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Wordpress Plugins — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:07:12 +0000

If you are into heavy reading, try the book “Evidence that demands a verdict”.

By: Robert R

Robert R — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:07:11 +0000

There are many thousands of early manuscripts of the New Testament and many early Christian writings.http://www.apologetics.com/default.jsp?b…
The fact that there is outstanding manuscript evidence for the New Testament documents is even admitted by critical scholars.2 John A.T. Robinson succinctly explains, “The wealth of manuscripts, and above all the narrow interval of time between the writing and the earliest extant copies, make it by far the best attested text of any ancient writing in the world.”3 Even Helmut Koester summarizes:
Classical authors are often represented by but one surviving manuscript; if there are half a dozen or more, one can speak of a rather advantageous situation for reconstructing the text. But there are nearly five thousand manuscripts of the NT in Greek… The only surviving manuscripts of classical authors often come from the Middle Ages, but the manuscript tradition of the NT begins as early as the end of II CE; it is therefore separated by only a century or so from the time at which the autographs were written. Thus it seems that NT textual criticism possesses a base which is far more advantageous than that for the textual criticism of classical authors.4
The result of all this is an incredibly accurate New Testament text. John Wenham asks why it is that, in spite of the “great diversity” in our copies, the texts are still relativity homogeneous. He responds, “The only satisfactory answer seems to be that its homogeneity stems from an exceedingly early text-virtually, that is, from the autographs.”5 The resulting text is 99.99 percent accurate, and the remaining questions do not affect any area of cardinal Christian doctrine.6

Comments on: For Christian Bible Scholars, Looking For Non Biblical Sources That Verify New Testament?

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By: Robert R