createdtoworship
In the grip of grace
- Mar 13, 2004
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I agree it's a method, now will you accept my method as well? Or do you only like to use your preconcieved ideas without openness to debate?
look up sanders bibliographical test (I spelled it wrong before)
here is something to bring us up to speed on it:
from http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmc6/Historical_Reliability_of_the_Bible.pdf
"There are several ways to approach this but I am going to go through 2 tests set up by military historian C. Sanders: the bibliographic test and the internal evidence test. There are other tests and topics I can talk about here but for times sake I am only going through these two.
The Bibliographic Test
The Bibliographic Test examines the textual transmission of an ancient text. We do not have the original manuscript of any book of the New Testament, so historians must be careful in assessing how close to the original text are our manuscript copies. In other words, when we pick up a New Testament today, are we reading the same words that the original authors wrote down?
Textual critics look for several things to do their job. The number of manuscripts (a larger number is always better), and their date; the earlier, the better. The New Testament passes this test better than any other body of ancient literature. We have roughly 5,700 Greek New Testament manuscripts with the earliest fragment dating to about 125 AD and large portions of the gospels found as early as 200 AD.
In addition to the Greek manuscripts, if you count other fairly early manuscripts written in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, etc. we have about 20,000 manuscripts. Even without any of these manuscripts, Dr. Bruce Metzger, the worlds top New Testament manuscript expert from Princeton, states that we could still reproduce the texts of the New Testament from the quotations found in the early church fathers.
To compare these numbers to other ancient works is just embarrassing. The next best is the Iliad with about 640 manuscripts, and the earliest fragments come from the 3rd century A.D., thats a gap of almost 1,000 years! The history of Thucydides written in the 5th century BC is available from only 8 manuscripts and they dont exist until 900 AD, 1300 years after! Aristotle wrote his poetics in 343 BC but we dont find a manuscript until 1400 years later and yet the information in these works is rarely doubted.
Dr. Craig Blomberg of the Denver Theological Seminary goes as far to say that the Greek New Testament is 97-99% accurate."
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