Originally Posted by
Mika-El
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Lol ease up. If there was a Jesus he's probably not what anyone imagines he was anyways. We are relying on many times removed stories from the actual events complete with the editorials, biases, censorship of the writers of the New Testament acting under the orders of King Constantine to merge pagan and Christian beliefs to avoid a civil war and create an institution (confession) so he could keep on eye on what people were thinking.
Geez just translating Armaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin back and for the would have distorted half the words/.Then throw in the political biases and agenda of the writers being instructed by Constantine and you get quite a hybrid of confusing stories.
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Not sure where you got your info from. But there's a lot of loose and INCOMPLETE "info" and ideas floating around about the history of the new testament.
But If you're really interested in where we get the Bible we have today, and whether or not it's reliable or compares to what the Apostles wrote originally, here's some information to start your research.
Do we have the correct New Testament Text? Gary Habermas at The Veritas Forum
FYI comparison info on Dates and number of copies of ancient historical docs.
The earliest (fragmented) manuscripts of Plato’s Dialogues date from the 2nd to 4th century AD. But the complete manuscripts date from about 900 AD. Plato died in 437 or 348 AD. That’s quite a gap (some 1250 years).
Jesus died 30 AD there are New testament fragments dating to the early 100s. But no one doubts Plato’s or Socrates’ existence or words. Socrates, like Jesus, is not known to have written anything, either. Other people recorded his words (precisely as in the case of Jesus).
Dr. Richard M. Fales analyzes the massive differences in the comparative evidence:
•Aristotle’s Ode to Poetics was written between 384 and322 B.C. The earliest copy of this work dates A.D. 1100, and there are only forty-nine extant manuscripts. The gap between the original writing and the earliest copy is 1,400 years.
•There are only seven extant manuscripts of Plato’s Tetralogies, written 427–347 B.C. The earliest copy is A.D. 900—a gap of over 1,200 years.
•For Caesar’s Gallic War (composed between 58 and 50BC) there are several extant MSS, but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar’s day.
•Of the fourteen books of the Histories of Tacitus (c. AD100) only four and a half survive; of the sixteen books of his Annals, ten survive in full and two in part. The text of these extant portions of has two great historical works depends entirely on two MSS, one of the ninth century (800 years later)and one of the eleventh (1000 years later).
• History of Herodotus (c. 488-428 BC). the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals
What about the New Testament?
•Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30. The New Testament was written between A.D. 48 and 95. The oldest manuscripts date to the last quarter of the first century, and the second oldest A.D. 125. This gives us a narrow gap of thirty-five to forty years from the originals written by the apostles.
•From the early centuries, we have some 5,300 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Altogether, including Syriac, Latin,Coptic, and Aramaic, we have a whopping 24,633 texts of the ancient New Testament to confirm the wording of the Scriptures.
So the bottom line is, there was no great period between the events of the New Testament and the New Testament writings. Nor is there a great time lapse between the original writings and the oldest copies we have available today.
And the number of copies for comparison and review of the accuracy of the text is staggeringly more than any other ancient documents.
Michael Grant, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh University, and President and Vice Chancellor of the Queens University, Belfast, holds doctorates from Cambridge, Dublin and Belfast and is the author of numerous books, among them "The Twelve Caesars", and "The Army of the Caesars". In his book "Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the"Gospels", he fully admits,
“But if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty.”19
But he does not believe in the Resurrection:
“Who had taken the body? There is no way of knowing.... at all events, it was gone.” 20
Yet he proceeds to show how the subsequent events of Christian history astonish the historian,
“For by conquering the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D., Christianity had conquered the entire Western World, for century after century that lay ahead. In a triumph that has been hailed by its advocates as miraculous, and must be regarded by historians, too, as one of the most astonishing phenomena in the history of the world, the despised, reviled Galilean became the Lord of countless millions of people over the course of the1900 years and more between his age and ours.” 21
Sir Frederic Kenyon, Director and Principal Librarian of the British museum, a palaeographer, biblical and classical scholar whose authority to make pronouncements on ancient MSS was second to none:
‘The interval then between the data of original composition and the earliest extant evidence become so small to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scripture have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.’
A couple of Lawyer's Take:
John Singleton Copley(Lord Lyndhurst) is recognized as one of the greatest legal minds in British history. He was Solicitor General of the British government, Attorney General of Great Britain, three times the High Chancellor of England and elected High Steward of the University of Cambridge. He challenges,
“I know pretty well what evidence is; and I tell you, such evidence as that for the Resurrection has never broken down yet.”
Simon Greenleaf was the author of the classic three-volume text, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence which, according to Dr. Wilbur Smith “is still considered the greatest single authority on evidence in the entire literature on legal procedure.” Greenleaf himself is considered one of the greatest authorities on common-law evidence in Western history. In his book "Testimony of the Evangelists Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice", Greenleaf writes:
All that Christianity asks of men... is, that they would be consistent with themselves; that they would treat its evidences as they treat the evidence of other things; and that they would try and judge its actors and witnesses, as they deal with their fellow men, when testifying to human affairs and actions, in human tribunals. Let the witnesses [to the Resurrection] be compared with themselves, with each other, and with surrounding facts and circumstances; and let their testimony be sifted, as if it were given in a court of justice, on the side of the adverse party, the witness being subjected to a rigorous cross-examination. The result, it is confidently believed, will be an undoubting conviction of their integrity, ability and truth.