Can We Skip the Parts of the New Testament Not in the Original Manuscripts?
00:00:00.000 | Well, can we just skip over those few bits of the New Testament that seem to have been
00:00:07.920 | added to the original manuscripts? What are we supposed to do with those sections? Do
00:00:13.560 | we preach through them on Sundays? And most significantly, don't these sections undermine
00:00:18.960 | the reliability of our Bibles? So great questions today in the inbox from an anonymous listener,
00:00:25.360 | a woman who writes this, "Dear Pastor John, I've recently discovered that many theologians
00:00:29.980 | do not believe John 7, verse 53 through John 8, verse 11 should be in the Bible because
00:00:37.440 | it was added later and is not found in the oldest Greek manuscripts we have. Even notes
00:00:44.060 | within current translations will admit the story was not found in the early manuscripts.
00:00:49.820 | This has shaken my confidence in the English Bible. Even one of my Muslim friends says
00:00:54.840 | this proves the corruption of the Bible. I don't know how to respond. How does it not
00:01:00.540 | undermine our confidence in our English Bibles?"
00:01:04.840 | On March 6, 2011, I preached one of the most unusual messages I've ever preached, because
00:01:13.240 | I preached it on this passage, John 7, 53 to 8, 11, a story that I agree was probably
00:01:22.540 | not part of the original Gospel of John. And there, in that sermon, which is at Desiring
00:01:30.840 | God, I dealt with the problems more fully than I can do it here. So I would encourage
00:01:39.400 | folks to go read or listen to that message at Desiring God. It's called "Neither Do I
00:01:46.240 | Condemn You." The date is March 6, 2011. But here, in this brief podcast, let me give
00:01:53.240 | three reasons, or clusters of reasons maybe, why we can be confident that the text of our
00:02:02.120 | New Testament corresponds to what the original authors wrote and have not been distorted
00:02:10.500 | in transmission.
00:02:12.060 | Number one, the traditional Muslim claim—and this is a street argument and a university
00:02:19.480 | argument, and I've dealt with it at both levels with people—the traditional Muslim
00:02:25.280 | claim that the text of the New Testament has been corrupted, and that behind the text of
00:02:34.880 | the New Testament there was another text in which Jesus did not die on the cross, and
00:02:43.520 | there was no atonement through his death, no covering for sins, no sacrifice, and there
00:02:50.440 | was no resurrection three days later. That claim, that Muslim claim, has zero historical
00:03:00.740 | manuscript evidence supporting it. In other words, there are no historical manuscripts
00:03:09.140 | of that nature. None. This is simply an Islamic theological claim, not a historical reality.
00:03:19.640 | And you can simply ask your Muslim friend to point you to any, any manuscript evidence
00:03:27.280 | at all that there was another version of the New Testament that portrayed Jesus differently
00:03:35.880 | than we have in the New Testament of our Bibles. They don't have it. They won't be able
00:03:41.540 | to point you to it or offer it up. They only have a claim, and it's amazing how they
00:03:48.360 | get away with using this when there is no historical manuscript evidence to make the
00:03:54.240 | claim at all. So that's number one. Number two, even though the first printed New Testament
00:04:01.180 | appeared in 1516, and therefore up till that time, for 1500 years, the New Testament had
00:04:10.620 | been handed down by scribes, being copied by hand, nevertheless, almost all text-critical
00:04:19.140 | scholars—these are the scholars who specialize in doing the analysis of the many texts that
00:04:24.980 | we have to see if we can discern the original wording—almost all text-critical scholars,
00:04:31.740 | both theological conservatives and theological liberals. I could tell a story about my three
00:04:38.220 | years in Germany where I thought I would have to establish the text of the passage I was
00:04:42.980 | working on, and they just waved it away and said, "Oh, we've got the reliable text.
00:04:47.980 | You don't even worry about that." Virtually all those scholars agree that the enormous
00:04:55.740 | abundance of those manuscripts, as we compare them, make it possible to be sure we have
00:05:04.740 | a text that corresponds to what the original authors wrote. And the fact that there are
00:05:10.860 | some outliers, like Bart Ehrman, who write books to try to undermine the reliability
00:05:19.140 | of the actual text, his writings have not, among mainline scholars, conservative and
00:05:26.380 | liberal, found persuasion. And here's what's amazing. The abundance of these manuscripts
00:05:33.020 | of the New Testament, or parts of the New Testament, as compared with the number of
00:05:36.760 | manuscripts for other ancient works, is staggering. There are ten existing manuscripts for Julius
00:05:44.340 | Caesar's Gallic Wars, composed between 58 and 50 BC, and all of these date from the
00:05:50.260 | 10th century or later. There are 20 manuscripts of Libby's Roman history, written roughly
00:05:56.780 | during the time when Jesus was alive. Only two manuscripts exist for Tacitus' histories
00:06:02.500 | and Annals, which were composed about AD 100, and one of them from the 9th century, the
00:06:09.660 | rest from later, the other from later. There are only eight manuscripts of the history
00:06:15.580 | of Thucydides, written between 460 and 400 BC. Now compare those numbers with the manuscripts
00:06:22.460 | or partial manuscripts of the New Testament. These numbers are from the Institute of New
00:06:27.380 | Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany. Go online and see all these things for yourself.
00:06:32.460 | Which is the most authoritative collection of such data in the world. There are 322 unsealed,
00:06:39.460 | that is capital manuscripts, capitalized, 2,907 minuscule texts, 2,445 lectionary portions,
00:06:49.460 | 127 papyri, for a total of 5,801 manuscripts of the New Testament part or whole. These
00:06:57.940 | are all handwritten copies of the New Testament or parts of the New Testament, preserved in
00:07:03.220 | libraries around the world today, and now captured electronically in digital format
00:07:09.420 | so that you can see them for yourself online. No other ancient book even comes remotely
00:07:15.240 | close to this kind of wealth of diverse preservation. Now it's true that the more manuscripts you
00:07:24.260 | have, the more variations you find. But on the other hand, and more importantly, the
00:07:31.860 | more manuscripts you have, the more control you have for discerning which readings are
00:07:39.340 | the original ones. Here's the way F.F. Bruce from a generation ago said it. "If the great
00:07:46.160 | number of manuscripts increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately
00:07:53.100 | the means of correcting such errors so that the margin of doubt left in the process of
00:07:58.780 | recovering the exact original wording is in truth remarkably small." Now here's my third
00:08:05.820 | and final reason for encouragement and confidence. What is most significant for the reliability
00:08:14.020 | and authority of the New Testament is that the variations that textual critics are unsure
00:08:22.100 | of are not the kind that would change any Christian doctrine. That's really important.
00:08:30.460 | So somebody might say, "Oh, there's hundreds and hundreds of variations." That's true.
00:08:37.060 | F.F. Bruce says, "The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics
00:08:44.180 | of the New Testament affects no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and
00:08:54.980 | practice." Nothing on this score—and I say this because he wrote that book in 1943, and
00:09:01.100 | you might say, "Whoa, that's 70 years ago." Nothing on this score has changed in the last
00:09:06.620 | couple of generations since F.F. Bruce. In 2006, Paul Wegner reaffirmed Bruce's conclusion,
00:09:14.060 | and this is the book I would send people to if they want to get a book on this, A Student's
00:09:17.500 | Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible by Paul Wegner. Here's what he says, "It is
00:09:22.700 | important to keep in perspective the fact that only a very small part of the text is
00:09:30.020 | in question, and of these, most variants make little difference to the meaning of any passage."
00:09:40.380 | When he closes his book—and I'm going to close this podcast by quoting Frederick
00:09:45.220 | Kenyon from earlier—"It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of
00:09:54.420 | all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity
00:10:01.540 | of the Scriptures and our conviction that we have in our hands in substantial integrity
00:10:08.660 | the veritable Word of God." Now, how all this scientific work on the text relates to
00:10:17.560 | our spiritual assurance that is ready to die for the truth of sentences in the Bible, how
00:10:26.180 | this scientific work relates to that spiritual assurance is what I wrote a book about and
00:10:33.080 | published last year called A Peculiar Glory. And if that's the level at which people are
00:10:40.740 | going to struggle, then I offer them that as my effort to establish my own faith and
00:10:47.620 | to help other people. Maybe it would help them, too.
00:10:50.420 | Yeah, that could be very helpful for listeners. There's so much reassurance just in those
00:10:54.660 | ancient manuscript comparison stats as well. Thank you, Pastor John, for that. And thank
00:10:58.500 | you for making the Ask Pastor John podcast a part of your day and for sending in really
00:11:03.240 | great challenging questions like this one. You can stay current with our episodes on
00:11:08.200 | your phone or device by subscribing through your preferred podcast app. And you can now
00:11:13.100 | even listen through Desiring God's official YouTube channel. And if you'd like to search
00:11:17.280 | our past episodes, browse our most popular episodes, or send us a question of your own,
00:11:21.100 | you can do those things through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:28.000 | But will profanity and crude talk make us more relatable and more effective in our engagement
00:11:33.840 | with this culture? The question comes up a lot in the inbox, and this time it arrives
00:11:37.980 | in an email from a podcast listener, a college student, who faces this question and all sorts
00:11:42.920 | of entailments with it on campus. And we are going to work through those questions next
00:11:48.040 | time when we return on Friday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we'll see you then.
00:11:51.920 | [END]
00:11:53.420 | Page 2 of 9
00:11:53.920 | Page 3 of 9
00:11:55.920 | Page 4 of 9
00:11:56.420 | Page 5 of 9
00:11:57.420 | [BLANK_AUDIO]