Dive into the fascinating world of the New Testament’s creation and survival! This episode explores the miraculous preservation of these ancient texts, penned in a short span between 50 A.D. and 70 A.D. Discover how scribes like Tertius diligently recorded the Apostle Paul’s words and the efforts made to keep the manuscript traditions alive despite various copying errors and regional diversities. Join us as we unravel the intricate process that has kept the New Testament alive for centuries.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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The New Testament is really a miracle in every way. We now know that the books that form our New Testament were all written in a short 15-year period between the early 50s A.D. and the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. I often ponder why this is so. It’s almost as though the church began to sense the need for a permanent record. One gets the impression that in the earliest years of the Christian faith, a lot of them expected Christ to come back in their own lifetime. And they may not have bothered to write anything down. What’s the point in writing anything down? We won’t be here to read it. But apparently, at some point, they began to realize that was not the case. It was the Apostle Paul who kicked off the parade of the New Testament books with Galatians and Thessalonians. The Gospels were apparently all written in the 60s, between 60 and 70 A.D., If you can, try to imagine the Apostle Paul writing his letter to the Romans. As it happens, Paul was dictating the letter to a man who served as an early type of stenographer. His name we know. At the end of the letter, Romans 16, verse 20, Paul is finishing up, and he says, The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Timothy, my fellow worker, and Lucius, and Jason, and Sosipater, my kinsmen, all salute you. I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord. Now, I have no idea what happened at this point. You know, Paul didn’t stand up there and dictate, I, Tertius. He probably said, Timothy, Jason, Sosipater, all my kinsmen salute you. And oh, by the way, Tertius also salutes you. And what Tertius wrote down was, I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord. Then he resumed what Paul was saying. Gaius, my host of the whole church, salute you. Erastus, the chamberlain of the city, salute you. This is the city of Rome, mind you. Quartus, a brother. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. Now, this explains one of the curious things about the early Greek manuscripts. Some manuscripts use abbreviations, and it’s easy to see why. As far as I know, no one had invented shorthand at that time. And if I were sitting down there taking dictation from Paul, I would use a lot of shortcuts, every one I could possibly find, to the point of using abbreviations. Now, let’s imagine that I’m not Tertius, and you’re not either. We’re both secondary scribes. We’ve gotten hold of Tertius’ manuscript that he wrote, listening to Paul dictate it to send it off to Rome. We’re in Corinth. And we come across, in our copying of this out, an abbreviation in Tertius’ original copy. How would we handle it? Well, you might copy it exactly like it was. Being very legalistic-minded, you decided you’d put it in there, abbreviation intact. On the other hand, I might come to that word in my copy and say, oh, that’s an abbreviation for, and I would put the intended word in my copy. In the process, we would have created two manuscript traditions. And third and fourth generation manuscripts copied from ours will carry one or the other of our variations, one of them including the abbreviated forms, the other using the expanded intended form throughout the epistle. Now, it isn’t all that hard for scholars to look at these two variations and figure out what happened. They can thus give us the original intent of Paul in his letter. Now, did you ever, in copying a manuscript or typing a document, put a word in twice? That’s the easiest thing in the world to do. It is so easy, in fact, that all the good word processing programs will catch the error for you. They’ll underline that second word, and when you click on it to see what it is, it says, do you want to delete the duplicate word? And you can easily knock it out and get on down. But it is so common that they wrote it into the program. Now, if Tertius made that mistake in copying Paul’s dictation, you, in making your copy, might copy it exactly as Tertius had it with the duplicated word, trying to be meticulous in your honesty. And I might very well kind of serve as a spell checker does, and I might drop the duplicated word. Now, we can already see that I’m taking liberties that you just aren’t willing to take in making our copies of Paul’s letter. By the way, there is a scholarly word for this type of error. High scholarship. Dittography. You know, ditto, the old word for same thing over again, and graphy, or writing. Dittography. Now, when Tertius finished the manuscript, he would have had Paul read it over. Mind you, there are no word processors, and the way Greek was written at the time, there were no breaks between words, so that you just had what looks like fully justified text on the page, right to both margins, no breaks in the words, no breaks for sentences, no nothing. So, Paul notices that there’s a word missing that he intended to be there. What does he do? Well, he makes the note in the margin. Now, here we are. You and I have the copy of this, Tertius’ copy. You might decide to include that marginal reading, actually decline to include it because it’s not in the text. So you would carefully put it right in the margin where it was before. I might look at it and say, that’s Paul’s handwriting. So what I’m going to do, since this is obviously what he intended, I will put it right in the text of my copy. Now, by the time you get through working your way through these scribal errors, you might say, hey, what’s the big deal? These are not errors of meaning. They’re nothing in the world but technicalities. And you would be right. And through long studies, scholars have worked out ways to determine the almost certain variations in what they really mean and what the original text was. Now, let’s imagine that your copy of Romans went off to Alexandria, while mine stayed in Corinth in Greece. The original, of course, went off to Rome, and what happened to it there, we can only imagine. But let’s imagine that the folks in Alexandria, in making copies of your manuscript, followed the practice of one person reading aloud while a room full of scribes copied it down. They called this a scriptorium. a place where people copy out manuscripts. So one person reads it aloud carefully, and this room full of scribes are actually writing it down. Now, this can lead to errors of the ear, can’t it? I mean, you hear it one way, I heard it another, and consequently our manuscripts may vary ever so slightly in the things that we think we heard. Errors of memory also crop up in this kind of scriptorium. You hear the sentence read, but by the time you get to the end, you have forgotten one word and left it in there. Someone else catches it, but another manuscript tradition is born. And so that another tree, and these are almost like family trees, and scholars make their life’s work of sorting out where does this manuscript fit in the family tree context. of all manuscripts of the Old Testament. Another peculiarity that crops up in manuscripts is called orthography. It just simply means some scribes had peculiar spelling habits that are reflected in the copy. And, you know, this is nothing unusual to people who maybe have lived overseas for a while. Americans who have lived in England often return with alternate spellings for some words. I am still not sure how to spell the word surprising in the United States and spell it in England. I’m almost always these days get it wrong. So consequently, if we were hearing someone read a text, Our spelling might vary in peculiar idiosyncratic ways. This accounts for some of the things that differ in manuscripts. There are also grammatical corrections. A scribe felt a natural tendency to correct a mistake in grammar. Greek is an inflected language, and the ending of words reflects where they’re supposed to go in sentences and how they relate to the parts of speech. And if someone left off a letter, made a small mistake in grammar, it’s only natural as you’re reading along it to correct the mistake, sometimes even unconsciously. And then there is that change that was made by Origen in John 1, verse 28. John 1, 28 says, These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing. That’s the King James Version. Well, Origen didn’t know of any Bethabara, so he thought it was intended to be Bethany, and that’s how the New International Version renders it. But in recent years, archaeologists have found what they think is Bethabara right there on the Jordan where it was supposed to be. So the King James translators can have the last laugh they were right in the first place. But you can see from these illustrations that while it’s a lot of work, it is not particularly difficult to pull together a good, clean text to translate from. But why was it done this way? Why did God allow all these variations to take place in the texts? Well, there’s an answer to that. And when I come back after this short message, I’ll explain.
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The Introduction to the New Testament series is available in album form. If you would like to get in on this story from the beginning, write or call and ask for your free introductory CD titled Introduction to the New Testament. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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Now, I know that some people are made a little bit uncomfortable by the thought of all these little ticky-tack errors creeping into the New Testament as it is spread and copied throughout the Middle East. And they would kind of rather have had it all handed down intact. Why was it done this way? Why did God allow all these things to take place? Well, in my opinion, it was done to maintain the independence of the Witnesses. You see, every single one of these manuscripts on papyrus or on vellum, however they were created, stands as an independent witness of the truth that is contained therein. You know, you can’t start out with the belief that the Bible is trustworthy based on nothing but faith. You may be able to do that, but the Bible has to stand examination by those who don’t have faith and who can come to have faith because they read it. These folks need evidence that the Bible is not merely the contrivance of a group of men. So we are provided with a set of witnesses. In the case of the New Testament, 27 of them. And, of course, in the case of the manuscripts, thousands. We’re provided with their testimony, and we have to decide if we believe them or not. And we can’t hide behind the excuse that the Catholic Church controlled the transmission of the text and the Catholic Church decided what books would be in the Bible and what books not. There was no Catholic Church before Constantine. I don’t care what they say. And the text of the New Testament in all of its parts was circulating widely prior to that time among Christian people. The scholars who have labored generation after generation to provide us with an accurate text of the New Testament deserve a lot of credit. No other documents from that time period have ever had the kind of exhaustive analysis that the New Testament has been exposed to. That’s fairly simple to think, because no other documents from that time have been as consequential as the New Testament is. Now, did I mention that we have none of the original manuscripts? We don’t have the original book that John wrote. We don’t have the original letters that Paul wrote. They all have perished. The reason is simple. They were all done on papyrus. And papyrus just won’t last in that Mediterranean climate. They fall apart and they turn to dust. So they had to be copied again and again, and of necessity, they had to be copied by hand. This is a little hard to get our mind around in the age of the Xerox machine and the word processor, but that’s the way it was. The very oldest manuscripts that have been found, consequently, are from the very dry climate in Egypt. where they could be preserved longer. And we can all thank God for the Egyptian Christians who did their work as they should. But how can we know for certain how old a given papyrus document is? How can we say, well, this papyrus, this document, this copy of John actually dates to the year 150? Well, you can’t tell from scientific tests on the paper. That’s not accurate enough. Oddly, you can tell by looking at the handwriting. Now, you may have noticed this yourself when you’re looking at early English handwriting in things like the Declaration of Independence and others. Handwriting has a style of its own in every age, and there’s a specialty called paleography. That’s Greek for the study of old writing, and it can be surprisingly significant about when documents were written because the style of handwriting makes subtle changes over time. The difference between your handwriting and that of George Washington is enormous. But what you don’t realize is that every 10 years down all through that period of time, there were subtle changes in general handwriting. I’ve been told that some paleographers can date a document almost to the decade in which it was written. Well, until recent years, the oldest papyrus manuscript that anybody ever had in hand was written about 125 A.D. It was of the Gospel of John. Now, what that means is that the original was, as it purports to be, a first century document. Because by the time it gets copied around and shows up in this papyrus in Egypt in 125, a lot of time has gone by. I also believe a fragment of Mark has been found that actually does date to the first century. I was in a conference once with Dr. James Tabor, who is a scholar specializing in the time of the Second Temple. he observed that scholarship is now pretty well determined that out of all the Christian documents that have been preserved, only 27, 27 and only 27, can be shown by scholarship to have originated in the first century. They are the 27 books we have in our New Testament. For a long time, it was thought in some quarters that we owe the preservation of the New Testament to the Catholic Church and Constantine. Some have viewed this with dark suspicion. Why, Constantine could have made the Bible say anything he wanted it to say, they think. Well, the Constantinian Church was very important because the fourth century was when the systematic reproduction of the New Testament really took root throughout all the empire. It was organized, it was disciplined, it was painstaking and carefully supervised. In the Greek churches, they were especially careful. And when a manuscript became old and brittle, it was burned. They didn’t want to leave old manuscripts around to be desecrated. This, of course, to the everlasting dismay of New Testament scholars who would dearly love to have their hands on those old documents. Thus, all their manuscripts, which form the basis of the text of the King James Version mostly, are later manuscripts. That does not mean they are less accurate, only that they were carefully copied and the previous texts were destroyed. These are called the Byzantine texts. Now, there are two major types of ancient texts. One is the Byzantine, preserved in Greece. The other is the Alexandrian, preserved more in Egypt. The division between these two family trees came very early. It may have come just about as early as you and I sitting there writing down our copies of the Epistle to the Romans, but never mind. It’s important for the validity of the text of your Bible to know how they vary. To give you an idea, scholars did a special study of the variations in these two family trees in the Epistle of James. They found agreement between these two family trees in more than 92% of the texts. That’s total agreement. Now, what’s important, most of the differences involved word order or grammatical variance, which are untranslatable. What that means is, as a translator, it doesn’t matter a whit which of these family trees you choose to use, because it’s merely a question of word order, a grammatical difference, or a spelling difference. They are trivial changes. And again, the evidence mounts that we can have total confidence in the witness of the Bible we have now in hand. Almost any good study Bible will have marginal notes to call your attention to any important textual issue so you can decide for yourself. Now, if you’re really serious, check with your local librarian for biblical reference books and commentaries. Of necessity, commentaries have to discuss any important textual variation. You get a good late commentary, and if you’re reading about their commentary on a given passage of Scripture and they don’t comment on the text, it’s because there really is nothing to discuss. Now, there’s one other issue on the table, and I could always see my students’ eyes glaze over whenever I mention this, so I hope I can retain your interest. It’s the issue of the canon of the New Testament. Canon is a Greek word. No surprise there. All these words seem to be Greek. It’s a Greek word that means a straight rod. It is the term used to designate that body of writings that gained general recognition in the early church as holy scriptures. Now, that’s all well and good, but you may wonder, why should I believe the church? Well, stay with me. When I come back after this short message, we’ll talk about that.
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For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, Introduction to the New Testament, No.
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5.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.
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To help make this clear, I’d like to rephrase the issue a bit. The canon of the New Testament is that body of writings that were seen by early Christians as genuine. You could tell that by the way they were treated, where they were found, how they were cited in early writings, and all these things. They could simply tell. The decision by the church to establish a canon of Scripture came about because of a raft of pretenders which any fool could see were late and uninspired and had no business in it. But because some people here and there were pressing on them, the church finally decided they needed to actually establish an official canon of the New Testament. Someone To cut the knot and clarify the issues once declared the canon, well, the canon was established by Peter himself. What’s wrong with that? Well, it would mean instead of 27 witnesses, we got one. Peter decided for us what the witnesses said. And no one knows when or how Peter might have even done that. But we no longer have to depend on any of that. Modern scholarship, independent of any church authority, has confirmed the decisions and the judgment of the early Christians. There are 27 and only 27 books that have any claim on apostolic authority at all. And you have them right there on your coffee table in the New Testament. But maybe you’d like to know what some of those early Christians thought about these things. One, Clement of Rome, who was writing in 95 A.D., makes copious use of the Old Testament. He cites that as Holy Scripture. He makes specific reference to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. So Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is, guess what, the first century. He’s acquainted with the words of Jesus. He doesn’t cite any of the gospel accounts. The Epistle of the Hebrews is known to him, as well as some of the other letters. Clement never refers to them as Scripture, but he does establish as an independent witness the existence of many New Testament books before the turn of the first century. And it’s that that we are looking for. We don’t want his decision… We want his testimony. We don’t want him to tell us which books are scripture. We simply want him to tell us when they began. Then there’s the Epistle of Barnabas written in the second century. It includes many references to the teachings of Jesus and cites, quote, many are called but few are chosen, end quote, from Matthew. And he proceeds it by the formula, as it stands written. Ignatius of Antioch, who died in 117 A.D., wrote seven letters to various churches. He’s obviously aware of the material from the gospel, cites several of Paul’s epistles. He doesn’t call them Scripture, but again, we aren’t looking for his decision. We’re only looking for his testimony about what early Christians thought. Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, which is about A.D.
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That letter abounds with language obviously drawn from the New Testament. He attributes statements to Jesus, quoting him. The Lord said, and then here comes words of Jesus. You can find more of these by going to the library or searching the Internet. There is the Didache, the Teaching of the Apostles, early 2nd century. the Shepherd of Hermas, Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis in about 130 to 140. There’s Justin Martyr. There’s Tatian, the Muratorian Canon, which is about 170. All these are testimony to the very early existence of these books, and they’re being accepted as authoritative on the part of Christians far and wide before Constantine was born. There is another body of work called the New Testament Apocrypha, yet another called the Pseudepigrapha, which is the Greek for false writings. I once attended a conference with Dr. James Charlesworth, who is a professor of New Testament language and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary. His specialty is the Pseudepigrapha, the false writings. He spoke to the value of such studies, not because the documents are Scripture, but because they reveal what some Christian communities believed and were teaching at a very early time. Now, you can find a translation of some of these early works. It shouldn’t take you long in the library. It won’t take you very long to realize you’re not reading Scripture. What you are reading is a later testimony of some Christian folk as to what they believe about the faith. Some of these are Gnostic documents, which have a very low view of the God of the Old Testament. And, of course, Clement of Rome, whom I mentioned first, actually cites the legend of the phoenix as though it was absolute truth. So you’re not particularly inclined to think, well, his book should somehow be in the canon. Now, all of us leaves us once again with that book there on your coffee table called the Bible. What is it? Well, some call it the Word of God, and it certainly is that to men and women of faith. But to those who approach it for the first time, it is something else. We can’t ask unbelievers to take the Bible on faith before they have any faith. For the person coming for the first time to the Bible, we can ask them to accept it as the testimony of men who, in the course of time, had an encounter with God and decided to write down their testimony. Each of us is a jury of one to weigh the testimony, examine its sources, and decide whether we believe it or not. After all, Jesus himself called on us to believe. And every jury comes down to the same point. What do we believe about the testimony of the witnesses and the validity of their testimony? And we can throw out all those ideas that the witnesses were tampered with. You might fool one witness. No one could ever get them all.
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Until next time. You have heard Ronald L. Dart. If you would like more information or if you have any questions, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. In the U.S. and Canada, call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and visit our website at borntowin.net.
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