Is the NT Reliable? Part 2: The Text of the New Testament

Let us embark, then, on the easy problem. There are four reasons typically put forward to discount the reliability of the NT. Under scrutiny we should consider the text itself, the theology represented in that text, and the historical accuracy of the events the text records. I’ll take each of these in turn. In this post we’ll deal with the New Testament Text.

The Text

Which Books?

First, the text itself. It sometimes comes as a surprise to Christians who grow up in the church that the text of the NT is a kind of composite reconstruction. It is a composite because it is only later in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries that it is bound together as a single book; it doesn’t originate as the singular work of a creative genius with a unified plan and a cohesive vision, but rather as a collection of materials of various genres from a diverse group of authors across multiple decades. Moreover, the bundling of these books takes place only through much contention and debate and is eventually accomplished by a group of individuals so far removed from the original authors that the decision to pick these books seems to us to be arbitrary and, perhaps, not a little sinister. Why these books? Why were others excluded? Did the church get it right or did we inherit the anthology that we now call “The New Testament” as a result of some kind of grand historical accident, or worse: conspiracy?

To this objection two things need to be said. The first is that this process—the variety of the original authors and the messiness of its reception by the church—is entirely to be expected given the kind of work that the New Testament claims to be. It never claims to be a cohesive and singular work; on the contrary, the NT writers everywhere acknowledge that they are individual representatives of a larger body. They are “eyewitnesses,” and let me put the emphasis on the plural there. The whole point of Christianity is that it does not stem from the testimony of one man, but rather a plurality of women and men united only by the compelling evidence of what they saw. Paul, for example, never claims to be the “originator” of a religion, the creative genius behind a movement or sub-movement, but rather the “least” of a larger group of individuals, the testimony of whom he frequently commends to his audience alongside his own (1 Cor. 15:1-5). Moreover, he partners with others as he writes his own letters and pastors the churches under his care. The Thessalonian correspondence, we should remember, is only co-authored by Paul. Paul also believes that the success of the Corinthian church owes as much to the work of Apollos as to himself. Given this plurality, and given that there is no single witness “at the top” to legislate and enforce “the faith,” one would expect the dissemination, collection, and authentication of this foundational body of literature to be both complicated and gradual, as all natural historical processes are. The complexity and messiness of the Church’s authentication of canon is thus not an argument against the veracity of these documents; quite the contrary, it demonstrates the church’s desire to “vet” the materials it has received, passing along to future generations only those that are demonstrably authentic.

The second thing that should be said is that we have every indication that the church did a very good job. The “main books” of the NT—the Gospels, the letters of Paul, 1 Peter, and James—have never been subject to much, if any, dispute. On the flip side, the “main books” excluded from the NT—that is, those books that were at one time considered for inclusion but, in the end, didn’t make the cut—contain nothing within them that would call into question the reliability of those books that “made it.” And finally, the books that might be debated—my own beloved Hebrews, 2 Peter and Jude, and Revelation—are recognized even by critics as consistent with the mainline of Christian teaching. The canonical “core” of Christianity is not under dispute; these books provide the earliest and most vetted witness to Christianity available to historian and theologian alike, and while the edges might be fuzzy in certain places and at certain times, that fuzziness does not detract from the general witness of the Christian faith.

Which Texts?

There’s another problem though. Even if we accept that we have generally the right books, how can we know that the text we now have accurately and faithfully (that is, reliably) transmits the text that the original author wrote down? After all, are we not dealing with copies of copies of copies? Here we turn from the composite nature of the text to the topic of its reconstruction. The text that we have, many Christians are surprised to learn, is a scientifically studied compilation of 1000s upon 1000s of copies, no two of which (prior to the printing press) perfectly agree with one another.

This is, of course, not a new problem, but its impact on the perceived unreliability of the NT has been brought into the popular foreground by text-critics like Bart Ehrman. And let me say from the beginning, Bart Ehrman is a good scholar and a great text-critic. He has put his “keen and penetrating mind to the task”—and it is an important task, and one sadly neglected in contemporary evangelical circles—but sadly he has come to the wrong conclusion. Critics are fond of pointing out that we have tens of thousands of copies of the text of the NT, most of which are dated after the 4^th and 5^th centuries of the church, and that these copies contain thousands of variant readings. Our reception of the text of the NT is thus not a static thing, there’s no “standardizing body” that maintains the original, but is rather in flux as scholars analyze an ever-growing body of evidence of divergent texts. And to this I would say: true enough. But the conclusion that we should draw from the diversity of textual witness is not that the NT is unreliable. The opposite is the case. As has been pointed out many times, breadth and depth of textual witness is what we want when it comes to the reconstruction of ancient documents. More, in this case, is better. And that’s precisely what we have. We have more textual witnesses, earlier in origin, from a greater variety of hands and lands and languages, than any other ancient texts ever. If we are aiming at “reliable” in the “ordinary” sense, then the text of the NT is more reliable than any other ancient (pre-printing age) manuscript we possess. (And not even Bart Ehrman would, I think, dispute this; his criticism is actually mustered against the hard problem, not the easy problem as we have described it). If this text is deemed unreliable, then logically we must conclude that every text from the ancient world is in question, for we have better evidence here than anywhere else.

More to the point, the divergence of these manuscripts is almost always overstated by the critics. There are important differences, to be sure, but they never call into question the general reliability of the textual witness. And when it does–that is, when the variants have a significant exegetical impact on our interpretation of the text–there’s no conspiracy that needs to be uncovered. No one’s hiding anything here. I don’t know of a bible publisher that does not backet or footnote the major variants in their text. They’re well documented, and no one is trying to hide them from the boarder public. The vast majority of variants are minor, but the major ones are acknowledged and, I should say, not all that problematic.  

Conclusion

The text, then, should be regarded as a reliable witness to what the first and second generation of Christians saw, believed, testified to, and saw fit to pass on to the generations to come. And with that, we will next turn to the theology of the text. Stay tuned!

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