38 replies to this topic

[Kaiser01]

http://carm.org/manuscript-evidence Author Date
Written Earliest Copy Approximate Time Span between original & copy Number of Copies Accuracy of Copies Lucretius died 55 or 53 B.C. 1100 yrs 2 ---- Pliny 61-113 A.D. 850 A.D. 750 yrs 7 ---- Plato 427-347 B.C. 900 A.D. 1200 yrs 7 ---- Demosthenes 4th Cent. B.C. 1100 A.D. 800 yrs 8 ---- Herodotus 480-425 B.C. 900 A.D. 1300 yrs 8 ---- Suetonius 75-160 A.D. 950 A.D. 800 yrs 8 ---- Thucydides 460-400 B.C. 900 A.D. 1300 yrs 8 ---- Euripides 480-406 B.C. 1100 A.D. 1300 yrs 9 ---- Aristophanes 450-385 B.C. 900 A.D. 1200 10 ---- Caesar 100-44 B.C. 900 A.D. 1000 10 ---- Livy 59 BC-AD 17 ---- ??? 20 ---- Tacitus circa 100 A.D. 1100 A.D. 1000 yrs 20 ---- Aristotle 384-322 B.C. 1100 A.D. 1400 49 ---- Sophocles 496-406 B.C. 1000 A.D. 1400 yrs 193 ---- Homer (Iliad) 900 B.C. 400 B.C. 500 yrs 643 95% New
Testament 1st Cent. A.D. (50-100 A.D. 2nd Cent. A.D.
(c. 130 A.D. f.) less than 100 years 5600 99.5%
How can we call the NT unreliable if it has more documents that are closer to its original construction than any other document? If we call the NT unreliable should we not also devalidate all of history? This little chart worries me becuase i dont have as much knowledge in new testament literature as i should.

[Kaiser01]

sorry about the chart. it was organizaed when i pasted it but when i posted it it got all jumbled up.

[mcdaddy]

It's reliable fiction.

I don't believe it was meant to be an account of history. I believe mark was written as fiction and Matt and Luke just copied, pasted and edited to suit there needs. John is obvious story telling.

[centauri]

Historically reliable???
The Gospel of Matthew (chap 27) claims that dead saints were resurrected and appeared to many people in Jerusalem.
This was an even bigger event than the resurrection of one man (aka Jesus) who conveniently didn't appear to anyone other than cult members.
Yet, not a word of these saints is confirmed by any other New Testament writer or any contemporary writers living at that time.
Contemporary writers would include Pliny the Elder and Philo of Alexandria.
These writers, particularly Philo who studied religions, mentioned nothing about the incredible mass resurrection and appearance, nor did they say one word about the allegedly famous "Jesus of Nazareth".

[HereticZero]

Big problem is the NT is a collection of COPIES, no original texts exist to support any 'historical' event. It is historical fiction. Accounts of the NT are not reliable nor are they true, especially the resurrection--unless you have historical proof Heyzus crawled out of his hole? The NT is written on the idea that the OT is true and without error, establishing the NT's credibility. First of all, the OT is not true and without error (unless you have personally witnessed talking snakes, unicorns, cockatrices, fauns, and satyrs, just to name a few mythological animals mentioned in the bible?) so that makes the NT just another book of mythology written after another book of mythology. Second, the prophet Jeremiah of the OT says everything is a bunch of lies written by corrupt scribes and priests ran the religion any way they chose to do so. Jeremiah expressed in no uncertain terms that god never gave the law to Moses concerning sacrifice for sins, and that makes the whole concept of Jesus as a 'perfect sacrifice™' a moot argument of no consequence, and certainly not historically true as a sacrifice.

[Thought2Much]

Just because the books contain some details that can be verified historically, such as Pontius Pilate being a prefect in Palestine during the first century, does not mean that everything within them is historically accurate.

Just because CSI: Las Vegas takes place in an actual city and at actual verifiable locations within that city does not mean that everything that happens on the show is real. Just because there was a U.S. President named Abraham Lincoln does not mean that he was actually a vampire hunter. Likewise, just because there might have actually been a heretical leader of a mystery cult named Jesus or Yeshua does not mean that the guy was the son of God and performed miracles. The story is little more than historical fiction.

[Vigile]

Carm?

Are you also looking at more rigorously researched sources like say Princeton Theological? You're basically getting your info from people who have already made up their minds and use a hammer to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together while holding the hammer behind their back when they present their findings.

[Akheia]

How can we call the NT unreliable if it has more documents that are closer to its original construction than any other document? If we call the NT unreliable should we not also devalidate all of history? This little chart worries me becuase i dont have as much knowledge in new testament literature as i should.

I hope by now you realize that there is a solid logical fallacy going on in your thinking as well as some flat-out error. The proximity of the Gospels to Jesus' putative lifetime has NOTHING to do with their veracity. The 1st century was a vibrant time of anal-retentive record-keeping, and strangely nothing there mentions Jesus. Also, much of the Gospels especially didn't hit final form until damn near the 3rd century.

The NT is unreliable not because of its proximity to Jesus' putative lifetime or its distance from it, but rather because none of the events in it have been corroborated by science or other extant record-keepers of the time. Some of the cities that were prominent in it haven't even been shown to exist, like Arimathea (where Joseph of Arimathea was supposed to be from), and the particulars around Jesus' birth have been solidly debunked--no worldwide census, for example, no Star of Bethlehem, and no slaughter of the innocents. The events around his death are likewise totally debunked--there were a wealth of historians around that time and not a single fucking one of them wrote a word about Jesus' miracles, trial, or execution, much less his arising from a tomb to show off a little more before heading into heaven. They are also strangely silent about the zombie uprising that one gospel writer insisted happened in Jerusalem. Not a word, not a nibble, not a peep out of the contemporary historians of the time. It's not like they didn't constantly refer to each others' notes--sometimes all we know of an ancient historian is what his BFFs and detractors wrote in response to his work--but weirdly, none of them, not a fucking one of them, wrote about Jesus at the time he supposedly lived and died or about anything Jesus said or did. There's *ONE* mention of Christianity in general, written decades after the putative death, but that, too, is not an eyewitness statement and is more of a "well, this is what I hear them saying" statement than proof of any kind.

This is all before you even start looking at the New Testament's wealth of contradictions and inconsistencies--check out this one about the birthplace of Jesus just to get a taste of how absolutely unreliable the NT is. Even the DC comics universe makes more sense than the New Testament.

The razor strikes true yet again here. The NT was a book of myths that grew around one of the *MANY* wizard-god-men running around Judea preaching the apocalypse and claiming to be divine. It was altered numerous times to fit the Old Testament's perceived "prophecies" and to suit the agendas of the men who were struggling to establish their religion in the world marketplace. The NT is not meant to be a history. It is meant to be a glorified Chick tract.

[ficino]

Hi Kaiser, those comparisons of the manuscript tradition of the NT and the manuscript traditions of various pagan authors often are brought up by Christian apologists. As Akheia said, it's a fallacious argument. (Valk, is it the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi?)

For example, I believe in Josh MacDowell the comparison is made between Julius Caesar's commentaries, the earliest manuscript of which is from somewhere in the 9th to 11th century AD, and the NT, which is transmitted in complete manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries and in papyrus scraps that are much older. But the number of later manuscripts is irrelevant to the accuracy of the oldest representative manuscript of an author, and the accuracy of the oldest manuscript does not depend on its proximity to the author's date but on the accuracy of that copyist and of the copyists earlier in the chain than he. the thing about the NT manuscript tradition is that there was a "market" for manuscripts of it far greater than any market for books of ancient pagan authors. Plus, there was no book burning of the NT once Christians came to power, unlike, say, the burning of books in the Serapaeum in Alexandria after Christians took it over from the followers of Platonism. So we expect that there would be huge numbers of NT manuscripts compared to those of pagan authors. That means there were many copyists of the NT, and many chances for error to creep in - as it does in a widely read author like Homer, in the manuscript tradition of whom there are very many variants. So, the fidelity of later copies to the original authors' autographs of the NT is not made more sure by the number of copies, and the centuries that separate the writing of the NT documents and the oldest complete manuscripts are still enough time for errors to have crept in. If you ever consult the variant readings printed at the bottom of the page of a Greek NT you'll see how many differences there are among manuscripts or manuscript families.

Akheia already pointed out that the fidelity of later copies to the supposed authors' autographs is a different issue from that of the historical accuracy of those authors' autograph writings.

[bornagainathiest]

Well Kaiser,

I'm no expert in ancient documents, but I can see one huge, glaring problem when it comes to comparing the NT with all the other texts.

I'm expected to believe that any supernatural stuff these other guys wrote about actually happened?

BAA.

[Kaiser01]

I wasnt trying to prove the NT to be true i was just asking for help on this matter of its number of documents.

Im well aware of all the historical errors like the Sanhedrin meating on Passover to deal with a prisoner, or that pontius pilot seems to need the jews to make a decision. My problem is, is was that, can we call any other history reliable if the most abundant and cross checked document wasn't.

[Kaiser01]

Thanks for the help guys.

[ficino]

Hi Kaiser, there are things in non-christian ancient sources that are doubted by historians, or that have been proved inaccurate. For one thing, there are lots of accounts of miracles attributed to pagan gods or other spiritual agents... same issues as with biblical miracles. then there is the issue of an ancient historian's bias (an issue with a historian of any era). There are problems with the ancient world's different notion of history vs. fiction than our notion. Problems with propagandizing motives affecting what is stated in ancient sources. Etc. etc. History is a discipline where many conclusions are simply the best we can do after sifting lots of evidence critically. But remember that the abundance of NT manuscripts is a different question from the historical reliability of the assertions made by the NT writers. If we had the original copy of the gospel of Matthew written by his own hand by the guy known as Matthew, we'd have as reliable a witness as possible to Matthew's original words. But the guarantee of the historical accuracy of his words is a different matter, and I think you'd agree that there is much in that gospel that cannot be true (for starters, it doesn't even agree with other gospels on many points).

[Akheia]

I think John Loftus, in his book about why he became an atheist, does a decent job of totally demolishing any pretense the Bible has of being historical or coherent. I cannot imagine, literally cannot imagine, any Christian tardbiscuit reading it and coming away still thinking anything in the Bible, anything at all, can be trusted. Had this book existed in the early 90s or even late 80s, a lot of my life would look a lot different right now. And he cites sources! But don't just take his word for it; once your eyes open, and you start questioning the Bible's lack of internal logic and its utter lack of corroboration by secondary sources, the rabbit hole just opens up under your feet.