The Search Podcast

Is the Bible Reliable? MINISERIES (Part 1 of 3) Don Barkley, Area Director Orange County, CA Authenticity: Do we really have now what was written then?

Introduction: 1. It is often thought…It’s natural to think that the farther away we are from events long ago, the less we can be sure about them. The telephone game? One big difference is that unlike the game, each person wrote it down. People have the idea that the message was passed along orally and then later via manuscripts. At 2:37 – David Cross, comic, “Telephone Game” https://i.imgur.com/6m32D.png

2. Manuscripts are earlier, better, and more numerous than most people think.

Background: Manuscripts. What are they? Handwritten copies of Bible text. Scrolls on Parchment, or Bound books on parchment or papyrus. The Old Testament: Almost all written in the Hebrew language. The New Testament: Written in Greek, “The English of the Day”

New Testament 1. Example: a short story about New Testament manuscripts: KJ in 1611 vs. NLT in the 2007 edition. (Cf Komoszewski, Sawyer, and Wallace: Reinventing Jesus, Kregel Publications. 2006, pp. 66-70)

2. Comparison with other ancient histories: Example: Julius Caesar’s Gallic War. At 21:43 Movie “The 300” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/ Thucydides/Herodotus Written around the 400s BC, earliest copies 1st Century, 75 for Her. And 20 for Thuc. The New Testament has at least 11 mss dated within 100 years of the originals. The earliest, John Rylands Papyrus.

At 17:25 - Dr. Daniel Wallace. Nonprofit project to record high-resolution photos of every extant biblical manuscript. https://danielbwallace.com/tag/new-testament-manuscripts/ And, this 6000 number doesn’t include some 9000 mss in translations, including the Latin, and worship guides for the church with NT scriptures (lectionaries) and all the times the NT is quoted by early Christian writers.

“If you were to take two different teams of text critics and ask them to work independently on a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, they would agree more than 99% of the time.” —Mark Roberts, Can We Trust the Gospels?, Crossway Books, 2007, pp. 32-33 Mark’s PhD is from Harvard in New Testament and Christian Origins

Old Testament 1. A similar story has occurred with the manuscripts of Old Testament. In 1611, there were only two main Hebrew manuscripts. Leningrad and Aleppo Codices. These are dated around 900 AD. 1947—Dead Sea Scrolls story. The Bedouins, Bishop Sameul, Sukenik and Yadin. A gap of more than 1000 years was bridged. Question: How close were the 10th C and the 2nd C. BCE copies? At 29:55 - “The state of purity in some of the DSS is nothing short of spectacular. For instance, in one complete Isaiah scroll, only three words exhibiting different spelling were found for a book that runs about one hundred pages and sixty-six chapters in our English texts.”

—Walter Kaiser, The Old Testament Documents, 2001 Before his retirement in 2006, he was the distinguished professor of Old Testament and President of Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Boston.

2. Italicized points below weren’t discussed in this episode, but it is left here if needed. Why was the copying so precise? The quality of the copying was due to the meticulous work of the Hebrew scribes. The “Sopherim”. They knew: 1. How many times each letter occurred in each book. 2. The middle letter of the Pentateuch, and the middle letter of the Hebrew Bible. 3. Where on each page any particular letter occurred.

They required… 1. that each line have exactly 30 letters. 2. The exact same spacing between everything. 3. A special recipe for the ink. 4. What the scribe was to wear. 5. Where the eyes of the scribe could look.

Summary for OT: Walter Kaiser*, Bruce Waltke**: Over 90% of the OT is textually sound…of the remaining 10% of the text that has any kind of variation, extremely few of those would involve any major doctrinal issue.

At 31:20 - For the Bible, the Bottomline? That the more time passes, the more, the better, the older Biblical manuscripts are available. We are not less sure, but much more sure, that what we have today is what was written long ago.

*Walter Kaiser. The Old Testament Documents—Are They Reliable and Relevant?, Inter-varsity Press, 2001. p.49 **Cited by by W. Kaiser: Bruce K. Waltke. “Old Testament Textual Criticism” in Foundations for Biblical Interpretation, ed. Dockery, Matthews and Sloan. Broadman, 1994. p.157