1. New Testament Manuscripts
Week 8: Manuscripts and Trustworthiness – What we’ve learned

2. philosophies & challenges
modern English
translations
translation
philosophies & challenges

3. philosophies & challenges
history of the English
translations
modern English
translations
translation
philosophies & challenges

4. philosophies & challenges
ancient Bible
translations
history of the English
translations
modern English
translations
translation
philosophies & challenges

5. philosophies & challenges
originals
authorship
divine qualities
ancient Bible
translations
history of the English
translations
modern English
translations
acceptance /
canonicity
translation
philosophies & challenges

6. philosophies & challenges
originals
authorship
divine qualities
ancient Bible
translations
history of the English
translations
modern English
translations
acceptance /
canonicity
copying & manuscripts
translation
philosophies & challenges

7. philosophies & challenges
originals
authorship
divine qualities
ancient Bible
translations
history of the English
translations
modern English
translations
acceptance /
canonicity
copying & manuscripts
translation
philosophies & challenges

8. thousands of
manuscripts
translation

10. thousands of
manuscripts
translation

11. Greek
New
Testament
thousands of
manuscripts
translation

12. Textual Criticism
“The study of the copies of any written document whose original (=the autograph) is unknown or non- existent, for the primary purpose of determining the exact wording of the original.”

13. The NT compared to the average classical workx8
average classical work
New Testament

14. How many manuscripts do we have, exactly?
2013: 5,824
+ 10,000+ Latin manuscripts of the NT
+ 5,000-10,000 ancient versions of the NT

15. Textual Variants
Everything counts as a variant

16. Textual Variants Everything counts as a variant
There are 138,000 words in the New Testament

17. Textual Variants Everything counts as a variant
There are 138,000 words in the New Testament
There are nearly 6,000 manuscripts to compare

18. “The NT is by far the best-attested work of Greek or Latin literature from the ancient world.” (Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace, 30)

19. “Let us not forget that the distinctive challenges in our field [biblical textual criticism] are actually the result of enormous quantities of data (unavailable for other documents whose originality we take for granted!).” (Moises Silva in Rethinking NT Textual Criticism, p.150)

20. How many manuscripts do we have, exactly?
2013: 5,824
+ 10,000+ Latin manuscripts of the NT
+ 5,000-10,000 ancient versions of the NT

21. How many manuscripts do we have, exactly?
2013: 5,824
+ 10,000+ Latin manuscripts of the NT
+ 5,000-10,000 ancient versions of the NT
+ over 1 million NT quotations from the church fathers

22. “To date, more than one million quotations of the NT by the [early church] fathers have been recorded. ‘[I]f all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, [the patristic quotations] would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament,’ wrote Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman.” (Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace, 28)

23. 400,000

24. 400,000
1,000-1,500

25. 400,000
1,000-1,500
A few hundred?

26. How many Christian doctrines are questionable due to textual variants?
“Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.”
(Bart Ehrman, pages of the HarperSanFrancisco 2005 edition of Misquoting Jesus)

27. “No essential doctrine of the Christian faith is jeopardized by any viable variant.” (Credo Courses – Textual Criticism, Daniel B. Wallace, 216)

28. “In the appendix to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman says about his disagreements with Bruce Metzger, whom Ehrman described as his doctor-father and to whom he had dedicated Misquoting Jesus, ‘[E]ven though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.’ (252).” (Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace, 20)

29. “Even though we are looking at the same textual problems and arriving at the same answers most of the time, conservatives are still conservative, and liberals are still liberal. What is the issue then? The text is not the basic area of our disagreement; the interpretation of the text is.” (Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace, 21)