Have read parts of The Case for Christ.
The little graphic above is my attempt to summarize some of the ideas from that book.
The New Testament Scriptures, as written works of antiquity, stand strong on three counts:
(1) Their closeness relative to the events they describe. Within a century (fragments of Gospels) and a few centuries (complete Gospels).
(2) The number of copies. Homer's Illiad comes in a distant second with 650 ancient copies.
(3) The consistency of the copies. Its estimated that they are about 99.5% in agreement with each other.
As you can see from the graphic, we don't have the actual original Matthew-Mark-Luke-John Gospel accounts of Jesus.
The art and science of textual criticism tries to piece together the original Gospels from the copies.
The late Bruce Metzger who died in 2007 was one of the most noted scholars of textual criticism. Though the copies of the Gospels aren't perfect, Metzger retained his Christian faith.
One of his students, Bart Ehrman eventually lost his faith owing to the discrepancies of the Gospel copies.
A readable assessment of Ehrman's critique was posted by Mark D. Roberts.
No comments:
Post a Comment