You have at your fingertips access to an English translation that is based exclusively on a small number of very late (and theoretically most “corrupt”) Greek manuscripts: the King James Bible. You can perform this experiment yourself with English Bibles. You, however, don’t have to take my word for it. And make no mistake, scholars have been doing this sort of examination for a long time, and no one has found any conclusive evidence that such a corruption has occurred. You may think that it would take a great deal of scholarly ability to do an examination like this. It is also important to remember that we are not simply looking for changes in manuscripts-the manuscripts of the New Testament do not all look perfectly alike for a variety of reasons we have already discussed we are looking for changes from one manuscript to another that corrupt the meaning of the New Testament. Since we have so many ancient manuscripts of the New Testament across so many centuries, this task is easier than it sounds. In order to reach the conclusion that the New Testament had been changed to say something it did not originally say, we would have to look for two kinds of evidences:įirst, we would compare the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament to later manuscripts of the New Testament to see if we can find evidence that changes were made. If you will permit me a bit of latitude in this post, I will endeavor to tackle some of the more common issues with regard to the alleged intentional corruption of the New Testament. This is an involved discussion, as you can imagine, and it is one that cannot be settled within the confines of textual criticism alone. Thus, they claim, the New Testament we have today is not reliable, because it has been altered to say something it did not originally say. The New Testament, they argue, was altered (corrupted) to reflect this new belief. There are those, for example, who claim that the earliest Christians did not believe that Jesus was God in the flesh and that such a belief came along much later in the life of the Church. What we did not do last month was address concerns that some people have about whether or not the New Testament was intentionally corrupted to make it say something that it did not originally say. We have an extremely robust manuscript tradition for a document as ancient as the New Testament, and those manuscripts contain relatively few significant errors of copying-certainly nothing to raise concern about whether or not we know what the original documents of the New Testament actually said. I hope I persuaded you that the facts really do work in favor of the reliability of the New Testament. Last month we tackled the question of the accidental corruption of the New Testament through the process of copying across the centuries. Part 4 entitled “What to Think about Manuscripts, Texts, and Variations” will be out next month. Part 1 can be found HERE, and Part 2 can be found HERE.
#Criticism of the testament of mary series#
This is the third in a series of posts on Textual Criticism of the New Testament and the Church that will run through 2016 and into 2017.
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