Early Recognition And Preservation Of The New Testament

Early Recognition and Preservation of the New Testament

An author takes a series of steps to write a book. He might plan an outline, a storyboard, or develop a rough draft. Next, he might have someone proof-read or edit his work. Finally, he would publish his work. The tools used in each of these steps may advance and change over time, involve one person and be informal, or involve an entire company with a thoroughly documented process. The Christian doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture does not supersede this process. The New Testament did not drop out of heaven; it was authored and published in the same manner as any other book. 2 Peter 1:21 describes how men were carried along by the Holy Spirit like a boat is carried along by the

Copies that are similar to each other are considered to come from the same source. The 2 major text types are called Byzantine and Alexandrian and they exhibit over a 90% agreement with each other. So, when we talk about variants, we are only talking about the remaining 10% of the text because the 90% is completely stable. The reason that the number of variants is misleading is that it includes one-off misspellings and word order arrangement (which does not affect meaning in Greek). In 5,600 copies, there are over 200,000 such one-offs. Over 90% of the text is in agreement; so if you take the percentage of errors in the remaining 10%, then you get less than 30,000 variants among 5,600 copies––that is under 10 per published text. That is a very low error rate rivaling even modern publishing

The gospels were a new covenant and the epistles were their terms. The NT fragments of papyri that we have increases our confidence from the 4th century right to the beginning of the 2nd. Less than 50 years and we have the gospels and the epistles of Paul including very early lectionaries that show us how the NT was received.

50 years is within the lifetime of the first followers of the apostles––i.e., the Church Fathers. Can we get closer to the author, and can we see how the Church Fathers received the texts? Yes, we can see that exactly 4 gospels and 13 epistles of Paul were received immediately, and assembled into a sub-corpus that later was recognized as the bulk of the NT Canon of Scripture.

There is a game where you tell a story around a circle and see how much it has changed by the time it comes back around. This is often used as a metaphor for how the New Testament (NT) was changed since it was written. As we have discussed, we can see the nugget of truth in this in the variants that occur due to scribal errors in the number of manuscripts that are available to