2016-04-04

Little White Lies: Is the NT the Best Attested Work from Antiquity?

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by Tim Widowfield

Frederick Fyvie Bruce
Frederick Fyvie Bruce

What does it mean to say that a written work from ancient times is “well attested”? If you browse Christian apologetic web sites, you’ll read that the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is superior to anything else from antiquity. The Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry (CARM) site, for example, tells us that our “New Testament documents are better preserved and more numerous than any other ancient writings.”

This argument, of course, is not new. F. F. Bruce often argued that we hold the NT to an unreasonably higher standard than any other ancient document or set of documents. He lamented that people tend to dwell on the mistakes and discrepancies in the manuscripts. Back in 1963 he wrote:

In view of the inevitable accumulation of such errors over the many centuries, it may be thought that the original texts of the New Testament documents have been corrupted beyond restoration. Some writers, indeed, insist on the likelihood of this to such a degree that one sometimes suspects they would be glad if it were true. But they are mistaken. There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament. (F. F. Bruce, 1963, p. 178, emphasis mine)

As you can see, apologetic victimhood is nothing new.

Ever so much greater

In a more recent work he said that the NT gets unfair treatment. He complained:

The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt. (F. F. Bruce, 1981, p. 10, emphasis mine)

In the foreword to the same book, N. T. Wright gushed:

Yes, we can trust the New Testament. For a start, the documents themselves — the manuscripts from which our knowledge of the New Testament comes — are in far, far better shape than the manuscripts of any other work from the ancient world, by a very long way. Think of the great classical authors — Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace, or whoever — and you’ll find that our knowledge of them rests on a small number of very late manuscripts, often as much as a thousand years after the author’s day. Examine the New Testament, and you’ll find that our knowledge of it rests on a very large number of manuscripts, several hundred in fact, which go back as far, in some cases, as the early second century, less than a hundred years after the books were first written. There is better evidence for the New Testament than for any other ancient book. (N.T. Wright, 1981, p. ix-x, emphasis mine)

And while Bart Ehrman is generally more skeptical and (blush!) an admitted agnostic, apologist authors love to quote him when it suits their purposes. For example:

We currently know of nearly 5,400 Greek copies of all or part of the New Testament, ranging from tiny scraps of a verse or two that could fit in the palm of your hand to massive tomes containing all twenty-seven books bound together. These copies range in date, roughly, from the second century down to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. As a result, the New Testament is preserved in far more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity. There are, for example, fewer than 700 copies of Homer’s Iliad, fewer than 350 copies of the plays of Euripides, and only one copy of the first six books of the Annals of Tacitus. (Ehrman,  2000, p. 443)

Such emphatic words, such impressive numbers! They astonish and comfort the lay reading public, which is exactly their intention. Breathless believers will cherry-pick and memorize these factoids, and then repeat them back to you. For the hardcore apologist they represent “solid proof” that the NT is reliable, and (obviously) the Word of God.

Why so many?

Not many will stop and wonder why so many New Testament manuscripts have survived. If they did, they might begin to question whether all that excitement is warranted.

The reverse side of Papyrus 37, a New Testamen...
The reverse side of Papyrus 37, a New Testament manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew. Most likely originated in Egypt. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

♦ But it’s a dry heat

First of all, we’re fortunate that Christianity gained an early foothold in Egypt. That dry climate preserved papyrus much longer than in Palestine, Asia Minor, or Europe.

♦ Hey! Make me a copy, too!

Since believers used the works of the NT for liturgical purposes, each church naturally wanted its own copy of whatever was available. That probably included partial collections — Paul’s letters, the four gospels, perhaps even primitive lectionaries. And they didn’t use their scriptures solely for worship. According to some scholars, the codex caught on among Christians because the format let them search more quickly and “bookmark” their proof texts. They used them.

♦ Wear and tear.

Of course, high demand wasn’t the only reason for the large number of manuscripts. Under heavy use, papyri wore out and had to be replaced. Unlike a copy of a play by Euripides, a community’s manuscript of the gospel of Matthew would suffer from constant handling. As they deteriorated, they had to be recopied.

In short, we have so many extant full and fragmentary manuscripts of NT texts because (1) a huge number existed originally and (2) many of them were in Egypt, where they didn’t rot away. If Ehrman’s estimate of 5,400 is correct, then many thousands more must have existed that were lost or destroyed, or that disintegrated into dust.

Is more always better?

Scholars continually tell us that no work from ancient times has as many copies or bits of copies as the NT. We can’t deny that. But there’s more to “good” attestation than sheer numbers.

♦ Good news and bad news

While fate gives with one hand, she takes with the other. Continual recopying and constant spread inevitably led to changes and mistakes. We could liken it to mutations in living organisms. While NT manuscripts were spreading like fruit flies and mutating with each generation, the writings of Livy remained safe and sound in the libraries of major cities.

♦ Not all scribes are created equal

If you take some time to learn about the manuscripts of NT works, you’ll see that many of them were written by scribes that were marginally capable at best. The scribes who wrote the Codex Sinaiticus had steady, well-trained hands. One of them was particularly good, possibly a “senior copyist.” But the amateur scribes responsible for some earlier manuscripts wrote with heavy, clumsy strokes, as if they were drawing each letter.

The fact that many early scribes weren’t fully up to the task shouldn’t surprise us. Functional literacy was rare in the first few centuries of the Common Era, and scribal literacy was rarer still. In some quarters, the mere ability to write your own name put you in a rarefied category. In smaller towns and in poor areas, true scribal literacy did not exist.

♦ Good attestation should include provenance

The Codex Sinaiticus, by the way, is a world treasure, and having it available on line so that ordinary people like us can read it is privilege we never would have imagined just 30 years ago. But despite its fantastic value and importance to the history of the New Testament, you should know that we have no idea where it was written. Most scholars date it to sometime in the fourth century. Exactly when? We don’t know. Who wrote it? We’re not sure. And how the parchment ended up in a monastery in the Sinai remains a mystery.

We don’t know much about earlier papyrus manuscripts, either. For example, we don’t know where the Chester Beatty Papyri came from. By that, I mean we don’t know who found them, where, or when. If we’re lucky, we might have some idea where an ancient manuscript was purchased (or liberated), but often we have no clue. Even then we frequently know nothing else about the provenance of early New Testament manuscripts.

The elephant in the scriptorium

While early fragments of Mark were turning to dust, Marcion’s gospel was being converted into ash.

Unfortunately, dogma played a huge role in what survived and what didn’t.

♦ Heretical works rarely survive

As I’ve said, the books we do have survived because they were needed, and so they were copied. But they had one more thing going for them: Orthodox Christians weren’t actively seeking to destroy them. We don’t have a copy of Marcion’s gospel, and we probably never will, because Marcion’s beliefs conflicted with the faction of Christianity that prevailed. While early fragments of Mark were turning to dust, Marcion’s gospel was being converted into ash.

Despite Bruce’s petulant comment about skeptical writers being “glad” that the NT is beyond restoration, I would love it if we found a copy of Marcion’s collection of Paul’s letters. Hell, I’d be ecstatic if a fragment of Marcion’s version of Galatians magically appeared. Imagine how much we would learn about the transmission of the Pauline canon.

♦ The custody problem

Speaking of Marcion, we know that he as well as other Gnostics revered Paul’s works and maintained copies for decades. When the Orthodox Christians took over Paul’s letters from the Gnostics they naturally felt the urge to “correct” anything the heretics might have changed. In other words, they had license to alter the text to conform to what they believed were the correct teachings of Paul. As they told the story, of course, they were simply adding back parts that Marcion had chopped out.

It becomes clear to anyone studying the early years of Christianity that the farther back we look, the more diversity in belief we find. In addition, we discover that orthodoxy, as it emerged in Constantine’s reign, does not represent a particular strain of Christianity that arose from the beginning, but rather represents the fusion of several different ideas. Some of those concepts, such as the doctrine of the trinity and the nature of Christ, are nonsensical and self-contradictory, but Christians came to embrace them as transcendent mysteries.

♦ The time gap

NT Scholars enjoy telling us that very little time transpired between the dates the original authors wrote their documents and the point at which we first find manuscripts of those writings. As we saw above, N. T. Wright claims we have manuscripts from the early second century, which would mean our gap of silence lasted less than a hundred years. But we have to remember that Wright is a Christian apologist, given to hyperbole. In “Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Dates,” Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse examine the earliest NT manuscripts the way any other work would be evaluated, and they concluded:

Our palaeographical investigation of Biblical papyri has shown that the early dates proposed by some NT scholars are not based on a careful study of the relevant scripts within the more general context of the development of Greek literary hands, but rather on the wish to find early examples of the Gospels among the papyri. There are no first century New Testament papyri and only very few can be attributed to the second century (𝔓52, 𝔓90, 𝔓104, probably all the second half of the century) or somewhere between the late second and early third centuries (𝔓30, 𝔓64+67+4, 0171, 0212). Biblical scholars should realise that some of the dates proposed by some of their colleagues are not acceptable to Greek palaeographers and papyrologists. (Orsini & Clarysse, 2012, p. 466, emphasis mine)

We should note as well that, as the authors point out, “The date of the earliest New Testament papyri is nearly always based on palaeographical criteria.” Unfortunately, as any expert in manuscripts will tell you, palaeography is the least reliable method for dating a manuscript. Remember that when you see date ranges of 25 years. That’s wishful thinking.

Other criteria for “good” attestation

Rather than a liturgical text, this manuscript of the Iliad is a scholarly text written by scholars for scholars.
Venetus A
Venetus A

Homeric scholars date the Venetus A manuscript back to the 900s CE, many centuries after the Iliad first appeared on the page. The gap is huge. And yet this manuscript (now referred to as Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [=822]) is considered the best version of the Iliad we have. NT scholars rightly point out that we have precious few examples of Homeric texts from antiquity. In fact, we would more properly call Venetus A a medieval text.

Still, in my humble, nonprofessional view, Venetus A easily beats Codex Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus, because it contains not only the text of the Iliad, but a number of annotations and commentaries by important Greco-Roman scholars from the late Roman Republic and early Principate. Simply put, Venetus A has value because of its content, provenance, and pedigree. It is a library-quality manuscript copied from library-quality manuscripts. Modern scholars believe that the text accurately reflects material from the Royal Library at Alexandria.

NT scholars emphasize the criteria of antiquity and proliferation, because, frankly, that’s all they’ve got. In the wider world of ancient history, scholars value other criteria as well: provenance, quality of workmanship, corroboration with other texts, and scholia. In addition, Venetus A contains evidence of known variations in the text:

On the Venetus A the D Scholia appear as interlinear notes written in a semiuncial script, and are largely “glosses,” short definitions, of words in the poems. One of the most interesting aspects of the D Scholia is their lemmata, the Homeric passages that a scholion may quote before commenting. In many cases, these lemmata do not match the Homeric text that appears on the manuscript. Thus, these scholia may offer insights into alternative versions of the text, other examples of traditional material that fell out of the common text of the Iliad by the ninth century, but are preserved here and there in brief quotations by the scholiasts, the writers of these marginal notes. (Blackwell and Dué, 2009, p. 8, emphasis mine)

These variations may go back to alternate oral renditions of the poem, thus providing the sort of insight no New Testament manuscript can or likely ever will give us.

In addition, we have no reason to suspect that the scribes who created Venetus A changed the text for religious purposes. Rather than a liturgical text, this manuscript of the Iliad is a scholarly text written by scholars for scholars.

Conclusion

When NT scholars tell us over and over that the New Testament is better attested than any other work from antiquity, they’re mainly talking about numbers of papyri and parchments. They gloss over several serious problems with those many manuscripts, including:

  • Corruption, owing to religious zeal (deliberate additions and deletions)
  • Variation, due to high turnover
  • Mistakes, thanks to mediocre scribes
  • Ignorance, caused by a lack of provenance (who, where, when, why?)

Exuberant confidence in the text of the New Testament depends on an array of little white lies of omission.

On the other hand, real ancient historians value manuscripts using other criteria. Essentially, they value quality over quantity. They certainly would wish for more, but so would NT scholars. So would we all. But if we were honest, we’d admit we don’t really need another scrap like 𝔓52. As far as NT manuscripts go, we’d give anything to have a document approaching the quality of Venetus A.


Blackwell, Christopher and Dué, Casey 

Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, edited by Casey Dué, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009

Bruce, F. F.

The Books and the Parchments, Fleming H. Revell, 1965

The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, InterVarsity Press, 2003

Ehrman, Bart D.

The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, Oxford University Press, 2004

Wright, N. T.

“Foreword,” The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable, F. F. Bruce, InterVarsity Press, 2003

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Tim Widowfield

Tim is a retired vagabond who lives with his wife and multiple cats in a 20-year-old motor home. To read more about Tim, see our About page.


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25 thoughts on “Little White Lies: Is the NT the Best Attested Work from Antiquity?”

  1. Your post would be far more interesting if your anti-Christian bias wasn’t so obvious. Hate to disappoint you, but nothing you wrote is at all troubling to well-read and informed Christian.

    1. Hello, Sue.

      My bias is not specifically anti-Christian; it is anti-supernatural. I am unequivocally, unabashedly anti-supernatural. There is the natural world. There is matter, and there is energy. And that is it. I have no use for the nonsense of any religion or “spirituality.”

      If you are uncomfortable with that position, you should go elsewhere. I have no interest in trying to change your mind or convince you of anything you disagree with. I don’t care what you believe. I simply do not care.

      At the same time, I have no wish to trouble you. So, I would recommend that you and any supposedly “well-read and informed Christian” go elsewhere. You will find no comfort here. Almost anywhere else in the known universe you will find people who will coddle you and your iron-age beliefs. They will equivocate. They will watch what they say. They will bend over backwards not offend your delicate sensibilities.

      But not here. Not on Vridar.

      1. Dear Tim,

        I think you should care when someone like this interacts with Vridar. As someone who has been rescued from fundamentalism I am so glad that I wasn’t told to go elsewhere. I wouldn’t eject a mentally ill patient out of my medical practice. Irrational religious belief is on a spectrum and it can produce some pretty nasty results in the sufferers. Frequently they have been brainwashed as children. You are lucky enough that the big bang has aligned your atoms so you can see that they “know not what they do”. I am not saying that you should waste the rest of your life countering rude christian apologetics but I thought you post lacked compassion for a fellow human being. Be interested in thoughts?

        1. Sue didn’t comment in order to court help with her delusion. There is a difference.

          Had she been inquisitive, Tim’s reply may have been a bit curt, but a troll is a troll.

    2. Perhaps it would helpful to address the actual arguments instead of the person behind them. In that way other readers may be able to understand your position better.
      Just because someone is “anti-something” does not mean their arguments are invalid. If time constraints don’t allow for a personal rebuttal, perhaps you could recommend one or two sources you think worthwhile? Thanks.

      1. TDA, his entire article addressed her “actual” arguments. What more should he have written to address them? I think he responded to Sue’s dismissive and condescending attack on his article.

        1. Dear Tom,

          My comment only makes sense with regards to Sue’s comment. Moreover it is a direct reply thus added on to her comment. Hope it is clearer for you now.

  2. Tim thanks for the education. This seems like a cogent and helpful answer to the “quantity” attestation claim. I’ve often wondered if the emergence of the present “orthodox” Mormon writings from their very early writings would have an instructive analogue to the early Christian texts. The difference is the Mormons embarrassingly saved (out of sight) their early writings. The further back you look the more diversity in belief is found within both faiths.

  3. Dear Sue, if nothing he wrote is at all troubling top well-read and informed Christians how does it exhibit an anti-Christian bias?

    Was some rock disturbed?

  4. “if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt”.

    Yes, if the documents did not contain hundreds of totally impossible claims, they would be a lot more credible. What’s his point?

  5. From the N.T. Wright school of dating manuscripts:

    1. Find a postage stamp-sized piece of John dated paleographically between the 2nd and 4th centuries.
    2. Assume it dates to the 2nd century.
    3. Assume it actually came from John.
    4. Declare that we have NT “manuscripts” going all the way back to the 2nd century.

    Truth be damned, apologists can make the evidence way whatever they want.

  6. “in some cases, as the early second century, less than a hundred years after the books were first written.”

    How do we know when the books were first written? All the dates are just guesses.
    These alleged early second century manuscripts might be the original texts in the author’s own handwriting.
    Alternatively, they might be versions of a story that was first written in 54BC, with a few extra details thrown in to bring it up to 33AD.

  7. “palaeography is the least reliable method for dating a manuscript. Remember that when you see date ranges of 25 years.”

    My mother lived for 100 years. Her handwriting hardly changed at all during most of that time. If you saw the phrase “Manchester was bombed” you could not tell from her writing whether this was German bombing in 1941 or IRA bombing in 1996. That’s a 55 year gap to play with.

    A trained scribe would be likely to follow the style he was taught by an older scribe, who followed what he was taught by an even older scribe. And stick to the Alexandrian way. None of this new-fangled Athenian stuff.

  8. And however many times, and however carefully it is copied, fiction is still fiction. There are hundreds of thousands of copies of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”.

    (We know that it can’t be a true story because there are lots of copies of a variant, evil, heretical, version called “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”.)

  9. The following comments make an excellent point

    > ♦ Good attestation should include provenance
    > The Codex Sinaiticus … despite its fantastic value and importance to the history of the New Testament, you should know that we have no idea where it was written. Most scholars date it to sometime in the fourth century. Exactly when? We don’t know. Who wrote it? We’re not sure. And how the parchment ended up in a monastery in the Sinai remains a mystery.

    Not really a mystery any more. The actual evidence points to Sinaiticus being written in Mt. Athos c. 1840 and sent to Constaninople and then Sinai, “just-in-time” to be a too-good-to-be-true find by Tischendorf. The reason “Sinaiticus” was not discovered by earlier adventurers to Sinai, and was not in any Catherine’s catalogue, is quite simple. The ms did not exist before 1840.

    This has been especially easy to see since the 2009 Codex Sinaiticus Project, combined with other media like the BBC special, laid bare the huge anomalies that are only explained by a recent production, and that fit like a “T” with the claimed production by Simonides and the observation that the ms. was coloured and tampered in the 1850s. The part that left Sinai before the tampering, the Leipzig 43 leaves, remains a beautiful, pristine white parchment even today. Parchment yellows with age and use, of which Sinaiticus is supposed to have gobs. Yet Leipzig forgot to yellow. Bridge and bogus mss for sale.

    Steven Avery
    Dutchess County, NY

  10. Perhaps the Bible is held to a higher standard than other ancient works and if they had this level of documentation no one would question them.
    But even if this is the case, if someone points to one of these documents and says we don’t where or when it was written, how often it had been copied or how close it was to the original, the response is going to be “of course” rather than try to argue that if we look 500 years later we have hundreds of documents so the earlier ones are somehow made more reliable.
    It’s a bit like the arguments for Jesus historicity. If it was true that we accept as real other figures with just as poor evidence, that just means we need to be more cautious with them, not that we should lower our standards so they match the religious belief ones.

    1. If it was true that we accept as real other figures with just as poor evidence

      Just as a side note to your comment, as far as I am aware there are very few, if any, figures universally accepted “as real” by ancient historians where the evidence is just as inadequate for historicity. Can you think of exceptions?

      1. Delayed reply, I must have missed the notification
        I’m not a historian, but I can’t. Socrates is one that is suggested, but it seems the evidence for his existence is somewhat stronger than Jesus. I’m also aware there are arguments that Homer didn’t exist, but I don’t know how commonly held they are, or what the actual evidence is.
        I have seen the argument from historicists that we do accept other figures as being definitely historical with less evidence than Jesus. I should probably try and get some examples next time I see such an argument

        1. I have seen the argument from historicists that we do accept other figures as being definitely historical with less evidence than Jesus.

          Indeed. Many say that and sometimes they will cite a historical figure as if to prove it, but each time they have done so it is clear to anyone with knowledge of the sources that their examples are false, that we do indeed have much stronger evidence for the existence of those examples.

    1. Do you have examples of this? To the best of my knowledge, no one referenced the gospels until around 170-180AD, though perhaps 30 years earlier there were some references to scriptures/gospels that are probably similar to what we have now
      I did a brief search to see if I could find this, and found one claim that Clement had referenced the gospels, and indeed, he does say things that are similar to what the gospels have two or three times, but do you know of others?
      What would this tell is anyway? That Clement was familiar with Mathew and quoted him, or that Mathew and Clement had both drawn on oral tradition? And if Clement was quoting Mathew, does it tell us anything other than there were copies in circulation at the time Clement wrote his letter

      1. You are correct from what I can remember. Although Justin Martyr, for example, sometimes appears to quote passages that are in our canonical gospels he does not actually say that he is quoting the gospel sources as we know them. The possibility is left open that later evangelists took over “free-floating” catch-phrases or elements of earlier works now lost that the earliest “fathers” were citing.

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