He never ...

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when people testify about events they saw, they will often try to protect themselves or others by conveniently forgetting to mention details that are embarrassing or hard to explain, as a result, this raises uncertainty about the veracity of their entire testimony, did the gospel writers include any material that might be embarrassing, or did they cover it up to make themselves look good? did they report anything that would be uncomfortable or difficult for them to explain? there's actually quite a bit along those lines, there's a large body of Jesus' teachings called the hard sayings of Jesus, some of it is very ethically demanding, if I were inventing a religion to suit my fancy, I probably wouldn't tell myself to be as perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect, or define adultery to include lust in my heart, but there are demanding statements in other religions as well, which is why the more persuasive kind of hard sayings are those that could be embarrassing for what the church wanted to teach about Jesus, for instance, Mark 6:5 says that Jesus could do few miracles in Nazareth because the people there had little faith, which seems to limit Jesus' power, Jesus said in Mark 13:32 that he didn't know the day or the hour of his return, which seems to limit his omniscience, now, ultimately theology hasn't had a problem with these statements because Paul himself, in Phillippians 2:5-8, talks about God in Christ voluntarily and consciously limiting the independent exercise of his divine attributes, but if I felt free to play fast and loose with gospel history, it would be much more convenient to just leave out that material altogether, and then I wouldn't have to go through the hassle of explaining it, Jesus' baptism is another example, you can explain why Jesus, who was without sin, allowed himself to be baptized, but why not make things easier by leaving it out altogether? on the cross Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" ... it would have been in the self interest of the writers to omit that because it raises too many questions, Mark's perspective of Peter is pretty consistently unflattering, and he's the ringleader! the disciples repeatedly misunderstand Jesus, James and John want the places at Jesus' right and left hand, and he has to teach them hard lessons about servant leadership instead, they look like a bunch of self-serving, self-seeking, dull-witted people a lot of the time, now we already know that the gospel writers were selective; John's gospel ends by saying, somewhat hyperbolically, that the whole world couldn't contain all the information that could have been written about Jesus, so had they left some of this out, that in and of itself wouldn't necessarily have been seen as falsifying the story, but here's the point: if they didn't feel free to leave out stuff when it would have been convenient to do so, is it really plausible to believe that they outright added and fabricated material with no historical basis? I'd say not

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when the gospels mention people, places and events, do they check out to be correct in cases which they can be independently verified? often such corroboration is invaluable in assessing whether a writer has a commitment to accuracy, they do and the longer people explore this, the more the details get confirmed, within the last hundred years, archaeology has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references in the gospels, particularly the gospel of John - ironically, the one that's supposedly so suspect! now there are still some unresolved issues, and there have been times when archaeology has created new problems, but those are a tiny minority compared with the number of examples of corroboration, in addition, we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life, and when you stop to think that ancient historians for the most part dealt only with political rulers, emperors, kings, military battles, official religious people, and major philosophical movements, it's remarkable how much we can learn about Jesus and his followers even though they fit none of those categories at the time these historians were writing

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this test asks the question, were others present who would have contradicted or corrected the gospels if they had been distorted or false? in other words, do we see examples of contemporaries of Jesus complaining that the gospels were just plain wrong? many people had reasons for wanting to discredit this movement and would have done so if they could have simply told history better, yet look at what his opponents did say, in later Jewish writings Jesus is called a sorcerer who led Israel astray - which acknowledges that he really did work marvelous wonders, although the writers dispute the source of his power, this would've been a perfect opportunity to say something like, "the Christians will tell you he worked miracles, but we're here to tell you he didn't." yet that's the one thing we never see his opponents saying, instead they implicitly acknowledge that what the gospels wrote - that Jesus performed miracles - is true, could this Christian movement have taken root right there in Jerusalem - in the very area where Jesus had done much of his ministry, had been crucified, buried and resurrected - if people who knew him were aware that the disciples were exaggerating or distorting the things that he did? we have a picture of what was initially a very vulnerable and fragile movement that was being subjected to persecution, if critics could have attacked it on the basis that it was full of falsehoods or distortions, they would have, but that's exactly what we don't see

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the next assignment is clear: figure out whether these gospels have been reliably handed down to us over the centuries, how can we be sure that the texts we're reading today bear any resemblence to what was originally written in the first century? what's more, how do we know that the gospels are telling us the full story about Jesus? it's ironic: the bible considers it praiseworthy to have a faith that does not require evidence, remember how Jesus replied to Thomas: "You believe because you can see; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." evidence can never compel or coerce faith, we cannot supplant the role of the Holy Spirit, which is often a concern of Christians when they hear discussions of this kind, there are plenty of stories of scholars in the New Testament field who have not been Christians, yet through their study of these very issues have come to faith in Christ, and there have been countless more scholars, already believers, whose faith has been made stronger, more solid, more grounded, because of the evidence

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we know that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, if all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have any confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written? this isn't an issue that's unique to the bible; it's a question we can ask of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity, but what the New Testament has in it's favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived, why is that important? the more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross check them to figure out what the original document was like, the only way they'd agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts, what about the age of the documents? certainly that is important as well? this is something else that favors the New Testament, we have copies commencing within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in the case of other ancient texts, maybe five, eight or ten centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy, in addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time - into Latin, Syriac and Coptic, and beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic, and alot of others - Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety, how does that help? because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually produce the contents of the New Testament, in addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the new Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters and so forth from the early church fathers

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when we talk about a great multiplicity of manuscripts, how does that contrast with other ancient books that are routinely accepted by scholars as being reliable? consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about AD 116, his first 6 books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about AD 850, books 11-16 are in another manuscript dating from the 11th century, books 7-10 are lost, so there is a long gap between the time that Tacitus sought his information and wrote it down and the only existing copies, with regard to the 1st century historian Josephus, we have 9 Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War, and these copies were written in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, there is a Latin translation from the 4th century and medieval Russian materials from the 11th or 12th century, these numbers are suprising, there is but the thinnest thread of manuscripts connecting these ancient works to the modern world, by comparison, how many New Testament Greek manuscripts are in existence today? more than 5000 have been cataloged, is that unusual in the ancient world? what would the runner up be? the quantity of New Testament material is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity, next to the New Testament, the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer's Illiad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks, there are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of it today, some are quite fragmentary, they come down to us from the 2nd and 3rd century AD and following, when you consider that Homer composed his epic about 800 BC, you can see there's a very lengthy gap, in describing the New Testament manuscripts, the earliest fragments of papyrus, which was a writing material made from the papyrus plant that grew in the marshes of the Nile Delta in Egypt, there are now 99 fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one or more passages or books of the New Testament, the most significant to come to light are the Chester Beatty Biblical Papri, discovered about 1930, of these, Beatty Biblical Papyrus number 1 contains portions of the 4 gospels and the book of Acts, and it dates from the 3rd century, Papyrus number 2 contains large portions of eight letters of Paul, plus portions of Hebrews, dating to about the year 200, Papyrus number 3 has a sizable section of the book of Revelation, dating from the 3rd century, another group of important papyrus manuscripts was purchased by a Swiss bibliophile, M. Martin Bodmer, the earliest of these, dating from about 200, contains about 2/3 of the gospel of John, another papyrus, containing portions of the gospels of Luke and John, dates from the 3rd century, at this point, the gap between the writing of the biographies of Jesus and the earliest manuscripts was extremely small, but what is the oldest manuscript we possess? how close in time can we get to the original writings, which experts call "autographs"?

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of the entire New Testament, what is the earliest portion that we possess today? that would be a fragment of the gospel of John, containing material from chapter 18, it has 5 verses - 3 on one side, 2 on the other - and it measures about 2 and 1/2 x 3 and 1/2 inches, how was it discovered? it was purchased in Egypt as early as 1920, but it sat unnoticed for years among similar fragments of papri, then in 1934 C. H. Roberts of Saint John's College, Oxford, was sorting through the papri at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, he immediately recognized this as preserving a portion of John's gospel, he was able to date it from the style of the script, he concluded it originated between AD 100-150, lots of other prominent paleographers, like Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir Harold Bell, Adolf Deissmann, W. H. P. Hatch, Ulrich Wilcken, and others, have agreed at least to the reign of Emperor Trajan, which was AD 98-117, that was a stunning discovery, the reason: skeptical German theologians in the last century argued strenuously that the fourth gospel was not even composed until at least the year 160 - too distant from the events of Jesus' life to be of much historical use, they were able to influence generations of scholars, who scoffed at this gospel's reliability, here we have, at a very early date, a fragment of a copy of John all the way over in a community along the Nile River in Egypt, far from Ephesus in Asia Minor, where the gospel was probably originally composed, this finding has literally rewritten popular views of history, pushing the composition of John's gospel much closer to the days when Jesus walked the earth

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while papyrus manuscripts represent the earliest copies of the New Testament, there are also ancient copies written on parchment, which was made from skins of cattle, sheep, goats and antelope, we have what are called uncial manuscripts, which are written in all-capital Greek letters, today, we have 306 of these, several dating back as early as the 3rd century, the most important are Codex Sinaiticus, which is the only complete New Testament in uncial letters, and Codex Vaticanus, which is not quite complete, both date to about AD 350, a new style of writing, more cursive in nature, emerged in roughly AD 800, it's called miniscule, and we have 2,856 of these, then there are also lectionaries, which contain New Testament Scripture in the sequence it was to be read in the early churches at appropriate times during the year, a total of 2,403 of these have been cataloged, that puts the total of Greek manuscripts at 5,664, in addition to the Greek documents, there are thousands of other ancient New Testament manuscripts in other languages, there are 8,000-10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts, plus a total of 8,000 in Ethiopic, Slavic and Armenian, in all, there are about 24,000 manuscripts in existence, in terms of multiplicity of manuscripts and the time gap between the originals and our first copies, how does the New Testament stack up against other well-known works of antiquity? we can have great confidence in the fidelity with which this material has come down to us, especially compared with any other ancient literary work, there is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament, in no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament

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with the similarities in the way the Greek letters are written and with the primitive conditions under which scribes worked, it would seem inevitable that copying errors would creep into the text, eyeglasses weren't invented until 1373 in Venice, compounded by the fact that it was difficult under any circumstances to read faded manuscripts on which some of the ink had flaked away, and there were other hazards, inattentiveness on the part of the scribes, etc., so although the scribes were scrupulously careful, errors did creep in, but there are factors counteracting that, Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language, meaning it makes a big difference in English if you say, "dog bites man" or "man bites dog", sequence matters in English, but in Greek it doesn't, one word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence, consequently, the meaning of the sentence isn't distorted if the words are out of what we consider to be the right order, some variations among the manuscripts exist, but generally they're inconsequential variations like that, still the number of "variants" or differences among manuscripts was troubling, estimates as high as 200,000 of them, the number sounds big, but it's a bit misleading because of the way variants are counted, if a single word is misspelled in 2000 manuscripts, that's counted as 2000 variants, how many doctrines of the church are in jeopardy because of variants? none, the variations, when they occur, tend to be minor, rather than substantive and scholars work very carefully to try to resolve them by getting back to the original meaning, the New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book - a form that is 99.5% pure ...

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how did the early church leaders determine which books would be considered authoratative and which would be discarded? what criteria did they use in determining which documents would be included in the New Testament? basically, the early church had 3 criteria, first, the books must have apostolic authority - that is, they must have been written either by the apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of apostles, so in the case of Mark and Luke, while they weren't among the 12 disicples, early tradition has it that Mark was a helper of Peter, and Luke was an associate of Paul, second, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith, that is, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative? and third, there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large, what's remarkable is that even though the fringes of the canon remained unsettled for a while, there was actually a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament within 2 centuries, and this was true among very diverse congregations scattered over a wide area, so the 4 gospels we have in the New Testament today met those criteria, while others didn't? it was an example of "survival of the fittest", we can be confident that no other ancient books can compare with the New Testament in terms of importance for Christian history or doctrine, the other documents (the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Nativity of Mary) were written later than the 4 gospels, in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, even 6th century, long after Jesus, and they're generally quite banal (devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite), they carry names that are unrelated to their real authorship, on the other hand, the 4 gospels in the New Testament are readily accepted with remarkable unanimity as being authentic in the story they told