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by
Lee Strobel
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January 24 - February 4, 2025
“there’s plenty of embarrassing material about the disciples.”
we already know that the gospel writers were selective;
So had they left some of this out, that in and of itself wouldn’t necessarily have been seen as falsifying the story.
if they didn’t feel free to leave out stuff when it would have been convenient and helpful to do so, is it really plausible to believe that they outright added and fabricated material with no historical basis?”
7. THE CORROBORATION TEST
“When the gospels mention people, places, and events, do they check out to be correct in cases in which they can be independently verified?” Often such corroboration is invaluable in assessing whether a writer has a commitment to accuracy.
“Within the last hundred years archaeology has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references in the gospels, particularly the gospel of John—ironically, the one that’s supposedly so suspect!
we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.
when you stop to think that ancient historians for the most part dealt only with political rulers, emperors, kings, military battles, official religious people, and major philosophical movements, it’s remarkable how much we can learn about Jesus and his followers even though they fit none of those categories at the time these historians were writing.”
8. THE ADVERSE WITNESS TEST
Were others present who would have contradicted or corrected the gospels if they had been distorted or false? In other words, do we see examples of contemporaries of Jesus complaining that the gospel accounts were just plain wrong?
“Could this Christian movement have taken root right there in Jerusalem—in the very area where Jesus had done much of his ministry, had been crucified, buried, and resurrected—if people who knew him were aware that the disciples were exaggerating or distorting the things that he did?”
“We have a picture of what was initially a very vulnerable and fragile movement that was being subjected to persecution. If critics could have attacked it on the basis that it was full of falsehoods or distortions, they would have.
How can we be sure that the texts we’re reading today bear any resemblance to what was originally written in the first century? What’s more, how do we know that the gospels are telling us the full story about Jesus?
See Textual Criticism
The Bible considers it praiseworthy to have a faith that does not require evidence.
evidence can never compel or coerce faith.
We cannot supplant the role of the Holy Spirit, which is often a concern of Christians when they hear discussions of this kind.
there are plenty of stories of scholars in the New Testament field who have not been Christians, yet through their study of these very issues have come to faith in Christ. And there have been countless more scholars, already believers, whose faith has been made stronger, more solid, m...
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When I hold a Bible in my hands, essentially I’m holding copies of ancient historical records. The original manuscripts of the biographies of Jesus—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and all the other books of the Old and New Testaments have long ago crumbled into dust. So how can I be sure that these modern-day versions—the end product of countless copying throughout the ages—bear any resemblance to what the authors originally wrote?
He means autographs
how can I tell if these four biographies are telling the whole story? What if there were other biographies of Jesus that have been censored because the early church didn’t like the image of Jesus they portrayed? How could I have confidence that church politics haven’t squelched biographies of Jesus that were every bit as accurate as the four that were finally included in the New Testament, and that would shed important new light on the words and deeds of this controversial carpenter from Nazareth?
These two issues—whether Jesus’ biographies were reliably preserved for us and whether equally accurate biographies have been suppressed by t...
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Bruce Metzger
the first issue I wanted to address: how can we be sure the biographies of Jesus were handed down to us in a reliable way?
“This isn’t an issue that’s unique to the Bible; it’s a question we can ask of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity,”
“But what the New Testament has in its favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived.”
the more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way they’d agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts.”
what about the age of the documents? Certainly that’s important as well, isn’t it?”
“And this is something else that favors the New Testament. We have copies commencing within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in the case of other ancient texts, maybe five, eight, or ten centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy.
“In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time—into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of others—Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety.”
even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. In addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church fathers.”
“how does that contrast with other ancient books that are routinely accepted by scholars as being reliable?
“Consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about A.D. 116,” he began. “His first six books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about A.D. 850. Books eleven through sixteen are in another manuscript dating from the eleventh century.
“With regard to the first-century historian Josephus, we have nine Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War, and these copies were written in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. There is a Latin translation from the fourth century and medieval Russian materials from the eleventh or twelfth century.”
“how many New Testament Greek manuscripts are in existence today?”
“More than five thousand have been cataloged,”
This book is 27 yrs old. How many more Mss have they discovered since the book was published?
See-In addition to the Greek documents, he said, there are thousands of other ancient New Testament manuscripts in other languages. There are 8,000 to 10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts, plus a total of 8,000 in Ethiopic, Slavic, and Armenian. In all, there are about 24,000 manuscripts in existence.
“Next to the New Testament, the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer’s Iliad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks. There are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of it today. Some are quite fragmentary. They come down to us from the second and third century A.D. and following. When you consider that Homer composed his epic about 800 B.C., you can see there’s a very lengthy gap.”
the manuscript evidence for the New Testament was overwhelming when juxtaposed against other revered writings of antiquity—works that modern scholars have absolutely no reluctance treating as authentic.
the New Testament manuscripts
earliest are fragments of papyrus,
“There are now ninety-nine fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one or more passages or books of the New Testament.
“The most significant to come to light
“Another group of important papyrus manuscripts
the earliest portion that we possess today?
would be a fragment of the gospel of John,
it originated between A.D. 100 to 150.
Adolf Deissmann,
was convinced that it goes back at least to the reign of Emperor Hadrian, which was A.D. 117–138, or even Emperor...
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This finding has literally rewritten popular views of history, pushing the composition of John’s gospel much closer to the days when Jesus walked the earth.
While papyrus manuscripts represent the earliest copies of the New Testament, there are also ancient copies written on parchment, which was made from the skins of cattle, sheep, goats, and antelope.
“We have what are called uncial manuscripts, which are written in all-capital Greek letters,”
