Great Moments in Duke Basketball

It is Saturday and time for Great Moments in Duke Basketball.

No. 1: North Carolina 96, Duke 92, OT (March 2, 1974)

In what many consider to be the most remarkable comeback in college basketball history, North Carolina rallied from an eight-point deficit with 17 seconds left against Duke to send the game into overtime. The host Tar Heels were trailing the Blue Devils 86-78 when Bobby Jones connected on both ends of a one-and-one. Duke threw away the inbounds pass and North Carolina's John Kuester scored a layup to cut the deficit to four with 13 seconds. The Blue Devils again threw away the inbounds pass and Jones got a putback on a missed shot from Ed Stahl to cut Duke's lead to two with six seconds.

The Tar Heels fouled Pete Kramer with four seconds remaining, and he missed the front end of a one-and-one. Stahl grabbed the rebound and called a timeout with three seconds left. Mitch Kupchak inbounded to Walter Davis, who sank a 28-foot desperation shot as time expired to tie it at 86.

North Carolina went on to win in overtime in what is arguably the most improbable victory in Tar Heels' history.


This has been Great Moments in Duke Basketball.

Bad Science Part 1

I am going to start a few post on "Bad Science"

Below is Atheism poster boy "Richard Dawkins" author of "The God Delusion".

Many take his words as the gospel according to Richard.

Here is his attempt at explaining the evidence of evolution.

I might add it is circular reasoning at its best. In other words speculation and presumptions.
Here Richard is stumped by a creationist.....
Not good for a genius.




They are our cousins. Dude, you are funny! Did you realize you can go to McDonalds and eat your cousin the cow or your aunt the chicken. Thanks Cuz!



"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Gen. 1:1

Is the Bible Reliable? Part 8

The first hand-written English language Bible manuscripts were produced in 1380's AD by John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor, scholar, and theologian.









Today I would like to do a post on the History of our Bible.

I will feature John Wycliffe.

Below is some info. from www.wycliffe.org--great site.
A Man Ahead of His Time
John Wycliffe lived almost 200 years before the Reformation, but his beliefs and teachings closely match those of Luther, Calvin and other reformers. As a man ahead of his time, historians have called Wycliffe the "Morning star of the Reformation."

Born in the 1300s, Wycliffe criticized abuses and false teachings in the Church. In 1382 he translated an English Bible—the first European translation done in over 1,000 years. The Lollards, itinerant preachers he sent throughout England, inspired a spiritual revolution.

But the Lollardy movement was short-lived. The Church expelled Wycliffe from his teaching position at Oxford, and 44 years after he died, the Pope ordered his bones exhumed and burned. Intense persecution stamped out his followers and teachings. It would be hundreds of years before men like Martin Luther resurrected the reforms of which Wycliffe dreamed.

Is the Bible Reliable? Part 7

Chester Beatty Papyrus (P46) c. AD 200. Above, Paul's Letter to the Romans. P46 is the
earliest manuscript containing Pauls Epistles.










Below is Tim Challies take on Biblical Inerrancy.

PROBLEMS WITH DENYING INERRANCY

We turn first to problems that may arise when we tacitly or expressly deny inerrancy.
First, if we deny inerrancy, we make God a liar. If there are errors in the original manuscripts, manuscripts that testify they were breathed out by God, one of two things must be true: either God purposely lied or he mistakenly lied. Either way this would indicate that God is capable of making or of producing errors. Needless to say, this would destroy our ability to trust any of God’s revelation and cause us to doubt God Himself.

Second, if we deny inerrancy we lose trust in God. If there are errors in Scripture, even if in the smallest detail, and these were placed there intentionally by God, how are we to maintain trust that He did not lie in other matters? When we lose trust in the Scriptures, we lose trust in God Himself and we may consequently lose our desire to be obedient to Him.

Third, if we deny the clear testimony of Scripture that it is inerrant, we make our minds a higher standard of truth than the Bible. At the outset of this series I indicated a concern I felt towards those who deny inerrancy is when they indicate that the doctrine does not “feel right.” But nowhere does the Bible appeal to our feelings or our reason for its authority or inerrancy. We must submit to the Word, for it will not submit to us. We must give to the Bible the place it claims for itself. We cannot stand in judgment over it.
Fourth, if we deny inerrancy, and indicate that small details are incorrect, we cannot consistently argue that all the doctrine the Bible contains is correct. Admitting error in even the smallest historical detail is only the thin edge of the wedge, for we then allow the possibility that there may be error in doctrine as well. And when we allow this possibility, the Christian faith soon crumbles into a mess of subjectivity and personal preference.
So inerrancy is not an optional doctrine—one we can take or leave. Rather, it is a doctrine at the very heart of the faith and without it we impoverish our faith and destroy our ability to trust and honor God.


OBJECTIONS
There are many objections that are commonly raised against inerrancy. For the sake of brevity I will address only the most common objections, and the ones I have encountered in recent discussions on this topic.

We Do Not Have The Original Manuscripts - The first objection has to do with the transmission of Scripture. Many people argue that since we no longer possess any of the original manuscripts, it is irresponsible to speak of inerrancy. What is the purpose in affirming an important doctrine based on documents we no longer have? I answered this, in part, in the first article of this series, when I quoted John MacArthur. “We possess a wealth of biblical manuscripts in the original languages of Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. John MacArthur writes, “With this wealth of biblical manuscripts in the original languages and with the disciplined activity of textual critics to establish with almost perfect accuracy the content of the autographs, any errors which have been introduced and/or perpetuated by the thousands of translations over the centuries can be identified and corrected by comparing the translation or copy with the reassembled original. By this providential means, God has made good His promise to preserve the Scriptures. We can rest assured that there are translations available today which indeed are worthy of the title, The Word of God.” We can be certain that we have accurate copies of over 99% of the inerrant words as they were first transcribed. When we focus on the less than 1% of the text that contains errors, we must realize that these are human errors and that God is in no way responsible for them. The fact that there are some errors in Scripture as we have it today, does not negate inerrancy which speaks only of the original documents. The Bible as we have it today is worth of our confidence.

Inerrancy is a Poor Term - Generally people who make this objection believe that inerrancy is too strong a term. They believe that such a word demands a type of scientific precision. And furthermore, they may claim that this term is not used in the Bible and was unknown through much of the history of the church.
To the first objection, I point again to the definition of inerrancy, and that it refers to truthfulness and not precision. The Bible claims to be perfectly true, but nowhere does it claim to contain perfect precision. As we saw in the second article, the Bible may round numbers, speak in human terms and contain odd grammatical constructions and still be inerrant. In response to the second objection I would point to any number of terms we use that are foreign to Scripture. The word “Trinity” does not appear within the pages of Scripture, yet the doctrine of the Trinity is clearly affirmed in the Bible and the term is very useful in summarizing the doctrines of the persons of the Godhead. The doctrine of inerrancy is taught within the pages of the Bible as clearly as if the word “inerrancy” was used.

The Bible is Full of Errors and Contradictions - This is a common objection that has been leveled at the Bible too many times to count. It has been answered just as often. It is the question that motivated me to post this series.
As often as not, this objection is made by people who really have no clear idea of where these errors can be found, as they are merely passing along what they have heard from others. They read a web site with a long list of contradictions and allow that to feed their disgust for the things of God. For those who are honestly seeking information on the alleged contradictions, there is a wealth of resources available to prove that there are no errors or contradictions within the text of the Bible. For example, Answers in Genesis answers many of these objections. So many of the objections can be answered so easily. For example, here is one I have seen on some sites:
[The Bible claims that] one day can last 930 years.
“And YHWH God commanded the human, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’” [Genesis 2:16-17]. The original text makes it clear that God is not speaking metaphorically or spiritually. Isn’t it lucky that since death hadn’t been invented yet, the human (“ha’adam,” pronounced “ha ah DAHM”) had no idea what God was talking about! “When Adam had lived one hundred thirty years, he became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years.”— Gen. 5:3-4
This, of course, ignores the obvious—that humans really did die on the day they ate of the fruit. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit they died spiritually and made physical death a horrible reality. They did not drop dead at that very moment, but already, at that very moment, death had begun to stalk them. And their perfect communion with God had been killed. When we see that inerrancy allows for normal human speech and that it relates to truthfulness more than precision, we see that it can easily account for such “errors.”

Many of the alleged errors within the Bible have to do with historical facts. Allow me to provide one example. Only a couple of generations ago, scholars pointed to the Bible’s claim that there was a king of Assyria named Tiglath-Pileser as an obvious error, for archaeological evidence had not proven that any such king existed. But a few years later, archaeologists excavated Tiglath-Pileser’s capital city and found his name carved into bricks which read, “I, Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria…” It is a fact that “the results of sound scholarship have not tended to uncover more and more problems…Rather they have tended to resolve problems and to show that what were once thought to be errors are not errors at all” (James Boice, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace). R.C. Sproul writes, “The Christian has nothing to fear from rigorous historical research. Rather, we have everything to gain” (Reason to Believe, page 27).

Consider the following quote from Dr. William Foxwell Albright. “For much too long a time the course of New Testament scholarship has been dictated by theological, quasitheological, and philosophical presupposition. In far too many cases commentaries on New Testament books have neglected such basic requirements as up-to-date historical and philological analysis of the text itself…The result has often been steadfast refusal to take seriously the findings of archaeological and linguistic research. We believe that there is less and less excuse for the resulting confusion in this latter half of the twentieth century. Closely allied with these presuppositions is the ever-present fog of existentialism, casting ghostly shadows over an already confused landscape. Existentialism as a method of interpreting the New Testament is based upon a whole series of undemonstrable postulates of Platonic, Neo-Platonic, leftwing scholastic, and relativistic origins. So anti-historical is this approach that it fascinates speculative minds which prefer cliches to factual data, and shifting ideology to empirical research and logical demonstrations” (emphasis mine). The Christian has nothing to fear from scholarship, science or archeology.

Truly, in my experience, the vast majority of supposed errors and contradictions fall into the realm of what we saw in “What Inerrancy is Not.” They point to a lack of precision that may be found in ordinary language or in a language that had no capacity to provide verbatim quotes. Those that do not fall into this category, most often simply reflect a misunderstanding of the Bible’s historical context or language. There are some that really are difficult and for which there are no easy answers. But even then, they have been dealt with by scholars and have been answered well.

So how do we answer charges of error and contradiction?

First, I think we assure ourselves that the Bible is inerrant and then we ensure that what we believe about inerrancy is correct. We read what the Bible says about itself and express faith that what God says in Scripture is true. Having done that, it is often valuable to turn to the many resources available for those wrestling with apparent errors or contradictions. Most of these questions have been dealt with very well in the past—well enough to give you assurance that they reflect contemporary arrogance or misunderstanding more than error. When challenged with a list of contradictions I believe there is often little value in answering the charges of error point-by-point and engaging in lengthy dialog about each of them. Anyone who is really seeking the truth will find not only the contradictions but the many answers to them. Rather, it is better, I think, to point people to what is true. Point people to the Bible’s claims of truth—what it claims about us, as humans, and what it claims about God. Point people to the gospel and ask God to do His work in them.

Is the Bible Reliable? Part 6

POxy 846 (or E 3074) is a 6th century manuscript of a portion of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) known as the Septuagint. It contains Amos 2 and is currently housed at the University of Pennsylvania, catalogued as E 3074.



Below is an article taken from Pulpit Magazine:

Can You Trust the NT Gospels?
September 5th, 2007
(By Nathan Busenitz)

Several weeks ago, we posted a brief overview of reasons we, as Christians, believe the Bible to be the Word of God. Along those lines, we are now beginning a series of articles regarding reasons we can trust the veracity of the New Testament Gospels.

Are the New Testament gospels a reliable witness to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ? The question is a basic one, yet it is absolutely foundational to the Christian faith. If the gospel accounts are reliable, then we have overwhelming reason to embrace Jesus Christ as the Messiah. His ancestry, birth, baptism, ministry, miracles, teaching, death, and resurrection all lead to the same inescapable conclusion.

But if the gospels are not reliable, then we have a massive theological dilemma. If the Jesus of the Bible was not the real Jesus, then our faith in Him is almost surely misplaced.

For centuries, the universal assumption was that the gospels were reliable historical accounts. But since the rise of theological liberalism, many scholars (like those of the Jesus Seminar) have seriously questioned whether or not the New Testament record is historically accurate. The result has been a search for the “historical Jesus,” which is free from the “Christ of faith” presented in the biblical accounts. In the words of one liberal critic, “The narrative Gospels have no claim as historical accounts. The Gospels are imaginative creations.”[1]

So, is the testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John trustworthy (assuming those men actually wrote the books that bear their names)? Or is it interpretative history, which like interpretative dance, is more the product of imagination than reality?


First, we can trust the NT gospels because they are consistent with previous revelation given in the Old Testament.

If the New Testament gospels were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (John 14:16-17, 26; 15:26-27; 16:12-15), they must harmonize with that which the Holy Spirit previously revealed in the Old Testament (cf. 1 Pet. 1:10-11). We cannot embrace them if they are inconsistent with that which has come before, since God cannot contradict His Word (Luke 16:17; John 10:35; cf. Num. 23:19; 2 Timothy 2:13; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18).

If God authored both the Old and New Testaments (2 Tim. 3:16-17; 2 Pet. 1:20-21; 3:15-16), then we should expect their doctrine and message to be consistent. And indeed, this is the case. The New Testament is the perfect complement to the Old, and in fact, the unity of Scripture is underscored by Jesus and the apostles, who saw the New Testament as the perfect complement to the Old (cf. Luke 18:31-33, 24:27, 36-48; John 5:39, 46; Acts 10:43; 1 Peter 1:10-12).

In the gospel accounts, this consistency becomes most clear when we consider what the Old Testament predicted about the Messiah. On this point, a host of Old Testament passages might be cited (such as Gen. 3:14-15; Deut. 18:15-19; Ps. 2:12; 22:1,16,18; 110:1-4; Is. 9:1-7; 42:1-4; 49:6; 53:1-12; 59:16-20; 61:1-3; Jer. 23:5-6; Dan. 7:13-14; 9:20-27; Zech. 3:8-9; 6:12-13; 9:9-10; Mal. 3:1-3; 4:5-6). According to some scholars, there are nearly 300 prophecies in the Old Testament related to the Christ’s first coming.[3] In each case, the picture of the Messiah painted in the Old Testament matches perfectly with the description of Jesus in the four gospels. But this is certainly not true of the “historical Jesus” depicted by liberal scholars.

The New Testament writers understood the importance of the Old Testament record, and they repeatedly emphasized the fact that “Moses and all the prophets” (Luke 24:27) pointed to Jesus (cf. Matthew 2:15, 17, 23, 13:14, 35, 26:54, 56, 27:9; Mark 14:49; Luke 1:1, 18:31, 22:37, 24:44; John 17:12, 18:9, 19:24, 28, 36; and many others).

According to the Old Testament, the coming Messiah would:

Be a descendant of Abraham (compare Gen. 22:18 with Gal. 3:16)
Be a descendant of Jacob (compare Num. 24:17 with Lk. 3:23, 34)
Be from the tribe of Judah (compare Gen. 49:10 with Lk. 3:23, 33)
Be from the family of Jesse (compare Is. 11:1 with Lk. 3:23, 32)
Be from the house of David (compare Jer. 23:5 with Lk. 3:23, 31)
Be born at Bethlehem (compare Micah 5:2 with Matt. 2:1)
Be the pre-existent one (compare Micah 5:2 with Col. 1:17)
Be the Lord (compare Psalm 110:1 with Matt. 22:43-45)
Be God with us (compare Isaiah 7:14 with Matt. 1:23)
Be a prophet (compare Deut. 18:18 with Matt. 21:11)
Be a priest (compare Psalm 110:4 with Heb. 3:1; 5-6)
Be a king (compare Psalm 2:6 with Matt. 27:37)
Be anointed by the Spirit (compare Is. 11:2 with Matt. 3:16, 17)
Be zealous for God (compare Ps. 69:9 with John 2:15, 16)
Have a forerunner (compare Is. 40:3; Mal. 3:1 with Matt. 3:1,2)
Begin His ministry in Galilee (compare Is. 9:1 with Matt. 4:12-17)
Have a ministry of miracles (compare Is. 35:5,6 with Matt. 9:35)
Bring healing and spiritual life (compare Is. 61:1-2 with Lk. 4:18).
Enter Jerusalem on a donkey (compare Zech. 9:9 with Lk. 19:35-37)
Be rejected by the Jews (compare Psalm 118:22 with 1 Pet. 2:7)
Be silent before His accusers (compare Is. 53:7 with Matt. 27:12)
Be wounded and bruised (compare Is. 53:5 with Matt. 27:26)
Be smitten and spit upon (compare Is. 50:6 with Matt. 26:67)
Be crucified with thieves (compare Is. 53:12 with Matt. 27:38)
Have His garments divided (compare Ps. 22:18 with John 19:23,24)
Have his side pierced (compare Zech. 12:10 with John 19:34)
Be buried in a rich man’s tomb (compare Is. 53:9 with Matt. 27:57ff)
Come before Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed (compare Dan. 9:26 with Matt. 24:2) [4]

If we take messianic prophecy at all seriously, believing that it was historically fulfilled, then we are drawn immediately to the Christ of the New Testament gospels. No other record of Jesus’ life–whether from the Gnostics or the skeptics–is consistent with Old Testament revelation. On the other hand, because the New Testament gospels are in perfect harmony with earlier revelation from God, they can be trusted.

The Old Testament, then, is our first witness to the authenticity of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Is the Bible Reliable? Part 5

This is p52, the oldest fragment of the New Testament. (The 'p' stands for papyrus, the substance of the fragment.) It has been dated to around 125 A.D. The text is from the Gospel of John, which was written around 90 A.D. So the gap between the original and this copy is about 30-50 years. The text reads (in translation, with bold letters represented in p52): The Jews replied, “We are not permitted to put anyone to death.” (This was to fulfill what Jesus had said when he indicated the kind of death he was to die.) Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” (John 18:31-33).



Below is Mark D. Roberts' comments on Bart Ehrman's book "Misquoting Jesus"



In my last post in this series I began to consider a recent challenge to the inspiration of the Bible. It's recent, I should say, in that it appears in a recently published book, Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. The arguments Ehrman puts forth are not new, and the evidence for his position is well-known among scholars, including many who uphold the inspiration of Scripture.

What Ehrman proposes one might call "The Text-Critical Case Against Bible Inspiration." It could be boiled down to something like this:

If the Bible is truly inspired by God, then we would expect that what was written in the original manuscripts should have been perfectly preserved, either through the preservation of those manuscripts, or through complete scribal accuracy. After all, why would God inspire the writers of the Bible but not perfectly preserve what they said? Yet when we study the history of the biblical text, we find out that scribes who copied the manuscripts made changes in the text they were copying. Some of these changes were accidental, reflecting human error, others were intentional, reflecting the particular theology of the scribe. Therefore, not only can we have no certainty about what was actually written in the original manuscripts of the Bible, but also we have no reason to believe that God inspired the original writers, because if He had, He surely would have done a better job making sure that that process of preserving His inspiration was a perfect one.

I want to make five comments in response to this argument. (i will just give 4)

1. You Can't Have Absolute Certainty in Matters of History and Faith

The Text-Critical Case Against Biblical Inspiration seems to imply that if we have anything less than full certainty about the text of the Bible, then we can't have confidence in it or its inspired origin. But this is to ask of history more than it can ever supply. What we should expect from text criticism is not 100% certainty about the biblical text, which is impossible, but rather a high level of confidence that the text reconstructed by text critics is very close to the original. This sort of confidence, I believe, is quite defensible on scholarly grounds.

2. The Text-Critical Case Against Biblical Inspiration Overstates the Problem

This argument greatly overstates the extent to which scribal changes inhibit our ability to "get at" the earliest text of the biblical books. In fact, we can have more confidence about the text of the New Testament, for example, than about any other piece of ancient writing, because we have so many copies of the New Testament from both ancient times and covering a broad array of geography. Yes, there are quite a few passages about which we cannot be sure of the original words, but these are a very small percentage of the New Testament.

3. The Tools Used in Text Critical Case Against Biblical Inspiration Actually Support the Opposite Conclusion

The argument Ehrman makes against biblical authority, ironically enough, supports the opposite conclusion. Ehrman indicates that various scribes changed the biblical text as they made copies. Fine. Let's grant that this is true, as I think it is in some cases. The text critical tools used in Ehrman's argument, however, actually show that we can identify these scribal changes and, to a high degree of probability, show what the text was like before the changes were made. In other words, Ehrman's use of text criticism to point out that scribes "misquoted Jesus" employs scholarly tools that allow us to get back to the more authentic words of Jesus. So, the very critical tools that Ehrman uses to write his book, one might argue, are the tools God has given so we can have confidence that we have access to the actual words He once inspired, or something very close to these words.


4. The Disputed Texts Are Not Terribly Significant for Christian Theology and Practice

In my last post I wrote, "Ehrman appears to believe that many of his text critical conclusions are injurious to orthodox Christianity. This is plainly false, since these conclusions are in fact held by many evangelical scholars. From everything I've learned about Misquoting Jesus, there's nothing that this book points out about the New Testament manuscripts that is truly threatening to Christian doctrine." I would add that even if we took out of the New Testament every passage that Ehrman believes, rightly or wrongly, to be questionable, this wouldn't change basic Christian theology one iota.

For example, Ehrman points to a Trinitarian scribal addition in 1 John 5:7-8. The original text of 1 John read,

There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.

At some later point a scribe added:

There are three that testify in the Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on the earth, the Spirit and the water and the blood.

All modern Bibles and translations, to my knowledge, do not print the added portion (except in footnotes). This supports Ehrman's contention that scribes sometimes changed the text of the Bible in light of their theology. Of course it also supports my contention that text criticism allows us to get back to the original text (or close to it, at any rate). Moreover, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in no way depends upon this particular passage for its biblical support.

I'd go even a step further than this and propose something I haven't actually checked in detail, but I expect is true. If you were to remove from the Bible every single passage where there is legitimate uncertainly about the original text, the impact on Christian theology and practice would be minimal at most. (The only folk I know who would be in trouble are the snake-handling Christians of Appalachia, who base their practice on Mark 16:18, which almost all scholars believe was not part of Mark's original gospel, and which almost never appears in modern Bibles without a note that explains its questionable origins.)

Although, I don't agree with everything Mark says he does make some very good points.

I have heard Bart speak and I think he is just trying to make money by writing controversial books! But that is just my opinion.

Great Moments in Duke Basketball

Yes, I know it is hard to believe I would do such a post.
But Duke has given America such Great Moments in Basketball history and they deserve a post.
So every Saturday I will post a Great Moment in Duke Basketball.

This post will feature J.J. Redick. He is the all time leading scorer in Duke basketball and ACC history.
He is also Dick Vitale's favorite college player of all time.

The following is a clip from Senior Night at Cameron Indoor. J.J. Redick's last ACC regular season game at Duke.




UNC won 83 to 76 on J.J. Redick's Senior Night.

This has been "Great Moments in Duke Basketball"

Is the Bible Reliable? Part 4

Is the Bible reliable? I think so. Below is a great article by Mark D. Roberts critiquing Bart Ehrman’s book “Misquoting Jesus”.

Variants by Mark d. Roberts

The Quantity and Quality of Textual Variants
Skeptics who try to cast doubt upon the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts point to the apparently large number of variants they contain. Bart Ehrman, for example, in Misquoting Jesus, suggests that there are 200,000 to 400,000 variants among the New Testament manuscripts. He adds, dramatically, "There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." That sounds ominous, doesn't it? But, in fact, the data give us no reason to doubt the reliability of the manuscripts. Let me explain why.


A thought experiment will help here. The four gospels comprise over 64,000 words. We have over 2,000 manuscripts that contain all or part of these gospels. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that each word represents one potential variant. (In fact each word represents many potential variants, owing to misspelling, omission, word order, etc.) Further, let's suppose that each manuscript contains half of the gospel material, or 32,000 words. Using these conservative numbers, there are 64,000,000 possible variants in the gospel manuscripts. If there are, in fact, 200,000 variants (a high estimate for the gospels alone), then this means that we have .3% of the possible variants. To put it positively, the accuracy score for the gospel manuscripts is 99.7%. Not a bad grade.

We have such a large number of variants because there are so many extant manuscripts. But, as I've already shown, having many manuscripts actually increases the likelihood of our getting back to the original text. It also adds to the number of variants, however, which can sound negative to one who isn't familiar with text critical issues.




This is p66, which is called the Bodmer Papyrus. It dates from around 200 A.D. The text is John 1:1-13, plus the first word of verse 14.






Let's me suggest one more hypothetical that might make clear what I'm saying. This book contains about 40,000 words. Suppose I asked two people to make copies of this book by hand. Suppose, further, that they made one mistake every 1,000 words (99.9% accuracy). When they finished, each of their manuscripts would have 40 mistakes, for a total of 80. This doesn't sound too bad, does it? But suppose I asked 2,000 people to make copies of my book. And suppose they also made a mistake every 1,000 words. When they finished, the total of mistakes in their manuscripts would be 80,000. This sounds like a lot of variants – more variants than words in my book! But in fact the large number of variants is a simple product of the large number of manuscripts.

Moreover, if text critics were going to try and determine what the autograph of this book said, they'd be in a much stronger position if they had 2,000 copies to work from, even though they'd be dealing with 80,000 variants. With 2,000 manuscripts, the text critics would be able to evaluate the variants more astutely and come up with something very close to what I originally wrote. If they only had two manuscripts, however, even though these included only 80 variants, they'd often be unable to determine what the original manuscript said.

So, the fact "there are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament" isn't surprising. Nor it is bad news. It's a reflection of the wealth of the manuscript evidence we have available to us. The actual number of variants represents a tiny percentage of possible variants among the manuscripts.
The vast majority of variants in the New Testament manuscripts are insignificant, either because they appear so rarely that they are obviously not original, or because they don't appear in the older manuscripts, or because they don't impact the meaning of the text. In fact, the majority of variants that show up in enough older manuscripts to impact our reading of the text are spelling variations or errors. Text critic Daniel Wallace concludes that "only about 1% of the textual variants" make any substantive difference. And few, if any, of these have any bearing on theologically important matters. If, for example, you simply took out of the gospels every word that was text-critically uncertain, the impact on your understanding of Jesus would be negligible.

This, by the way, is exactly what most modern translations do with the two most obvious and significant textual variants in the gospels. One of these appears in John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery. Virtually all translations put this story in brackets, adding a note that says something like: "The earliest manuscripts do not include this passage." It's likely that this story is true, but that it was added to John well after the evangelist finished his task. Similarly, the ending of Mark includes a bracketed passage because the old manuscripts do not include anything after Mark 16:8. These two disputed passages, though significant in some ways, do not substantially alter our understanding of Jesus.

This Bible you have is reliable, trustworthy and true. Read it, live by it, and support it!

“For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,…”
1 Corinthians 15:3