Has the Bible Been Corrupted Over the Centuries?

We're working our way through the book Questioning the Bible (Jonathan Morrow). His next chapter deals with the issue of whether the Bible has been corrupted over the centuries. Some people worry about passages like John 8:1-13 or Mark 16:9-20, where Bible footnotes indicate these passages were not found in the earliest manuscripts. So, the key question is simple: how do we know that what was written in the first century is what we have today in the 21st century? Let's take a look at what he says.

He starts off by talking about something called the telephone game. People sit in a circle while one person whispers a message to the player on his right who then turns to the next person and repeats the message. By the time it makes it around to the original whisperer, the message is usually wildly different. Some people suggest this is a good analogy for how the New Testament was transmitted.

However, it's a bad analogy. Why? First, the telephone game is linear (from one person to the second to the third…), But the New Testament gospels in the copying process were not done that way. There are multiple lines of transmission within the original documents which were probably copied several times. We have access to earlier copies to compare with later copies. In addition, the telephone game is verbal, but the text was written, with the result that the words and phrases can be examined along the way. Finally, when we play the telephone game, life or death usually do not hang in the balance. There would've been a high degree of motivation among the copiers to get the message right.

The author then turns to textual criticism, the practice of reconstruction for ancient texts. There are three fundamental questions when it comes to reconstructing the New Testament – how many manuscripts do we have? How early are these manuscripts? How important are the textual variants (differences) among these manuscripts?

Let's start with how many manuscripts are available. The answer is that we have a wealth of material with nearly 6000 Greek New Testament manuscripts, as many as 20,000 translated versions, and more than 1 million quotations by early church fathers. In comparison with the average ancient Greek author, the New Testament copies are well over one thousand times more plentiful. This gives us an opportunity to examine these different manuscripts to look for any wildly different stories, but they aren't there.

Let's deal with the other two questions in the next blog.

Forgeries in the New Testament? (Part 2)

For this blog I would like to finish up a chapter in Questioning God by Jonathan Morrow. He was dealing with the issue of whether there were forgeries in the New Testament.

One question he considers has to do with whether forgeries now exist in the New Testament Canon. He says skeptics talk about stylistic/literary problems, historical problems and theological problems. Because this book is a brief overview, the author focuses only on the stylistic/literary arguments concerning Paul and the pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus).

First, some argue that the style, vocabulary, and grammar of these epistles are different from those of the accepted letters of Paul. But Morrow notes that it's hard to come up with an accurate statistical analysis since the sample is so small. Secondly, he says stylistic arguments are highly subjective and dependent on what kinds of assumptions the critics are using. Third, he says the purpose of writing is what determines the style used, which can vary along with the vocabulary that Paul wanted to use on that occasion. In addition, the style could have been affected by the use of a hired scribe that Paul may have used. For example, we know from the book of Romans that Paul used Tertius as his secretary. We also know that Silas (Silvanus) was involved in the composition of 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Morrow ends this argument by saying the early church fathers did not doubt that Paul authored these books and that Pauline authorship of them was not seriously questioned until the 19th century.

One other question he deals with has to do with authorship of the four "anonymous" Gospels. Technically they are anonymous because there are no definitive statements about who wrote them. Morrow suggests that even if we later discover that someone else wrote what we know as the gospel of Matthew, that would not mean there was an error because no claim of authorship was technically made in the document. He says that very fact that there is a title means that it became necessary to distinguish between early gospel accounts. The unusual form of the titles and the universal use of them as soon as we have any evidence suggests that they originated at an early stage. The existing manuscripts that we have demonstrate the authority given only these four Gospels. We possess no instance where an apocryphal gospel is joined with these four Gospels within a single manuscript. I think a key point is that the true identities of the authors of the four Gospels were never in question historically. From the very earliest witnesses and Church Fathers, we find the authors' names associated with each gospel. Consider this – it is difficult to conceive why Christians as early as the second century would ascribe these otherwise anonymous Gospels to three such unlikely candidates as Matthew, Mark, and Luke unless it was a certainty that they were the authors. If you were going to forge documents, you would most likely pick better-known apostles like Peter and Thomas to act as authors.

Again, there's a lot of good info here, so I'm  going to stop so people can think these points over.

Forgeries in the New Testament?

Bart Ehrman is a skeptic when it comes to the Bible. One of his arguments is that most of the books in the New Testament were forged. He has said a large number of books in the early church were written by authors who falsely claimed to be apostles in order to deceive their readers into accepting their books and the views they represented. This is one challenge that Jonathan Morrow is taking on in his book Questioning the Bible.

He starts by saying authorship is usually determined by several factors. First, there are external factors such as comments by other writers or historical corroboration. In addition, there are internal factors like the claims of the author, his style, and theology. He also says it's important to notice if the document was disputed by those closest to its composition, also known as historical proximity. He notes that the twenty-seven documents contained in the New Testament are the earliest Christian writings in existence and therefore the closest to the resurrection event.

One of his key points is that Christians in the first century were able to write well. The earliest Christians were Jewish and highly valued reading, writing, and explaining the Hebrew Scriptures. So, the earliest Christians were not ignorant peasants unaware of the literary practices of the day.

Regarding forgeries, Morrow makes three points. First, forgeries certainly existed in the ancient world, but they were rejected when discovered. Secondly, forgeries did occur among some early Christian writings, but Christians rejected them when they were discovered. Third, and most importantly, there is no reason to think that a known forgery made it into the New Testament canon. Church fathers understood that the apostles were the authorized agents of the new covenant message and documents. Therefore, if the writings were not apostolic in origin, they were not regarded as authoritative.

The author asks a couple of key questions which I would like to save for next time – Do forgeries now exist in the New Testament canon? Who wrote the four Gospels?

The so-called "lost gospels"

The next chapter in Jonathan Morrow's book Questioning the Bible is an intriguing one: "Why Were Some Gospels Banned from the Bible?" Today we hear comments that early Christians suppressed some Gospels and that there were early Christianities with various viewpoints about Jesus. After a struggle only one story was allowed to continue – the one we see in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But is this revisionist history true? Nope.

The author starts by giving us a background of discovered Gospels. In 1945, fifty-two papyri were discovered at Nag Hammadi in lower Egypt. Some of these had the word "gospel" in their title. These have caused quite a bit of controversy and speculation. People began to wonder if there had been a cover-up by the church. These so-called "lost Gospels" were made up of New Testament Apocrypha and Gnostic writings. The apocryphal stories dealt with the childhood of Jesus and the three days between death and resurrection, the parts of his life not covered by the four gospels we have today. For example, one apocryphal work is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in which we find a story about Jesus getting angry at a child and striking him dead.

Most people are unfamiliar with the idea of Gnosticism, which is seen in many of these newly-found documents. Gnostics said there were multiple creators, the world and body are evil, only spirit and soul are good, Jesus was a spirit being rather than a human being, ignorance rather than sin is the ultimate problem, and special knowledge brings salvation. The most famous example of Gnostic writings is the Gospel of Thomas, which is made up of sayings of Jesus rather than a chronology of his life. Here's one of them: Simon Peter wants Mary to leave the group because he believes women are not worthy of life. Jesus says in response, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." How's that for a sexist remark?

Here's the bottom line. These Gospels were not lost to the early church. Instead, Christians knew about them and rejected them for good reasons. We learn nothing significant about the historical Jesus. In addition, these writings are dated long after the time of Jesus and his earliest followers. Even Bart Ehrman, a famous skeptical critic of the New Testament, admits that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John provide the earliest and most reliable witnesses to the words and works of Jesus. Here is what he says: "The oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus are the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This is not simply the view of Christian historians; it is the view of all serious historians of antiquity of every kind, from committed evangelical Christians to hard-core atheists."

OK, more from the book next week.

More from Questioning the Bible

In Questioning the Bible, author Jonathan Morrow examines skeptical challenges to the Bible's authority, especially the New Testament. In this blog I want to cover what he has to say about how the early message of Jesus's resurrection and other core doctrines were transmitted among early Christians.

Keep in mind, he says, that the ancient world was predominately an oral culture. Today we wonder how it's possible for such a culture to transmit reliable history. We often think of the telephone game, but it was certainly not like that at all. Disciples of a rabbi were required to memorize his sayings, and people are capable of memorizing a tremendous amount of material. Some Muslims have memorized the entire Koran, for example.

There were four S's used by early followers in order to maintain true history and correct core doctrines until they were written down. The first is Scriptures – Christians sought continuity in what God had done in the Old Testament and what God was doing now through Jesus the Messiah. So they read the Hebrew Scriptures of public worship services. Therefore, the foundational documents of the earliest Christians were the Hebrew Scriptures acting as a theological baseline. Second were summaries, or what we would call creeds. Early Christians memorized and recited doctrinal summaries alongside the Hebrew Scriptures when they gathered for worship. This made it easy for people to remember key elements of doctrine and history. Third was singing. When Christians gathered, they sang their theology and hymns to show their devotion to Jesus (see Philippians 2:5-11 as an example). Finally, the last "S" has to do with sacraments. Baptism and the Lord's supper were practiced on a regular basis, and they both pictured the basic elements of the salvation story as core theology. These creeds, hymns, and practices predated the writing of the New Testament documents.

How early was Jesus being worshiped as God? We see from Paul's letter to the Philippians that Jesus was being worshiped as God within 20 years of his crucifixion. We also see that belief within early Christian hymns. It is also found in early Christian summaries – note 1 Corinthians 8:4-6. This is a powerful passage because Paul has taken the famous Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 and included Jesus as part of the divine nature. Outside the Bible, Morrow notes that a Roman governor, Pliny the younger, wrote: "They [the Christians] were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang an alternate versus a hymn to Christ, as to a God." Then there's the 1 Corinthians 15 creed, which I mentioned in the last blog. This statement may go back to within one year of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

What's the point of all of this? Many skeptics say that exalted beliefs, proclamations, and even worship of Jesus emerge gradually over time. But the truth is far different. Devotion to Jesus as divine erupted suddenly and quickly among his first-century followers.

More to follow.