Can We Trust the Greek New Testament? How We Got the New Testament
The New Testament was written in a small time frame in the first century. The earliest book was only written at about 44-45 AD and the last book was written around 95 AD. So over a 50-year period the New Testament was written. It is comprised of 27 books. There are four Gospels and that number has been set since at least the middle of the second century. Irenaeus was trained and taught by Polycarp, who in turn was taught and trained by the apostle John. He wrote that by his time there were only four Gospels and there could only be four Gospels, and there are statements by other early church fathers from the middle period of that second century who affirm that by then there were only four Gospels.
All of the New Testament was written between 45-95 AD and it has been typical of liberal theology since the middle of the nineteenth century to reject these conservative, traditional dates for the New Testament. They did that because they have various assumptions, one of which was that God couldn't really reveal Himself in this manner and so these are just writings like every other writing. Their controlling presupposition was as they approached the New Testament. If they had just waited 25 years or so for various archaeological finds they would not have had any traction for their views at all. But they got them out there in the nick of time and so we still run into professors at major universities and community colleges who continue to state these things as if they are true. One of the liberal views of the Old Testament canon was that Moses could not have written the Torah because the Jews did not know how to write at that time in their history, that writing came along after that. But it has been discovered that there were massive library at once place at least a thousand years before Moses. So a lot of these ideas that the liberals had were found to be false. People are committed to rejecting the Bible, so they are going to grab any view that they want to.
Then after the four Gospels is Acts, also written by Luke—the historical books—and then we have the epistles. There are thirteen Pauline epistles, three written by John, two by Peter, and then there is Hebrews whose author is unknown, James and Jude. The last book that was revealed in the first century was Revelation around AD 95. James was one of the first epistles, probably written about 44-47, some have suggested it may have been written as early as AD 40. The Pauline epistles were written from the late forties through about 64 or 65 AD, Hebrews in 63, Matthew between 57 and 59, Luke and Acts probably around 61. These books all had apostolic authority behind them. Even though Luke was not an apostle, Mark was not an apostle they had apostolic authority behind them. Mark is believed to have been written by Mark but it is told from Peter's viewpoint. Luke was Paul's traveling companion and when Paul was in prison in Caesarea he had two years there where he could interview eye-witnesses, Mary the mother of the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ, other eye-witnesses to His life, ministry and death. And he was able to interview Paul and also participated with Paul on some of the missionary journeys. Therefore this was written from a first-hand account, very well researched.
By the time of the decade of the sixties several of Paul's letters were already thought to have been inspired. Peter refers to that in 2 Peter 3:16. Peter also quotes from Luke as authoritative as Old Testament passages in 1 Peter, and so we have these examples that before the New Testament canon is even fully written there is already a recognition that some of the other New Testament writings have the same level of authority as the Old Testament.
As the text was copied and transmitted down through the next two or three centuries they finally wrote these in several ways. They were written on papyrus and in especially the dry climate of Egypt they would be preserved very well down through the centuries. A large number of papyri have been discovered that have contained portions or almost all of the New Testament and they date back to the third to sixth centuries. There were also various parchments which were bound together and referred to as a codex. There were different types of writings in these MSS. There were uncials which were written in all upper case letters. There were also minuscule MSS, written in lower case letters, and there are 2764 minuscule MSS. Then lectionaries, Scripture reading that was written out to be read to the congregation in a service of some type. Then there are 88 papyri, all for a total of 5300 Greek documents, in whole or in part, some of which are just very fragmentary. There is one of papyri from John 18:31-34, 37, 38 which is referred to as P52, and it is dated somewhere between 110 and 125 AD. There is another referred to as P46 which some scholars think maybe just a little older. But P52 would be within a generation of John's original writing. This was found in Egypt and it shows that within 40 years a copy had found its way into Egypt from Ephesus where John wrote his Gospel.
So we can have great confidence that what we have before us in the Greek text that underlies our English translation is accurate. When we look and compare this to other ancient writings no other ancient writing have near the documentation that we find for the Greek New Testament. We have over 5000 MSS related to the Greek New Testament and when we add to that the fact that there are over 10,000 Latin MSS plus translations into Syriac and Ethiopic and a number of other languages that date back to the first five or six centuries after the completion of the canon, this all gives us a pretty solid understanding of what the original text would have included.
Homer's Iliad was written about 800 BC. The oldest manuscript that we have is 400 BC, and we have about 645 copies. Plato wrote about 400 BC and the earliest copy that we have dates to 900 AD, a 1300-year gap, and we have seven copies. When we look at Caesar's Gaelic Wars, written about 100-44 BC, the earliest copy that we have is dated AD 900 and that is a gap of 1000 years; we only have ten copies. Of the New Testament, in contrast, we have over 5000 copies that date back within four or five centuries of the original writing. There is no other ancient document that has the kind of support, the number of copies, that we have of the New Testament.
The various types of papyri that are referred to are:
The Oxyrhynchos Papyri—various fragments that were discovered in the rubbish heaps in Oxyrhynchos, Egypt. More than 35 MSS containing portions of the New Testament were found in that garbage dump.
The Chester Beatty Papyri—purchased in the 1930s by Chester Beatty at the University of Michigan, and this includes three MSS that are very early (245 AD, 3rd century) containing portions of all four Gospels and Acts. There is P46 which may be dated as early as late first century and has almost all of Paul's epistles and Hebrews, and P47 which is dated to the 3rd century and contains Revelation 9-17.
Then there is the Bodmer collection which includes 300 papyri, including P66 and a number of other papyri that are also dated very early.
One of the more interesting finds was Codex Sinaiticus. This is one of those great stories of a brilliant Greek scholar of the 19th century, Tischendorf, discovered this. He was a young man, not even thirty years of age, who went to St. Catherine's monastery on the traditional site of Mount Sinai and noticed in his room where he was staying there was a pile of papyri that was being used to light the fires in the rooms at night to keep them warm. He realized when he examined them he had a very ancient copy of the Greek New Testament. Then he discovered that he had a large segment of the Septuagint, and they discovered that they had the codex there called the Codex Sinaiticus containing the entire New Testament and also portions of the Old Testament. It dates back to the middle of the fourth century.
Codex Vaticanus has been in the Vatican library since about 1481 and it was made available only to a very, very few people. Tregelles would go in and memorize portions because they weren't allowed to take pen or paper with them, and he would go out and write it down. He published portions of that which eventually put enough pressure on the Vatican where they released a copy of it.
There were various other codexes found, all of which date around the third to fifth century. Codex Alexandrinus was a fifth century manuscript that has nearly all of the New Testament and it is generally thought to be very reliable in the Gospels and in the Pauline epistles.
So we have this great collection of documents which gives us great confidence in the text that we have. But that is only part of the question. The other part of the question is how did the canon come to be? How did we get these 27 books? We take a look at the very early period and there are three periods of time. There is the period of separate circulation from basically AD 70-170, the period of separation from 170-303, and then a period of completion from 303-397. The period of separate circulation is when Paul had written letters to the Thessalonians, the Corinthians. Peter had written his two epistles, John had written his, and they were sent to the recipient and then passed around. Churches would make copies. When Paul wrote to the Colossians, for example, they were to make a copy and then send it on to other churches in the vicinity. Then they would begin to pass them around and begin to collect them. But basically for about 100 years they were in a separate circulation. Then there was a period of separation when they were separating out these particular documents and manuscripts and they began to collect them together. This is the period from about 170-303 AD. In the first period were a number of church fathers who made very clear statements about what was in the canon. Irenaeus, about 160, says it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. There had to be four. Origen who is also late second century or third century said: "I accept the traditional view of the four Gospels which alone are undeniably authentic in the church of God on earth." He also said: "I know a certain Gospel which is called the Gospel According to Thomas and a Gospel According to Matthas. And many others have we read lest we should in any way be considered ignorant, nevertheless among all these we have appeared solely what the church has recognized which is only the four Gospels should be accepted."
Another thing that we get from all of these early writings is that pastors and teachers wrote and quoted many, many verses. Thousands of verses are quoted in their sermons and so that also attests to the veracity of our early text.
The period of separation from 170-303 is when they began to separate out certain books and reject certain books and we see that different early church fathers made different statements about which books they considered to be authoritative. For example, Tertullian did not include Hebrews, James, 2 Peter or 2nd or 3rd John. That could be understood because Hebrews didn't have a stated author and one of the criteria was that it had apostolic authentication, and since they didn't know who wrote it they weren't sure whether it was authoritative. James was not written to an area where he was, so that would be further away. 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John were written to individuals, so these would have had less distribution than some of the other books. Origen, who dates mostly from the early third century, stated that Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, James, Jude, were questionable. Outside of those everything else that we have in our 27 New Testament books was accepted. By about 200 AD there is a canon called the Muritorian Canon in which about all of our books are included and accepted as the canon. Irenaeus quotes from almost every New Testament boom, except for Philemon, James, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and Revelation. Those were the books that were a little bit disputed but by the end of the second century they are accepted.
In 367 Athanasius, the Bishop of Hippo, writes an Easter letter where he mentions all 27 books that are included in our New Testament. The tests for canonicity were that they recognized that it was authenticated by an apostle, that it was theologically consistent with the other books that were clearly known to be authoritative, and that they were used and accepted by the Christian church. They never really considered any other books as being part of the canon. The one thing that we see throughout the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, in terms of these books that are in the canon, is that they all have the same common themes and are all united in their view of God, of man, the sinfulness of man, the need for atonement, and that man can only be saved by God's grace and God providing the solution to man's sin problem. The basic four doctrines that define Christianity are not in dispute and not questioned or challenged by any of the textual variants that we find or by any of the books that are in the New Testament. They stand united in their testimony, their witness to all of the basic doctrines of Christianity, all of which points to the cross. Everything, whether it is the Old Testament looking forward or the New Testament looking back, points to the cross either as God's future plan for providing salvation for man, or in the case of the New Testament helping us to understand what took place on the cross and what its implications are for the spiritual life of the church age.
The conclusion is that we can absolutely trust the Word of God. Satan says: "Has God said?" We can answer with a resounding yes. He has said and we can trust it.
Illustrations