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Session 4: The Documentary Evidence

Review: How can we determine whether or not the evangelists are trustworthy witnesses? Do their testimonies stand up to scrutiny?

Opening Question: Did you ever copy somebody else’s work? Why? What were you most concerned about when copying it?

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The 1st Vatra Court of Grass Lake is now called to session.

Prosecution: Your honors, yesterday we heard very persuasive arguments as to the trustworthiness of the evangelists. The defense suggests we could call them to the witness stand and that their testimony would be reliable. But the truth is they are now all dead, and all we have is the gospels, which have been copied over and over by other, unknown groups and individuals for hundreds of years. All of whom had their own biases and agendas as well. Therefore we hold that the gospels cannot be accepted by this court as equal to a legally acceptable deposition of a witness, but only as corrupted and altered legend.

Defense: Your honors, the defense will agree with the prosecution that the gospels have been copied for centuries and that this is how we have them today. In fact, they have been copied so many times and in so many languages that we actually have more evidence of the original gospels than of any other texts from the ancient world.

Questions for thought:

  • How can we be sure the gospel documents we have today are true to their originals, which have been lost?
  • What kind of tests or standards do you think we can apply to determine their authenticity?
  • How can we be sure that over history, the Church hasn’t altered the texts in order to support its own ideas and position? (Which is an accusation leveled upon it by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have come up with their own translation and version of the Bible)
  • Why is this such an important issue? What would it mean to Christian faith if the gospels cannot be trusted?

Here are some standards for determining the trustworthiness of an ancient document:

  1. Multiple copies: the more copies you have, the more you can compare and look for discrepancies.
  2. Multiple languages: if copies exist in different languages, this provides more opportunities to find consistencies and discrepancies.
  3. Supporting materials: are there documents outside the gospels that support the current form and can be used to check the copies? Are there fragments? Citations by other writers? Liturgical selections?
  4. Time elapsed: how much time has elapsed between the writing of the original and the earliest surviving copies?


Compare the Gospel with other Ancient Documents:
There are many books from ancient times that scholars consider reliable and do not doubt as authentic to the originals, even though our current forms are based on copied manuscripts.

For example:

  1. Tacitus, the Roman Historian, wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome somewhere around 116 AD. There were 16 volumes of his history. Books 1-6 exist today in only one manuscript, form about 850 AD. Books 7-10 are lost. Books 11-16 are in another manuscript from the eleventh century. This book is considered authentic based on this little evidence.
  2. Josephus, a 1st century Jewish historian, has more evidence. There are 9 Greek manuscripts from copies written in the 10th-12th centuries. There is Latin translation from the 4th cent. And a Russian translation from the 12th cent.
  3. Homer wrote the Iliad around 800 BC, and fewer than 650 manuscripts survive today, the earliest of which come from the 2nd cent. AD. That’s a gap of 1000 years. Not including the New Testament, that is the most number of manuscripts for any ancient document.
  • How many manuscripts do you think we have of the New Testament?
  • How early do you think they go back?
  • How many do you think are sufficient to consider the NT as reliably preserved?
  1. The New Testament, by comparison, has over 5000 catalogued Greek manuscripts, some fragments of which come clearly from the beginning of the 2nd century. That’s a gap of less than 50 years, and the amount of materials is completely overwhelming compared to any other ancient document.

The New Testament: Unlike any other text in the history of texts!

Not only do we have thousands of manuscripts and fragments of Greek manuscripts

  • Over 300 complete Greek New testaments from 300-800 AD, along with fragments
  • Nearly 3,000 Greek Manuscripts from 800 AD onward
  • Greek Church lectionaries that contain the NT as read in Church (about 2400 of these)

But also thousands in many different languages

  • Latin (known as the Vulgate) (8,000-10,000)
  • Syriac, Coptic, and also secondary languages such as Armenian, Gothic, Georgian, Slavic, and Ethiopian from early centuries (another 8000).
There are about 24,000 total manuscripts in existence today.

Having this many resources is it very easy for scholars to track where and when and how changes might have occurred in copying. These manuscripts serve to check each other and show the slight variations that have occurred.

What is quite astonishing is that scholars can say that with confidence that the New Testament in the form we have received is 99.5% pure to its original. The 0.5% in variations is so minor that it does not affect any major doctrines of faith.

  • What about other “gospels,” other books that were written at the time but were not included by the Church in the New Testament canon?
  • Did the Church use its power to push out those books it didn’t like and in this way distort the original message?

The determination of the NT Canon came about quite naturally in the life of the Church. There were basically four criteria:

  1. Apostolic: does the writing have apostolic authority. That is, was it written by one of the apostles, who were eyewitnesses, or close followers of them (such as Mark, Luke)?
  2. Conformity: does the writing adhere to the rule of faith established by the apostles, would it be considered part of the everyday Christian faith?
  3. Continuous acceptance: was the writing used continually by the Church at large and have a place in its life and worship?
  4. Relevance: while there were many writings that were considered true and accurate, not all books were equally significant to the core Christian faith. For example, the Proto-Gospel of James that tells us about the birth of the Virgin Mary is not rejected by the Church but is not really central enough to be included among the Gospels.

Several books and epistles of the NT were not accepted immediately by the whole Church but eventually were accepted by these criteria, such as Hebrews and Revelation. The books called “gospels” that have surfaced in later years are often of a much different character and foreign to the writings of the apostles. They have tell tale signs that they were written by and for specific groups at later dates, such as the Gnostics. Many of them were rejected outright as heretical. When the Church established the canon of the NT in the councils of the 4th century, they were really acknowledging something that was already complete, not deciding it anew.

In Closing, if the gospels are not trustworthy documents, then we must apply the same standard to all ancient documents. We hope to show the court that if this is true then we can today know just about nothing about anything that happened before the printing press made it possible to create relatively uniform copies. Rather, the gospels stand up to this criticism above and beyond any other ancient document. They are “marvelously correct” in comparison to any other known document from antiquity.

Deliberations:

  • How does the evidence for the reliability of the New Testament documents affect your opinion of what we can know about Jesus?
  • Do you think the standards that we apply to these documents is fair and accurate?
  • Why do you think it might be important that the bible documents we have are true to the originals?
This court is now called into recess. Tomorrow we shall meet to consider whether or not this biblical evidence stands alone or if it can be corroborated by other sources.