This page is divided into 3 part sections so they can fit into Yahoo Clubs message posting character limit.
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This club's welcome message located at the main entry page to this club, asks the question if the Bible would stand up to scientific scrutiny.
I would ask/challenge this ... who in this club, from among the founders and those who feel the quran is the truth and doubt the Bible, has ever taken a SCIENTIFIC "research" approach to the Bible?
Have you 1) followed the research of those archeologists that have unearthed such findings as the Dead Sea Scrolls, have you done any of your own research into the thousands of manuscripts that have been in existence since the 4th century?
or B) have you read and duplicated information from other anti-Christian Muslim websites that spew out falsehoods about "contradictions" and show these as "proofs" (or as I like to call them SPrOOFS) of corruption ...
as for these alleged proofs, does it make ANY sense, to any reasonable rational logical thinker that if a document contains errors, that these errors somehow prove "changes" (or corruptions) .. don't you think that any "corruption" that is ALLEGEDLY been done, would have CORRECTED any errors???????
Furthermore, to go back to point 1 from above. Let's take a look and compare the Bible with other publications that people have taken for granted and would never dare propose that these documents were altered or otherwise tampered with
In the book "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" Josh McDowell quotes Bruce Metzger's "The Text of the New Testament"
(my quote is from McDowell's book, which is quoting these other authors works)
p.40
Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, who was the director and principal librarian of the British Museum and second to none in authority for issuing statements about MSS (# of manuscripts), says, "... besides number, the manuscripts of the New Testament differ from those of the classical authors, and this time the difference is clear gain. In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so sshort as in that of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament were written in the latter part of the first century; the earliest exant manuscripts (trifling scraps excepted) are of the fourth century - say from 250 to 300 years later.
"This may sound a considerable interval, but it is nothing to that which parts most of the great classical authors from the earliest manuscripts. We believe that we have in all essentials an accurate text of the seven extant plays of Sophocles; yet the earliest substantial manuscript upon which it is based was written more than 1400 years after the poet's death"
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(other quotes taken from McDowell's book)
p.41
J.HaroldGreenless states,"... the number of avilable MSS of the New Testament is overwhelmingly greater than those of any other work of ancient literature. In the thrid place, the earliest extant MSS of the N.T. were written much closer to the date of the original writing than is the case in almost any other piece of ancient literature."
...
"F.F.Bruce in "The New Testament Documents" vividly pictures the comparison between the New Testament and ancient historical writings:"Perhaps we can appreciate how wealthy the New Testament is in manuscript attestation if we compare the textual material for other ancient historical works. For Ceaser's Gallic Wars (composed between 58 and 50 BC) there are several extant MSS, but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Ceaser's day. Of the 142 books of the Roman history of Livy (59BC-AD17), only 35 survive; these are known to us from not more than 10 MSS of any consequence, only one of which, and that containing fragments of Books III-VI, is as old as the fourth century. Of the 14 books of the Histories of Tacitus (ca AD100) only four and a half survive; of the 16 books of his Annals, 10 survive in full and two in part. The text of these extant portions of his two great historical works depends entirely on thw MSS, one of the ninth century and one of the eleventh.
"The extant MSS of his minor works (Dialogus de Oratoribus, Agricola,Germania) all descend froma codex of the tenth century. The History of THucydides (ca 460-400 BC) is known to us from eight MSS< the earliest belonging to ca AD 900, and a few papyrus scraps, belong to about the beginning of the Christian era. The same is true of the History of Herodotus (BC 488-428). Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals."
p42
F.F.Bruce says:"There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament"
(source: "The Books and the Parchments"
(chart from p42 shows other authors, their works, when written, and the earliest manuscript copy we have)
Plato(Tetralogies) from 427-347BC
earliest 900 AD
TIME SPAN 1,200 yr's
#of copies 7
Tacitus(Annals)
from 100AD
earliest 1,100 AD
TIME SPAN 900 yr's
#of copies 20
Herodotus(History) from 480-425BC
earliest 900 AD
TIME SPAN 1,300 yr's
#of copies 8
There are other authors and works included in the chart, but I will have to leave it to YOUR OWN search for TRUTH to determine whether you want to TRUTHFULLY examine the integrity of the New Testament documents in comparison to other "works of history"
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Okay, I know what some people will want to know next .. what about the variants that ARE in the New Testament documents ... okay, let's adress those
(still from McDowell's book and from his qouting of other sources)
p.43
Geisler and Nix make a comparison of the textual variations between the New Testament documents and ancient works:"Next to the New Testament, there are more extant manuscripts of the Iliad (643) than any other book. Both it and the Bible were considered 'sacred,' and both underwent textual changes and criticism of their Greek manuscripts. The New Testament has about 20,000 lines."
(source "A General Introduction to the Bible" by Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix)
(continuing on)
They continue by saying that "the Iliad [has] about 15,600. Only 40 lines (or 400 words) of the New Testament are in doubt whereas 764 lines of the Iliad are questioned. This five percent textual corruption compares with one-half of one percent of seimilar emendations in the New Testament"
"The national epic of India, the Mahabharata, has suffered even more corruption. It is about eight times the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey together, roughly 250,000 lines. Of these, some 26,000 lines are textual corruptions (10 percent)."
"Benjamin Warfield in Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament quotes Ezra Aboot's opinion about nineteen-twentieths of the New Testament textual variations, saying that they:"... have so little support ... although there are various readings;and nineteen-twenthieths of the remainder are of so little important that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages where they occur"
(source Benjamin B. Warfield "Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament")
p.44
"Geisler and Nix make the following comment about how the textual variations are counted:"There is an ambiguity in saying there are some 200,000 variants in the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, since these represent only 10,000 places in the New Testament. If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different manuscripts, this is counted as 3,000 variants or readings."
"Although he was daling with fewer manuscripts than we have today, Philip Schaff in "Comparison to the Greek Testament and the English Version" concluded that only 400 of the 150,000 variant readings caused doubt about the textual meaning, and only 50 of these were of great significance. Not one of the variations, Schaff says, altered "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching."