•The Documentary Evidence

Were Jesus’ Biographies  (the Gospels) Reliably Preserved for Us?
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COPIES OF COPIES OF COPIES

"I'll be honest with you . . . When I first found out that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, I was really skeptical. I thought, If all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have any confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written?” (Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, p.75)
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  • •Because writing was done on perishable materials, virtually every document we have today from ancient times is a copy of a copy of a copy.
  • •And yet no one doubts that we have a reasonably accurate understanding of the history of the ancient world.
  • •By examining a number of copies of an ancient document, we can determine with greater accuracy what the original said.
  • •The more copies we have of the original document, the more accurately we can know what was said in the original. •
 

 

“The number of available manuscripts of the New Testament is overwhelmingly greater than those of any other work of ancient literature .” (J. Harold Greenlee, quoted in The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, p.36)
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  • •Another important factor in determining how accurately a copy reflects what was written in the original  is the amount of time that passed between when the copy was made and when the original existed.
  • •Presumably the fewer years there are between a copy and the original, the less intervening copies there are between that copy and the original, and therefore less errors have been introduced into the copy.
  • •In other words, generally speaking, the fewer years there are between the copy and the original, the more accurate the copy is assumed to be.
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“In real terms, The New Testament is easily the best attested ancient writing in terms of the sheer number of documents, the time span between the events and the document, and the variety of documents available to sustain or contradict it. There is nothing in ancient manuscript evidence to match such textual availability and integrity.” (Ravi Zacharias, quoted in The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, p.37)
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