Bruce Metzger observes: "Of all the literary compositions by the Greek people, the Homeric poems are the best suited for comparison with the Bible." He adds: "In the entire range of ancient Greek and Latin literature, the Iliad ranks next to the New Testament in possessing the greatest amount of manuscript testimony."
Metzger continues: "In antiquity men [1] memorized Homer as later they were to memorize the Scriptures. [2] Each was held in the highest esteem and quoted in defense of arguments pertaining to heaven, earth, and Hades. [3] Homer and the Bible served as primers from which different generations of school boys were taught to read. [4] Around both there grew up a mass of scholia and commentaries. [5] They were provided with glossaries. [6] Both fell into the hands of allegorists. [7] Both were imitated and supplemented - one with the Homeric Hymns and writings such as the Batrachomyomachia, and the other with apocryphal books. [8] Homer was made available in prose analyses; the Gospel of John was turned into epic hexameters by Nonnus of Panopolis. [9] The manuscripts of both Homer and the Bible were illustrated. [10] Homeric scenes appeared in Pompeian murals; Christian basilicas were decorated with mosaics and frescoes of Biblical episodes.
E. G. Turner points out that Homer was no doubt the most widely read author in antiquity.
WORK |
WHEN WRITTEN |
EARLIEST COPY |
TIME SPAN |
NO. OF COPIES |
---|---|---|---|---|
Homer (ILIAD) | 900 BC | 400 BC | 500 years | 643 |
New Testament | 40-100 AD | 125 AD | 25 years | over 24,000 |
Geisler and Nix make a comparison of the textual variations between the New Testament documents and ancient works: "Next to the New Testament, there are more extant manuscripts of the Iliad (643) than any other book. Both it and the Bible were considered 'sacred', and both underwent textual changes and criticism of their Greek manuscripts. The New Testament has about 20,000 lines."
They continue by saying that "the Iliad [has] about 15,600. Only 40 lines (or 400 words) of the New Testament are in doubt whereas 764 lines of the Iliad are questioned. This five percent textual corruption compares with one-half of one percent of similar emendations in the New Testament.
"The national epic of India, the Mahabharata, has suffered even more corruption. It is about eight times the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey together, roughly 250,000 lines. Of these, some 26,000 lines are textual corruptions (10 percent)."
Benjamin Warfield in Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament quotes Ezra Abbot's opinion about nineteen-twentieths of the New Testament textual variations, saying that they: "...have so little support...although there are various readings; and nine-twentieths of the remainder are of so little importance that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages where they occur."
Geisler and Nix make the following comment about how the textual variations are counted: "There is an ambiguity in saying there are some 200,000 variants in the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, since these represent only 10,000 places in the New Testament. If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different manuscripts, this is counted as 3,000 variants or readings."
Although he was dealing with fewer manuscripts than we have today, Philip Schaff in Comparison to the Greek Testament and the English Version concluded that only 400 of the 150,000 variant readings caused doubt about the textual meaning, and only 50 of these were of great significance. Not one of the variations, Schaff says, altered "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching."
Fenton John Anthony Hort, whose life work has been with the MSS, says: "The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation than seven-eights of the whole. The remaining eighth, therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism.
"If the principles followed in this edition are sound, this area may be very greatly reduced. Recognizing to the full the duty of abstinence from peremptory decision in cases where the evidence leaves the judgment in suspense between two or more readings, we find that, setting aside differences of orthography, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt only make up about one-sixteenth of the whole New Testament. In this second estimate the proportion of comparatively trivial variations is beyond measure larger than in the former; so that the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text."
Geisler and Nix say, concerning the observations of Hort above, that "only about one-eighth of all the variants had any weight, as most of them are merely mechanical matters such as spelling or style. Of the whole, then, only about one-sixtieth rise above 'trivialities', or can in any sense be called 'substantial variations'. Mathematically this would compute to a text that is 98.33 percent pure."
Warfield boldly declares that the facts show that the great majority of the New Testament "has been transmitted to us with no, or next to no, variation; and even in the most corrupt form in which it has ever appeared, to use the oft-quoted words of Richard Bentley, 'the real text of the sacred writers is competently exact; ...nor is one article of faith or moral precept either perverted or lost...choose as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst by design, out of the whole lump of readings."
Schaff quotes both Tregelles and Scrivener: "We possess so many MSS, and we are aided by so many versions, that we are never left to the need of conjecture as the means of removing errata." (Tregelles, Greek New Testament, "Protegomena," P.X.)
"'So far,' says Scrivener, 'is the copiousness of our stores from causing doubt or perplexity to the genuine student of Holy Scripture, that it leads him to recognize the more fully its general integrity in the midst of partial variation. What would the thoughtful reader of Eschylus give for the like guidance through the obscurities which vex his patience and mar his enjoyment of that sublime poet?'"
F. F. Bruce in The Books and the Parchments writes that if no objective textual evidence is available to correct an obvious mistake, then "the textual critic must perforce employ the art of conjectural emendation - an art which demands the severest self-discipline. The emendation must commend itself as obviously right, and it must account for the way in which the corruption crept in. In other words, it must be both 'intrinsically probable' and 'transcriptionally probable'. It is doubtful whether there is any reading in the New Testament which requires it to be conjecturally emended. The wealth of attestation is such that the true reading is almost invariable bound to be preserved by at least one of the thousands of witnesses."
That textual variations do not endanger doctrine is emphatically stated by Sir Frederic Kenyon (one of the great authorities in the field of New Testament textual criticism): "One word of warning already referred to, must be emphasized in conclusion. No fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading...
"It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain: Especially is this the case with the New Testament. The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.
"Scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers whose works have come down to us, of Sophocles, of Thucydides, of Cicero, of Virgil; yet our knowledge of their writings depends on a mere handful of manuscripts, whereas the manuscripts of the New Testament are counted by hundreds, and even thousands."
Gleason Archer, in answering the question about objective evidence, shows that variants or errors in transmission of the text do not affect GOD's revelation:
"A careful study of the variants (different readings) of the various earliest manuscripts reveals that none of them affects a single doctrine of Scripture. The system of spiritual truth contained in the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament is not in the slightest altered or compromised by any of the variant readings found in the Hebrew manuscripts of earlier date found in the Dead Sea caves or anywhere else. All that is needed to verify this is to check the register of well-attested variants in Rudolf Kittel's edition of the Hebrew Bible. It is very evident that the vast majority of them are so inconsequential as to leave the meaning of each clause doctrinally unaffected."
Benjamin Warfield said, "If we compare the resent state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must...declare it to be marvelously correct. Such has been the care with which the New Testament has been copied - a care which has doubtless grown out of true reverence for its holy words - such as been the providence of GOD in preserving for His Church in each and every age a competently exact text of the Scriptures, that not only is the New Testament unrivaled among ancient writings in the purity of its text as actually transmitted and kept in use, but also in the abundance of testimony which has come down to us for castigating its comparatively infrequent blemishes."
The editors of the Revised Standard Version say: "It will be obvious to the careful reader that still in 1946, as in 1881 and 1901, no doctrine of the Christian faith has been affected by the revision, for the simple reason that, out of the thousands of variant readings in the manuscripts, none has turned up thus far that requires a revision of Christian doctrine."
Burnett H. Streeter believes that because of the great quantity of textual material for the New Testament, "the degree of security that...the text has been handed down to us in a reliable form is prima facie very high."
Frederic G. Kenyon continues in The Story of the Bible: "It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries (of manuscripts) and all this tudy is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of GOD."
Millar Burrows of Yale says: "Another result of comparing New Testament Greek with the language of the papyri is an increase of confidence in the accurate transmission of the text of the New Testament itself."
Burrows also says that the texts "have been transmitted with remarkable fidelity, so that there need be no doubt whatever regarding the teaching conveyed by them."
I believe one can logically conclude from the perspective of literary evidence that the New Testament's reliability is far greater than any other record of antiquity.
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