We Don't Have the Original Manuscripts

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I was wondering if anyone has ever heard a sound rebuttal or reply in defense of the faith to the charge that we don’t have the original manuscripts of the gospels and letters of the New Testament. I was made aware of this by reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus; as far as I know its basically undisputed historical information. None of the critical book reviews I’ve read of Ehrman’s book take him to task for stating that we don’t have the originals. In your view, does this seroiusly undermine the reliability of the Bible and the Catholic faith? Anyone’s thoughts would be appreciated.
 
CollegeKid said:
I was wondering if anyone has ever heard a sound rebuttal or reply in defense of the faith to the charge that we don’t have the original manuscripts of the gospels and letters of the New Testament. I was made aware of this by reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus; as far as I know its basically undisputed historical information. None of the critical book reviews I’ve read of Ehrman’s book take him to task for stating that we don’t have the originals. In your view, does this seroiusly undermine the reliability of the Bible and the Catholic faith? Anyone’s thoughts would be appreciated.
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The original copies of all the written sources have completely disappeared**. **The oldest fragment of any portion of the New Testament dates from the 2nd century, 100 years after Jesus’ death. The next oldest fragments (of Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas) date to about 200. The first complete copy of the Greek New Testament (Codex Sinaiticus) is from the 4th century. Thus, three centuries separate Jesus from the earliest complete surviving copies of the gospels. None of the bibles we use are from a single or original source - they are formed from about 5000 Greek manuscripts that contain all or parts of the new testament.

These are the simple facts, undisputed by the church. Now as to whether this undermines anything, the answer is no and the reason is that the Catholic church does not promote a literalistic interpretation of the bible and does not engage in “proof-texting”. The overall themes of the scriptures are what we focus on and we combine that knowledge with the church’s traditions and teachings through the ages to arrive at our current understanding.

If you are interested in practical Catholic teachings on this subject, take a look at “And God Said What?” by Maragret Ralph and “Biblical Fundamentalism, What Every Catholic Should Know” by Ronald Witherup. These are inexpensive excellent reads.
 
Hi CK, the very nature of textual criticism is the best answer.

Lets say you write three copies of a letter and send it to three different friends, and those friends make six more copies of your letter to them and send those copies out to other friends, and each of those friends make additional copies that are mailed out to other friends, and some of those friends translate your letter into other languages and makes other copies in both the orignial language and target languages and sends those copies out to others. And, this copying goes on and on, until years down the line, all that is left is copies of those letters in different cities.

Now, someone collects all those copies that they can find and start comparing them. That textual critic removes spelling errors of the various copiers. And, he compares the different translations with the orginal language letters, and there is in the end 99.999 percent agreement among all those documents. Would it be safe to say, that textual critic has isolated the original letters with 99.999 percent accuracy? Yes. That is basically why we don’t need the originals. Look at the root system of any tree, and its branches, that is basically what copies of copies look like.
 
The 20th century had the benefit of advances in textual criticism, allowing us to reconstruct to a high degree of accuracy the contents of the originals.

this is especially true for the New Testament writings.
 
CollegeKid said:
I was wondering if anyone has ever heard a sound rebuttal or reply in defense of the faith to the charge that we don’t have the original manuscripts of the gospels and letters of the New Testament. I was made aware of this by reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus; as far as I know its basically undisputed historical information. None of the critical book reviews I’ve read of Ehrman’s book take him to task for stating that we don’t have the originals. In your view, does this seroiusly undermine the reliability of the Bible and the Catholic faith? Anyone’s thoughts would be appreciated.
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Hi
Well, to me, that is a fact the original scriptures in Aramaic or Hebrew which JesusYeshuaIssa , Mary and the apsotles spoke are not available now. We have only Greek or Latin translations from which the English translations have been made. Some say that the Scriptures were perhaps not written by the Apostels and were later ascribed to them, this is what I gather from wikipedia.For every book there is an article in wikipedia which gives its history.
Thanks
I am an Ahmadi – a peaceful faith in Islam bridging gaps between faiths/denominations/religions/agnostics
 
We don’t have the original manuscripts, but that in no case means that we don’t have the original teaching of Jesus and the Apostles.
The “Original Copies” aren’t magic, and we don’t really need them. In fact, I’d contend that there never were “original manuscripts;” they were quickly copied and recopied. It didn’t matter to the first readers if the ink and papyrus written from Luke’s hand survived.
But if you’re really interested in a fairly fair (grin) treatment of Bart Ehrman’s book by some evangelical people, listen to this:
bethinking.org/download.php?MediaID=859

I will now become a conservative Christian and say that the earliest witnesses we have to the Gospels are the Father’s of the Church who seemingly teach many of the same things the Gospels do, and often quite independant of them.
Furthermore, “We don’t have the original manuscripts” is something by the unschooled in such subjects.

But we can get pretty darn close to the Originals, sort of.

Our earliest copies of Paul’s letters come from a mysterious collection of manuscripts called “P-46.”
lib.umich.edu/pap/k12/reading/Paul/contents.html

Also the earliest piece of the Gospel of John comes from about 125 CE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_52
 
Good point about the church fathers, I remember reading somewhere if one took quotes of the NT from them you can recover over 90 percent of the NT.

Also, looking back at my example of a person sending out duplicate copies of letters. No only would the textual critic have copies of letters from different locations, he would also have copies of letters from different generations of the copies. He would also have different translations of the letters. And, he could examine christian literature in general to locate passages from those letters that were quoted by others. There is also, old prayer books and such he can consult too.
 
Concerning the book of Isaiah for example, a copy of Isaiah was discovered in the dead sea scrolls that was a thousand years younger than any manuscript of Isaiah we had to date, and it is in argreement with the much older manuscripts to almost 100 percent with spelling differences being the major differances.
 
Bear in mind that the Vatican Library has the largest collection of ancient manuscripts of the various books of the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, etc. in the world. Current translations in modern languages for use by Catholics are made from careful examination, comparison and reconstruction based on these materials.
The only thing that I have a problem with is the fact that the library has so much material that even the Vatican Library doesn’t really know what’s in there. People doing research ask the librarian to bring a codex from the stacks and what comes out may be a surprise. One researcher was handed a scroll of Jeremiah which had variant passages. Further examination showed that the manuscript was much earlier than other copies more frequently used by researchers.
Still, what we have today in modern translations is probably closer to the original manuscripts than Bibles compiled a thousand years ago.

Matthew
 
paarsurrey said:
Hi
Well, to me, that is a fact the original scriptures in Aramaic or Hebrew which JesusYeshuaIssa , Mary and the apsotles spoke are not available now. We have only Greek or Latin translations from which the English translations have been made. Some say that the Scriptures were perhaps not written by the Apostels and were later ascribed to them, this is what I gather from wikipedia.For every book there is an article in wikipedia which gives its history.
Thanks
I am an Ahmadi – a peaceful faith in Islam bridging gaps between faiths/denominations/religions/agnostics
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Just a quick correction.

The New Testament was written mostly (if not exclusively in Greek). The Old Testament in common use in Jesus’ time was the Septuagint, a Greek transalation, which Jesus quotes from.

Therefore, the Bible that is relevent to Christians is in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic.

God Bless
 
drafdog said:
Bear in mind that the Vatican Library has the largest collection of ancient manuscripts of the various books of the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, etc. in the world. Current translations in modern languages for use by Catholics are made from careful examination, comparison and reconstruction based on these materials.
The only thing that I have a problem with is the fact that the library has so much material that even the Vatican Library doesn’t really know what’s in there. People doing research ask the librarian to bring a codex from the stacks and what comes out may be a surprise. One researcher was handed a scroll of Jeremiah which had variant passages. Further examination showed that the manuscript was much earlier than other copies more frequently used by researchers.
Still, what we have today in modern translations is probably closer to the original manuscripts than Bibles compiled a thousand years ago.
Matthew
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Hi
What my Christian friends usually inform us is that the scriptures are farely accurate.Nevertheless, since we have to base our actions/deeds on the Scriptures, it is utmost essential that the Scriptures should be beyond any doubt from GodAllahYHWH, so search for the original Scriptures in the original languages they were revealed should be contiued fervently. May GodAllahYHWH bless the persons who are engaged in the research work.
Thanks
I am an Ahmadi – a peaceful faith in Islam bridging gaps between faiths/denominations/religions/agnostics
 
CollegeKid said:
I was wondering if anyone has ever heard a sound rebuttal or reply in defense of the faith to the charge that we don’t have the original manuscripts of the gospels and letters of the New Testament. I was made aware of this by reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus; as far as I know its basically undisputed historical information. None of the critical book reviews I’ve read of Ehrman’s book take him to task for stating that we don’t have the originals. In your view, does this seroiusly undermine the reliability of the Bible and the Catholic faith? Anyone’s thoughts would be appreciated.
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As a humanist/freethinker, it doesn’t undermine anything except if someone is saying that the NT contains eyewitness accounts. You can only say it contains probable accounts about accounts.

Does it undermine the Catholic faith per se? No, not in my opinion.
 
How would we even know if we had the original manuscripts?
How could such a thing be proven to the intellectual satisfaction of scholars and historians who doubt the validity of the Church or who have theories of their own about its origins and development?
What do they think the originals really said? Could the original manuscripts even be identified as such at this distance of time? Wouldn’t the scholars and historians doubt the original manuscripts and what they contained just like they doubt
what we already have in our Bibles?

The best “proof” of the authenticity of the Gospels and letters of the New Testament is not to be sought for in “original sources” but in the lives of the saints. The saints who go out of their way to be uncompromisingly good – to love in abundance,to forgive always,to show mercy on the needy,to care for the sick,to feed the hungry,to give to the poor,to speak truth to power without fear,to embrace poverty and find freedom in it,to defend the weak,to forgive while enduring persecution,torture,and being put to death. This kind of behavior is wildly abnormal and beyond human capacity. It is not of human origin. It is only possible to live like this with divine help and it points back to the Jesus Christ of the Bible.
The saints do what they do not on their own capacities or pride or authority,but on commandment from Jesus Christ,who did what he did and said what he said on authority from his Father.
This is all the proof of the authenicity of what is said in the Gospels and letters that is necessary.
 
anthony022071 said:
How would we even know if we had the original manuscripts?
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Historians have their methods.
anthony022071 said:
How could such a thing be proven to the intellectual satisfaction of scholars and historians who doubt the validity of the Church or who have theories of their own about its origins and development?
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Christian scholars know they aren’t the original ones. For example, they know that two of the synoptic gospels are based on Matthew, and that Matthew is based on some hypothetic source they call “Q” (German for ‘Quelle’, which means ‘source’).
 
From Proving Inspiration:
Sir Frederic Kenyon, in The Story of the Bible, notes that “For all the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts written long after their original composition. The author who is the best case in this respect is Virgil, yet the earliest manuscript of Virgil that we now possess was written some 350 years after his death. For all other classical writers, the interval between the date of the author and the earliest extant manuscript of his works is much greater. For Livy it is about 500 years, for Horace 900, for most of Plato 1,300, for Euripides 1,600.” Yet no one seriously disputes that we have accurate copies of the works of these writers. However, in the case of the New Testament we have parts of manuscripts dating from the first and early second centuries, only a few decades after the works were penned.
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Not only are the biblical manuscripts that we have older than those for classical authors, we have in sheer numbers far more manuscripts from which to work. Some are whole books of the Bible, others fragments of just a few words, but there are literally thousands of manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and other languages. This means that we can be sure we have an authentic text, and we can work from it with confidence.
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LogosSokratikos said:
Christian scholars know they aren’t the original ones. For example, they know that two of the synoptic gospels are based on Matthew, and that Matthew is based on some hypothetic source they call “Q” (German for ‘Quelle’, which means ‘source’).
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While off topic, the statement above is contested by many scholars.
 
LogosSokratikos said:
Historians have their methods.

Christian scholars know they aren’t the original ones. For example, they know that two of the synoptic gospels are based on Matthew, and that Matthew is based on some hypothetic source they call “Q” (German for ‘Quelle’, which means ‘source’).
Click to expand...
I meant that even if someone were to discover the very earliest written sources,there would be no way to prove conclusively that they were,in fact,the originals,because the history gets so murky and indistinct prior to the 2nd century AD. We are talking about hypothetical,“undocumented” documents of unverifiable origin from two thousand years ago and events that took place without having been documented when they took place. Outside of the New Testament,Jesus is practically a historical non-entity. As to the methods of Biblical historians,there is always some philosophy behind those methods,as with exegesis.
As to the Q source, if it is hypothetical , how can anyone seriously “know” in a scientific way if it is a source of Matthew?
 
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