew 3:16-17 – but he also had his findings published in the journal Athenaeum (on page 548 of the October 24, 1903 issue).
Notably,
the text of Matthew 3:17 as cited in
Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 405 does not say Ουτός ἐστιν (“This is” My beloved Son)
but, instead, Σὺ ει (“You are” My beloved Son).
One could, perhaps use this as evidence that the earliest manuscript of
Matthew 3:17 disagrees with the majority of manuscripts and with the
Alexandrian manuscripts, in favor of the Western text attested in Codex Bezae (although it agrees with the Byzantine and Alexandrian manuscripts, disagreeing with Codex Bezae, where it does not have Codex D’s phrase πρὸς αυτόν (“to Him”)).
Via a consideration of these points I hope that readers may see that it is an oversimplification to treat either the quantities of manuscripts, or the ages of specific manuscripts, as if that is automatic vindication of either a particular reading, or a particular collection of readings. Where our 5,843 Greek manuscripts concur regarding the meaning of a particular passage, there is no scientific impetus to seek some other sense, except in very rare cases where conjectural emendation may be considered (and even then, I would decline to put any conjectural emendation into the text – unlike the current editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation). That is about all that should be extrapolated from the existence of that multitude of manuscripts.
Via a consideration of these points I hope that readers may see that it is an oversimplification to treat either the quantities of manuscripts, or the ages of specific manuscripts, as if that is automatic vindication of either a particular reading, or a particular collection of readings. Where our 5,843 Greek manuscripts concur regarding the meaning of a particular passage, there is no scientific impetus to seek some other sense, except in very rare cases where conjectural emendation may be considered (and even then, I would decline to put any conjectural emendation into the text – unlike the current editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation). That is about all that should be extrapolated from the existence of that multitude of manuscripts.
