I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (36 page)

1. Jesus lived during time of Tiberius Caesar.

2. He lived a virtuous life.

3. He was a wonder-worker.

4. He had a brother named James.

5. He was acclaimed to be the Messiah.

6. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

7. He was crucified on the eve of the Jewish Passover.

8. Darkness and an earthquake occurred when he died.

9. His disciples believed he rose from the dead.

10. His disciples were willing to die for their belief.

11. Christianity spread rapidly as far as Rome.

12. His disciples denied the Roman gods and worshiped Jesus as God.

In light of these non-Christian references, the theory that Jesus never existed is clearly unreasonable. How could non-Christian writers collectively reveal a storyline congruent with the New Testament if Jesus never existed?

But the implications run even deeper than that. What does this say about the New Testament? On the face of it, non-Christian sources affirm the New Testament. While the non-Christian authors don’t say they believe in the Resurrection, they report that the disciples certainly believed it.

Since, as we have shown, the existence of God and the possibility of miracles is firmly established through natural revelation, and the general story of Christ and the early church is affirmed through nonChristian sources, did the miracles of Christ actually occur as the disciples claim? Do the New Testament documents record actual history? Could it be that they are not biased religious writings full of myths and fables as many in our modern world assume, but instead describe events that actually occurred about 2,000 years ago? If so, we’ll be well on our way to discovering which theistic religion is true.

To see if the New Testament is a record of actual history, we need to answer two questions concerning the documents that comprise the New Testament:

1. Do we have accurate copies of the original documents that were written down in the first century?

2. Do those documents speak the truth?

In order to believe the New Testament message, both of those questions must be answered in the affirmative. It’s not enough just to give evidence that we have an accurate copy of the original first-century documents (question 1) because those documents could be telling lies. We must have an accurate copy of the documents
and
have reason to believe that those documents describe what really happened nearly 2,000 years ago (question 2). Let’s begin with question 1.

Q
UESTION
1: D
O
W
E
H
AVE AN
A
CCURATE
C
OPY
?

We’re sure you remember the child’s game of “telephone.” That’s where one child is given a verbal message to pass to the next child, who passes what he’s heard to the next child, and so on. By the time the message gets to the last child in the chain it barely resembles what the first kid was told. To the casual observer, it seems like that same type of distortion could infect documents that have been transmitted from generation to generation over 2,000 years.

Fortunately, the New Testament was not transmitted that way. Since it was not told to one person who told it to another and so on, the problem from the telephone game does not apply. Numerous people independently witnessed New Testament events, many of them committed it to memory, and nine of those eyewitnesses/contemporaries put their observations in writing.

At this point, we need to clear up a common misunderstanding about the New Testament. When we speak of the New Testament documents, we are not talking about one writing, but about 27 writings. The New Testament documents are 27 different documents that were written on 27 different scrolls by nine different writers over a 20- to 50year period. These individual writings have since been collected into one book we now call the Bible. So the New Testament is not just one source, but a collection of sources.

There’s only one problem: so far, none of the
original
written doc uments of the New Testament have been discovered. We have only
copies
of the original writings, called manuscripts. Will this prevent us from knowing what the originals said?

Not at all. In fact, all significant literature from the ancient world is reconstructed into its original form by comparing the manuscripts that survive. To reconstruct the original, it helps to have a large number of manuscripts that are written not long after the original. More manuscripts and earlier manuscripts usually provide more trustworthy testimony and enable a more accurate reconstruction.

How do the New Testament documents fare in this regard? Extremely well, and far better than anything else from the ancient world. In fact, the New Testament documents have more manuscripts, earlier manuscripts, and more abundantly supported manuscripts than the best ten pieces of classical literature
combined.
Here’s what we mean:

More Manuscripts
—At last count, there are nearly 5,700 handwritten Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In addition, there are more than 9,000 manuscripts in other languages (e.g., Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Arabic). Some of these nearly 15,000 manuscripts are complete Bibles, others are books or pages, and a few are just fragments. As shown in fig. 9.1 on the next page, there is nothing from the ancient world that even comes close in terms of manuscript support. The next closest work is the
Iliad
by Homer, with 643 manuscripts. Most other ancient works survive on fewer than a dozen manuscripts,
⁸
yet few historians question the historicity of the events those works describe.

Earlier Manuscripts
—Not only does the New Testament enjoy abundant manuscript support, but it also has manuscripts that were written soon after the originals. The earliest undisputed manuscript is a segment of John 18:31-33, 37-38 known as the John Rylands fragment (because it’s housed in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England). Scholars date it between A.D. 117–138, but some say it is even earlier. It was found in Egypt—across the Mediterranean from its probable place of composition in Asia Minor—demonstrating that John’s Gospel was copied and had spread quite some distance by the early second century.

Even earlier than the John Rylands fragment are nine
disputed
fragments that date from A.D. 50 to 70, found with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
⁹
Some scholars believe these fragments are parts of six New Testament books including Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, 2 Peter, and James. While other scholars resist this conclusion (perhaps because its admission would undermine their liberal leanings that the New Testament was written later), they have not found any other non–New Testament texts that these fragments could be.
¹⁰

The fragments were found in a cave that had previously been identified as containing material from 50 B.C. to A.D. 50. The scholar who first identified these early fragments as New Testament books was Jose O’Callahan, a noted Spanish paleographer. The
New York Times
recognized the implications of O’Callahan’s theory by admitting that if it is true “it would prove at least one of the Gospels—that of St. Mark—was written only a few years after the death of Jesus.”
¹¹

But even if they are not true New Testament fragments and the John Rylands fragment really is the earliest, the time gap between the original and the first surviving copy is still vastly shorter than anything else from the ancient world.
¹²
The
Iliad
has the next shortest gap at about 500 years; most other ancient works are 1,000 years or more from the original. The New Testament gap is about 25 years and maybe less. (This does
not
mean there were no other manuscripts between the original and the first copy; there most certainly were. It simply means that those manuscripts have decayed, have been destroyed, or are still undiscovered.)

How old are the oldest surviving manuscripts of complete New Testament books? Manuscripts that are complete New Testament books survive from about A.D. 200. How about the oldest manuscripts of the entire New Testament? Most of the New Testament, including all of the Gospels, survives from 250, and a manuscript of the entire New Testament (including a Greek Old Testament) called Codex Vaticanus survives from about 325. Several other complete manuscripts survive from that century. And those manuscripts have spelling and punctuation characteristics that suggest that they are in a family of manuscripts that can be traced back to A.D. 100–150.

If these numerous and early manuscripts were all scholars had, they could reconstruct the original New Testament with great accuracy. But they also have abundant supporting evidence from the ancient world that makes New Testament reconstruction even more certain. Let’s look at that next.

More Abundantly Supported Manuscripts—
Beginning in February of A.D. 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian ordered three edicts of persecution upon Christians because he believed that the existence of Christianity was breaking the covenant between Rome and her gods. The edicts called for the destruction of churches, manuscripts, and books and the killing of Christians.
¹³

Hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts were destroyed across the Roman Empire during this persecution, which lasted until A.D. 311. But even if Diocletian had succeeded in wiping every biblical manuscript off the face of the earth, he could not have destroyed our ability to reconstruct the New Testament. Why? Because the early church fathers—men of the second and third centuries such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and others—quoted the New Testament so much (36,289 times, to be exact) that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations.
¹⁴
In other words, you could go down to your local public library, check out the works of the early church fathers, and read nearly the entire New Testament just from their quotations of it! So we not only have thousands of manuscripts but thousands of quotations from those manuscripts. This makes reconstruction of the original text virtually certain.

But how certain? How are the originals reconstructed, and how accurate is this reconstructed New Testament?

How Is the Original Reconstructed?

These three facts—many, early, and supported manuscripts—help scholars reconstruct the original New Testament manuscripts rather easily. The process of comparing the many copies and quotations allows an extremely accurate reconstruction of the original even if errors were made during copying. How does this work? Consider the following example. Suppose we have four different manuscripts that have four different errors in the same verse, such as Philippians 4:13 (“I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.”). Here are the hypothetical copies:

1. I can do all t#ings through Christ who gives me strength.

2. I can do all th#ngs through Christ who gives me strength.

3. I can do all thi#gs through Christ who gives me strength.

4. I can do all thin#s through Christ who gives me strength.

Is there any mystery what the original said? None whatsoever. By the process of comparing and cross-checking, the original New Testament can be reconstructed with great accuracy. And the reconstruction of the New Testament is easier than this, because there are far fewer errors in the actual New Testament manuscripts than are represented by this example.

Let’s assume for a minute that the New Testament really is the Word of God. Skeptics may ask, “Well, if the New Testament really is the Word of God, then why didn’t God preserve the original?” We can only speculate here, but one possibility is because his Word might be better protected through copies than through original documents. How so? Because if the original were in someone’s possession, that person could change it. But if there are copies spread all over the ancient world, there’s no way one scribe or priest could alter the Word of God. As we have seen, the process of reconstruction allows variants and changes from copies to be identified and corrected rather easily. So, ironically,
not
having the originals may preserve God’s Word better than having them.