The church I pastor, Grace Church in Racine, WI, has begun our Read the Bible 2012 campaign, and I thought it might be helpful to provide you with some thoughts about the trustworthiness of Scripture, specifically the New Testament.
Below are common questions people have regarding the veracity of the New Testament writings. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but does address some of the basic questions and even objections people have about the New Testament. Following each question is a brief answer reflecting the common beliefs of scholars, Christian and non. You will also find a list of resources for further study. Happy reading!
1) What about the number of copying errors in the New Testament manuscripts? Doesn’t the number of errors suggest that the documents are less than trustworthy?
There are more than 200,000 “variants,” or differences among existing manuscripts. This number may appear high at first, but understanding what constitutes a variant actually downplays their significance. For example, if a word is misspelled in 2,000 manuscripts it is counted as 2,000 variants.
Additionally, many variants deal with the sequence of words in a given phrase or sentence. A scribe—a person who copied a manuscript—may write the words out of sequence by accident. This may sound like a major mistake, but when one understands that the language of the New Testament writings, Greek, is not an “inflected” language, the importance of these variations diminishes. English is an inflected language, meaning that the order of words in a sentence plays a significant role in its meaning. For example, it is one thing to say, “People eat meat from animals,” and another thing entirely to say that “Animals eat meat from people.” In Greek, however, one word functions as the object of the sentence no matter where it falls in the sequence. So the meaning of a sentence isn’t distorted by words being out of sequence. Most of the variations in New Testament manuscripts are differences in sequence and spelling, and have little to no impact on the meaning of a passage.
2) How did the early church decide which books would be considered authoritative?
The early church considered three criteria when deciding if a book was considered authoritative. First, it had to be authored by an apostle, someone who was an eyewitness to Jesus’ life and ministry (Matthew, John, Peter, etc.), or someone who was a close friend or student of an apostle (Mark and Luke).
Second, the document had to be consistent with the “rule of faith,” or the basic message of Christianity that had become normative within the church at large.
Third, the document needed to be one that was in use by the church in a wide geographical range. In other words, the book had to be one that fueled not only a local expression of the faith, but was one that was already operating as authoritative in many places.
3) Why were some books, like the Gospel of Thomas, left out and others included?
First, it is inaccurate to believe that the collection of scriptures we call the Bible was decided in a series of votes more akin to politics than careful study and practical faith. Consider the words of the late Bruce Metzger, a preeminent New Testament historian and translator. When the canon was decided,
It merely ratified what the general sensitivity of the church had already decided. The canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books.
For somebody now to say that the canon emerged only after councils and synods made these pronouncements would be like saying, “Let’s get several academies of musicians to make a pronouncement that the music of Bach and Beethoven is wonderful.”
Second, there are many who believe that certain ancient writings, like the Gospel of Thomas, were left out of the Bible because they didn’t paint Jesus in the most flattering light. This is not historically accurate, however. Other gospels, like the Gospel of Judas, were written no earlier than the second century and as late as the sixth—hundreds of years following the death of Christ. These gospels, despite their names, give very little information that would help identify authorship.
These other writings also do not seem to match up with the teachings of Jesus and the general Christian ethic espoused in the writings in the New Testament. For example, the Gospel of Thomas, which is not a book in the New Testament, contains many of the sayings of Jesus that are recorded in other gospels. But it also contains statements of Jesus that undermine the value of women[1] and promote pantheism, the belief God is in all matter and all matter contains God. This is clearly not the same Jesus we see in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Resources for Further Study
F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988).
Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995).
“The Documentary Evidence” chapter in Lee Strobel’s, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
[1] The Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus this way: “Women are not worthy of life,” and “I shall lead her in order to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit.” Surely, this is not the same counter-cultural Jesus we see rescuing a prostitute from her accusers and spending time with the woman at the well despite her "less than human" standing among her 1st century culture.
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