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Notes for work lecture next week
H.D. McDonald explains that God is considered the authority behind the New Testament. God has revealed himself, and therefore the revelation is a key to the Biblical authority. McDonald (1996: 139).
J.R. McRay notes that the earliest list of New Testament books with the current twenty-seven appeared in A.D. 367, in a letter to Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. McRay (1996: 141).
McRay explains that the formation of the New Testament canon did not come from a council. The council of Nicea in 325 did not discuss canon. McRay (1996: 141). At Carthage in 397 the council deemed the twenty-seven books canon, and that nothing else would be considered New Testament divine Scripture. These twenty-seven books were regarded by consensus as canon. McRay (1996: 141).
The New Testament canon can be traced to 397 AD.
W.R.F. Browning explains that canon comes from the Greek word for 'rule' or 'standard'. In both the Old and New Testaments canon formation was gradual and controversial. Browning (1996: 57). Browning notes some New Testament era books were quoted by Church Fathers, although the texts were not canonized. Browning (1996: 57). Jesus Christ's teachings and story was passed along in oral tradition and then eventually written down in the Four Gospels, and sidelined rival versions. Browning (1996: 57). The Epistles from Apostles and their scribes were preserved by the churches and soon formed a collection along with the Gospels. Browning (1996: 57).
Am I overly concerned that some inspired texts have been excluded from the New Testament canon?
No. The twenty-seven books contain the same basic Gospel and theology. Contrary texts have been weeded out by Church Fathers.
Even if an inspired text is missing from the canon, let us state, one of the apocrypha, and God has willingly allowed this, which I doubt, the current canon, along with the Hebrew Bible, provides correct history and teaching concerning the Old Testament, the Gospel, primary theological issues, and in my view, many secondary theological issues. But, admittedly there could be debate on potential canonicity, especially in some non-Protestant movements within Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox. It is an evangelical belief of many that there can be the canon as is 27 New Testament books and 39 Old Testament books, but the Bible itself does not state how many Biblical books there are in existence.
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Religion facts.com
Religion facts.com: New Testament Manuscripts
I originally cited from an earlier version. This article was offline for a while, but I see has now been republished as of 2015.
Cited
The New Testament plays a very central role in Christianity. For most Christians, the New Testament is not only a precious record of the life of Jesus Christ and the apostles, but a divine revelation to mankind on matters of salvation. Christians of all denominations look to the Bible as their primary authority in determining doctrine, ethics, church structure, and all other religious issues.
This strong reliance on the New Testament is based in part on the religious belief that it was divinely inspired. But it also based on the belief that it is an accurate historical record written by men who experienced the lives of Jesus and the apostles firsthand. But some have challenged this traditional view, arguing that it was written much later, long after Jesus' original followers were dead and Christianity had transformed into a different religion than the one taught by Jesus of Nazareth.
The debate really comes down to the question: When was the New Testament written? And this question leads to another important question: Even if it was written at an early date, how do we know the New Testament that exists today is the same as the original? How do we know the modern translations aren't full of human errors, additional content, or the interpretations of countless human scribes?
Both of these questions are answered within the fields of paleography and textual criticism, which seek to analyze ancient manuscripts of the New Testament to determine their date and accuracy. The article that follows provides an overview of the most important New Testament manuscripts that have been discovered and outlines the process used to analyze those manuscripts. ---
No original manuscripts of the original Greek New Testament have been found. However, a large number of ancient manuscript copies have been discovered, and modern translations of the New Testament are based on these copies. As one would expect, they contain some scribal errors. In fact, "there is not a single copy wholly free from mistakes." {1} That said, the variances are theologically inconsequential and the vast majority don't affect translation. It is the task of textual criticism, therefore, to study and compare the available manuscripts in order to discern which of the variations conforms the closest to the original. Bruce Metzger of Princeton University, a prominent modern textual critic, describes the role of textual criticism this way:
The necessity of applying textual criticism to the books of the New Testament arises from two circumstances: (a) none of the original documents is extant, and (b) the existing copies differ from one another.
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Fortunately, textual critics and paleographers have a large number of ancient manuscripts at their disposal, many of which have been found within the last century. Nearly the entire New Testament exists in manuscripts dated to before 300 AD. Other important manuscripts date to the fourth and fifth centuries. The manuscripts dating from 100 to 300 AD are almost entirely papyrus fragments. These fragments are named with a "P" followed by a number. The vast majority of them were found in Egypt in the twentieth century, and are now kept in various museums and libraries throughout the world, including at Dublin, Ann Arbor, Cologny (Switzerland), the Vatican and Vienna.
The earliest manuscript of the New Testament was discovered about 50 years ago. P52 is a small papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John (18:31-33 on the front; 18:37-38 on the back), and it has been dated to about 125 AD. This makes it a very important little manuscript, because John has been almost unanimously held by scholars to be the latest of the four gospels. So if copies of John were in circulation by 125, the others must have been written considerably earlier. Moreover, the Gospel of John's greater theological development when compared with the other three gospels has led some scholars to conclude it was written as late as 120 or even 150 AD. The P52 fragment seems to make such late dates impossible. {4}
In addition to the early papyrus fragments, a large number of parchment manuscripts have been found that date from 300 CE onward. These are usually named for the place in which they were discovered and are abbreviated by a letter or sometimes a number. The manuscripts A/02 (Codex Alexandrinus), B/03 (Codex Vaticanus), and Sin./01 (Codex Sinaiticus) contain nearly complete sets of the New Testament. By comparing these to the earlier papyrus fragments, they have been shown to be quite reliable.
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From the original article I cited:
British Museum Pamphlet on the Codex Sinaiticus Philip W. Comfort, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts. C.C. Edgar, Select Papyri.
Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (1992). Full text is available online at Questia Online Library.
Bruce M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Paleography. E.G. Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (1987).
G. Cavallo & H. Maehler, Greek bookhands of the early Byzantine period, A.D. 300-800 (1987). Leighton Reynolds, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature.
C.H. Roberts, Greek Literary Hands (1956). On the dating of manuscripts with the aid of contemporary documents.
J. Finegan, Encountering New Testament Manuscripts: A Working Introduction to Textual Criticism (1974).
W.H.P. Hatch, The Principal Uncial Manuscripts of the New Testament (1939). H.J.M. Milne &
T.C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (1938).
D.C. Parker, Codex Bezae: An Early Christian Manuscript and its Text (1992). On the idiosyncratic manuscript
D. C.H. Roberts, Manuscript Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt (1979).
G. Zuntz, The Text of the Epistles (1956): on P46.
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The divine inspiration of Scripture was noted as important. God revealed the Gospel message. The New Testament is not full of mythological stories of clearly fictional characters, but actual people that existed. Some of these received revelation from God, and some knew Christ personally. The same group of people discussed within the New Testament, is also the group that produced the Scripture, and therefore New Testament is historically grounded on eyewitness testimony, and associates of eyewitnesses.
Since every manuscript contains scribal errors, we can conclude the copies are not equal to the original inspired letters. This does not mean that we have to abandon the Biblical idea of inspired Scripture. I hold to the concept of 2 Timothy 3:16 that all Scripture is inspired by God for teaching, and training. Scribal errors do not equate with theological errors, and therefore they do not eradicate or change the New Testament’s essential doctrines.
There are enough New Testament documents extant that scholars would know if certain schools of manuscripts contained serious differences in theology from other schools. This is why as Christians we do not need to take seriously the claims of critics that state that lost or hidden New Testament era documents from the group of eyewitnesses contradict the ones found in the New Testament. The manuscript evidence supports the fact that there are scribal errors in the documents, but does not support the idea of major theological differences between different groups of manuscripts.
My theory of inspiration would include the idea that God inspired the original New Testament documents written by those within the group of Christ and the Apostles. Since the documents would eventually physically disintegrate, God would have to use supernatural means to maintain the original documents. The idea of God using some kind of supernatural force field to maintain the documents as good as new does not seem in line with how God works in our world over a long period. God allowed the originals to be destroyed or lost, and instead maintained his Scripture through copying.
God does not primarily maintain Christian faith, by the use of continual supernatural means in preserving Scripture miraculously. Let us not add unnecessarily to orthodoxy through views of inspiration of Scripture that are not supported by that Scripture and reasonable theology.
BROWNING, W.R.F. (1997) Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
MCDONALD, H.D. (1996) ‘Bible, Authority of', in Walter A. Elwell (ed.), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Grand Rapids, Baker Books.
MCRAY, J.R. (1996) ‘Bible, Canon of', in Walter A. Elwell (ed.), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Grand Rapids, Baker Books.
