During our summer break, we are reviewing one of our previous classes: A Case for the Gospels! This week’s class focuses on the topic of “Textual Criticism” which is an academic field of study and method used by scholars to decipher the meaning of the original texts, or “autographs,” from ancient manuscripts. With a multitude of ancient manuscripts of the Bible, scholars have found many minor and a few somewhat major differences between them, but textual criticism allows scholars to eliminate the majority of those differences that are mostly in spelling, grammar, word insertions, or word deletions, so we can have confidence that what we are reading in our Bibles today is exactly what God had inspired in the originals!

Watch this week’s class presentation on this topic:

Presentation Notes

A Case for the Gospels, Session 8: The Reliability of the Gospels – Textual Criticism

Prayer and Reflection

Prayer cards: Take a minute and write your name on the index card provided, and add any special prayer request you might have. Exchange cards at the end of the class this evening.

At your table groups, answer the following:

1. Go over the categories and the 27 books found in the New Testament.
2. Go over the 15 major historical events of the Bible – add in the major players and Covenants for those events.
3. Recite the Memory Verse:

Christian Apologetics Theme

15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, 16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.

1 Peter 3:15-16 (NIV)

HOW DO WE KNOW THE GOSPELS ARE HISTORICALLY RELIABLE?

• Multiple lines of evidence give us confidence in the reliability…

1. God’s Inspiration
2. The Fuses (cultural, spiritual and prophetic)
3. Eyewitness accounts (in multiple)
4. Transmission
5. Translation
6. Canonization
7. Textual Criticism (MAPS-S)

In review of Canonization:

• The Canon of the Hebrew Bible is the same as the Protestant Old Testament, some books are just in a different order or grouping.
• The Catholic and Orthodox Bibles differ from the Protestant Bible by having extra Old Testament books they added later on, but were not in the original affirmed canon of the 4th Century AD.
• Extra books are often referred to as apocrypha or deuterocanonical, or pseudepigrapha books

What About those extra books?

Definition of terms

• Apocrypha: Hidden; of doubtful authenticity
• Deuterocanonical: Of, or constituting a second or subsequent canon; specif., designating certain Biblical books accepted as canonical in the Roman Catholic Church. The books of the Old Testament which are part of the canon of Scripture of a given church but which are not found in the Hebrew Bible.

Usage note: The term Deuterocanon implies to some that the works therein ought to be included in the Bible, whereas use of the term Apocrypha implies to some that the same works ought to be excluded from the Bible.

• Pseudepigrapha: The term comes from the Greek pseudo, meaning “false,” and epigraphein, meaning “to inscribe,” thus, “to write falsely. These are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past.
• Gnostic Gospels: The Gnostic gospels are writings by early “Christian” Gnostics. Gnosis means knowledge and Gnosticism fosters the conviction that matter is evil and that emancipation (being set free) comes through special knowledge and runs contrary to almost every Christian Doctrine.

Why were these books left out?

• First of all, there are no inspired books that were left out otherwise it would not be Christianity as passed down from the beginning!
• Classic Christianity is based on the teachings of the 66 books of the Christian Bible, and the canonization process confirmed this.
• Other books that skeptics have said were “left out” teach something completely different than what we get in our Bible!

What are some of those other books?

Apocryphal Literature

The Apocrypha: (means hidden or doubtful)

• The Catholic Bible today contains eleven of these books in their deuterocanonical (secondary canon) section between the Old and New Testament.
• They were never accepted by early Christianity nor by the Jewish faith.
• These books do contain some valuable historical information useful in understanding the intertestamental period (c. 250-60 BC), but have never been considered inspired writings.
• They were included in the Latin Vulgate (AD 382) in part to defend some of the teachings of the Catholic Church (such as purgatory).

The Apocrypha…

• does not claim to be inspired by God
• was not written by prophets of God (1 Mac. 9:27)
• was not confirmed by supernatural acts of God (Heb. 2:3-4)
• was not accepted by the people of God (Judaism) and they were never included in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)
• does not always tell the truth of God, for example: On praying for the dead (2 Mac. 12:46); on working for salvation (Tobit 12:9)
• was not accepted by Jesus the Son of God (Lk. 24:27)
• was not accepted by the Apostles (who never quoted it)
• was not accepted by the early Church and was never part of the Protestant New Testament
• was rejected by the great Catholic translator Jerome
• was not written during period of the prophets of God
• contain some absurdities and inconsistencies with the accepted Biblical Canon

Gnostic Literature

• Gnosticism came out of Greek philosophy and held a belief that one could gain “secret knowledge” of God through certain practices.
• Gnostic literature includes ‘secret’ gospels, poems and myths attributing to Jesus’ sayings and beliefs which are very different from the New Testament Gospels.
• There was an attempt to assimilate Gnosticism with early Christianity.
• There are over 300 writings from Gnostic literature in antiquity.

Gnostic gospels

In addition to the same reasons for the Apocrypha, Christians reject these because…

• Gnostic literature, and so-called gospels, were written well into the second through forth centuries AD/CE by authors who were not primary eyewitnesses of the events, and who falsely took the names of many of the apostles and disciples (for example, the gospels of Thomas, Phillip and Mary).
• The early Church leaders unanimously rejected them.
• Gnostic writings have no basis in primary evidence, cross-references to other Scripture, or confirmation from the first and second century Churches.
• The dating of the book is the key for recognizing legitimate historical literature, and these are written way too late to be legitimate primary accounts.
• Gnostic literature contains absurdities and inconsistencies with the early beliefs of the apostles and disciples of Jesus
• Gnostic literature does not reflect a first century Palestinian Jesus but rather an esoteric or Hellenistic Jesus
• The Gnostic gospels contain false doctrines and heresies (Gnosticism, Ascetisicm, Docetism, Modalism, etc.) that are inconsistent with the doctrinal essentials of classic Christianity
• The Gnostic heretic Marcion, c. AD 140, was the first to promote these Gnostic writings in the Christian community because he was anti-Jewish and rejected all books written by Jews
• The books of the Christian Bible today are the same ones used by the earliest disciples of Christ and therefore any other so called “missing” book would not be part of the classical Christian faith anyway.

Key points:

• The 27 books of the New Testament were the same ones already in use by Christians since the first century AD/CE—it was not simply a decision by a few people or a single council.
• The 39 Old testament books are the ones affirmed by the Jewish faith before the time of Jesus.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

What is Textual Criticism?

• Textual criticism = A method used by scholars to decipher the meaning of the original texts, or “autographs,” from the manuscripts
• With a multitude of available ancient manuscripts of the Bible, scholars have found many minor and a few somewhat major differences between them
• Textual criticism allows scholars to eliminate the majority of these differences that are mostly in spelling, grammar, word insertions, or word deletions
• The science of textual criticism has given us 100% certainty that what we have in our Bibles today is the original vox (meaning)
• There is over 98% certainty for the Old Testament and 99.5% for the New Testament in verba (words)

Examples of Textual Criticism research:

Works of antiquity	Date written	Date of earliest available copy	Number of years from the events	Number of available manuscripts and fragments
Aristotle’s work in philosophy	384-322 BC/BCE	AD/CE 850	1200-year gap	1000
Plato’s work in philosophy—“Tetralogies”	427-347 BC/BCE	AD/CE 900	1200-year gap	210
Pliny the Younger’s work in history—“Letters”	c. AD/CE 100	AD/CE 850	750-year gap	7 (unconfirmed)
Pliny the Elder’s work in history—“Natural History”	AD/CE 23-79	AD/CE 1000	900-year gap	200
Herodotus’ work in the “Histories” (Greco-Persian Wars)	480-425 BC/BCE	AD/CE 900	1350-year gap	109
Caesar’s firsthand account in history of the “Gallic Wars”	44-10 BC/BCE	AD/CE 1000	900-year gap	251
Tacitus’ Greek history—“Annals”	AD/CE 100	AD/CE 850	750-year gap	33
Thucydides’ work in history—“History of the Peloponnesian War”	460-400 BC/BCE	AD/CE 900	1300-year gap	50
Sophocles’ work in history—“Tragedies”	496-406 BC/BCE	AD/CE 900	1200-year gap	193
Livy’s work in history—“History of Rome”	59 BC/BCE to AD/CE 17	AD/CE 400	400-year gap	150
Demosthenes work in history—“Speeches”	300 BC/BCE	AD/CE 1100	1400-year gap	340
2ND Place overall:Homer’s work in history—“Illiad, the history of the Trojan War”	800 BC/BCE	400 BC/BCE	400-year gap	1757
1st PLACE OVERALL: The Bible’s New Testament	AD/CE 40-75	AD/CE 117 (and a Mark fragment from within the first century)	25–150-year gap (new discoveries may be even closer)	*Over 25,000

*The number of New Testament manuscripts include:

• 5795 Greek Manuscripts (dated first century and on)
• Over 7974 manuscripts in other languages (Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Georgian and Slavic) dated early second century and on
• Over 10,000 manuscripts in the Latin Vulgate dated from the third century and on

Are There Errors in the Manuscripts?

“The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or the other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other book in the world.”

– Sir Frederick Kenyon, Archeologist, “Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts”

• Out of all of the known manuscripts there is only a 2% error rate
• When literary scholars looked at these so-called errors (2%) they found only the following:

Variations in the texts stem from differences in spelling, word order or the relationship between noun and definite articles—slight variants that are easily recognizable.

• After factoring out the minor spelling errors and light variations in word order, there is more than 5% agreement between all of the known manuscripts of the Bible.
• Of the remaining variants (0.5%) none affects any crucial element or teaching of the Christian faith.

MAPS-S

1. Manuscripts: Historical literary facts, transmission, canonization, translation, textual criticism, and eyewitness accounts from both Christian and non-Christian sources
2. Archeology: Physical evidence from uncovered, geographically confirmed locations and artifacts; and historical records of people, places, and events that corroborate Biblical accounts
3. Prophecy: Predicted verifiable outcomes of historical events and Messianic prophecy fulfilled in Jesus
4. Scientific: Biblical authenticity confirmed in areas of medicine, nutrition, cosmology and biochemistry
5. Saved lives: Personal testimonies over the centuries of drastically changed lives (for the better) because of Biblical Christianity

Going Deeper

Video: J. Warner Wallace on Textual Criticism