New Testament Artifacts-IAC Training Video

The Early Greek Manuscripts of the New Testament

Now, this is a recreation of a papyrus that contained a fragment of the Gospel of Matthew. As you'll notice here, it's a very realistic recreation. It's actually just paper, but it's been wrinkled and printed in such a way to make it look very much like a real papyrus document.

Now this is a very early Greek manuscript. It dates to around 250 AD, which places it within 200 years of the original writing of the Gospel of Matthew. So that makes it a very early document when talking about how close the manuscripts we have today are in relation to the original writing.

The earliest New Testament documents we have date to around 125 AD, which place it within about 75 years of the original writings of the New Testament books. That's really important to talk about when talking about the reliability of the New Testament because the New Testament is by far the best attested book of antiquity.

We have more manuscripts in the New Testament than any other book of antiquity by far. We have around 5 ,800 manuscripts in the original Greek of the New Testament. For other books, we might have maybe only 10 copies of the book.

For example, Caesar's Gaelic Wars only has about 10 copies of it, and the oldest ones date to 1 ,000 years after the original writing. When talking about the reliability of the Bible, it's very important to emphasize this.

Fact.

We don't have the original writings of the New Testament authors anymore. All we have is copies, but nonetheless, we can still know what the original authors said because we have so many copies and because we have such early copies.

Codex Vaticanus and Its Significance for Bible Scholars

So now let's take a look at our next couple artifacts. These are copies of ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. They're printed copies of them. So let's take a look at them. First we have Codex Vaticanus and then Codex Sinaiticus.

We'll start with the smaller of the two. This is Codex Vaticanus, and here you can see the inside of it. It's not a replica of the Codex Vaticanus. It shows what the text looked like from high-quality photographs.

Here you can see it's written in Greek on animal skin called vellum. Codex Vaticanus dates to around 300 to about 325 AD. It's a very early manuscript. It contains most of the books of the New Testament.

Now this particular copy just contains the New Testament, but the original Codex Vaticanus also contains some of the books of the Old Testament written in Greek, known as the Septuagint. Now this is a very early manuscript, as I said before, so it's considered important to Bible scholars for understanding how the Bible was passed down to us.

Codex Sinaiticus and Uncial Script

So let's take a look at the next artifact, which is Codex Sinaiticus. Now Codex Sinaiticus is called Codex Sinaiticus because it was discovered in the Sinai Peninsula at a monastery called St. Catherine's Monastery.

Here you can see what the text looks like on the inside. This is a much bigger copy, and it contains the full text of Codex Sinaiticus. Like Codex Vaticanus, it's also just the pictures of the text, very high-quality pictures, but it's not an actual replica.

You can see the text more clearly in Codex Sinaiticus, the pictures are much larger. And in Codex Sinaiticus, as well as Codex Vaticanus, we find a type of writing called unseal script. Now unseal script uses majuscule letters, which are big letters, and they're all strung together in single lines.

There's no breaks between words. That's what makes it an unseal text. The estimated date for Codex Sinaiticus is around the middle of the 4th century, so around 350 AD. Codex Sinaiticus, as well as Codex Vaticanus, are early witnesses to the text of the New Testament.

They're very early manuscripts, so they're both considered some of the most important manuscripts we have of the New Testament. And like Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus contained much of the New Testament, as well as many of the books of the Old Testament.

So it's a very neat artifact. Both of these are very neat artifacts that you can use when talking about the reliability of the New Testament. They're just very visual. You can set them out on tables like this, and have your audience come by and flip through the pages and examine them for themselves, so they can see what the original text actually looks like.

Let's close this up. And you have to warn you, Codex Sinaiticus is a monster of a book. It's huge and it's very heavy, so take special care when you're carrying it. So as to make sure that you don't drop it or damage it, we need more people to be able to use these artifacts.

So just be careful when you're carrying it. It's very heavy. So let's take a look at the last artifact we have in the Reliability of the Bible collection. This right here is a replica of one of the Nag Hammadi Gospel Codices.

The Gospel of Thomas and the Gnostic Gospels

And the Nag Hammadi Gospel Codices are considered important by many critics of the faith, because they contain what's called the Gnostic Gospels. One of the most famous of these is called the Gospel of Thomas.

You've probably heard of the Gospel of Thomas. The liberal Jesus Seminar scholars made it famous because they actually claim that the Gospel of Thomas is more true to what Jesus actually said than some of the canonical Gospels like the Gospel of John.

And so it's a very neat recreation. I do have to say that. Just take a look at it here with me. It's leather-bound. You can see the inside of it here is actual papyri. So it's a very, very cool recreation of the original codices.

The text is actually written in a language called Coptic that was used in Egypt. These manuscripts were discovered in Egypt back in the 1800s. When talking about these manuscripts, you can talk about how we know that the Gnostic Gospels are not part of the New Testament because of the fact that they contain a version of a religion known as Gnosticism, which dates to the 2nd century AD, which shows that it wasn't written during the time of the Apostles who wrote down the canonical Gospels.

Now, many people talk about the Gospel of Thomas like it's on the same footing as the canonical Gospels, but in reality, the Gospel of Thomas is actually not really a Gospel.

At all.

Actually, what it is is it's a collection of 114 supposed sayings of Jesus that have no historical context, no biographical information at all, which makes it very different from the canonical Gospels, which contain lots of biographical information about Jesus and many quotes from the Old Testament verifying that he indeed is the Messiah of Israel who is prophesied in the Old Testament.

You don't find that with the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas has a Gnostic religious background rather than a 1st century Jewish religious background like the New Testament, so it's not really an authentic Gospel and there's really no reason to believe that it has anything to do with the historical Jesus.

In fact, the only thing it really has to do with the historical Jesus is it appears in some cases that the writer of Thomas was plagiarizing from the canonical Gospels, that he was copying down those sayings and maybe changing them a little bit, but we really don't have any reason to believe that Thomas has anything to do with the original Gospels and in fact was a late forgery.

So it's a really neat artifact that you can use when talking about the reliability of the Bible and specifically talking about the canon and why the canonical Gospels are legitimate whereas the others like Thomas are not.

Using the Artifacts to Teach Reliability and Canon

So we've made it through all the artifacts and the reliability of the Bible collection. I hope you really enjoy using these. These are really powerful tools that I hope you take advantage of and I hope your audience will enjoy them just as much as I've enjoyed sharing them with you.

So enjoy using them and may our Lord bless you as you do.