Live at Nine from London, February, 2010

Good evening and welcome to live at nine tonight. Our subject is the reliability of the New Testament and We're going to be looking at the importance of how the New Testament has come to be in our possession today.

There's so much discussion. There's no much argument. There's so much debate on the authenticity of the New Testament and today We're going to be looking at this very very important subject and tonight.

We have a very very special guest with us Dr.. James are white James welcome to the program. It's great to be with you. James is the director of the Alpha and the Omega ministries based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He's the professor of taught Greek and systematic theology. Dr.. Weiss also engaged in over 50 debates debating all kinds of people from Mormons Jehovah's Witnesses and everybody in between and He's an elder of the church there a Baptist Reformed Baptist Church in Phoenix Phoenix, Arizona.

So a warm welcome to you James. It's great to be back. I just want to say you know we were talking about I can't believe it an accent like that. You said you've got Scottish origin. I.

Loved it going back to Scotland the land of my roots. Unbelievable. I actually have a picture of my my great-grandparents in Broken Bow, Nebraska in 1889 and Yet, I know they were married in Dundee in 1885 so somewhere between 1885 and 1889 they emigrated the states.

And that's just one of the lines. I've traced traced back all the way to 1590s in Scotland so 1590 1590s.

Yes, there's also your name is quite famous with this a lemonade or lemon pop.

Named after you. I don't think it is actually no connections. No no connections at all folks.

He's not lemon when he comes to the subject attempt. And we're going to be looking at this subject. And I hope many people out there got questions to to ask and you can do that. You can join. It's an interactive program so you can text us Oh seven seven eight one four seven two six four seven or email us live at talk .com.

Make your questions succinct to the point and don't give me half a page full of information. I won't be able to read it so make sure that is pointing to the program that we are doing tonight and Join with us and as we as we explore this very very important topic.

Thank you for joining us and God bless you. As you watch the program. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and you already done it, but a little bit about your Christian experience.

Well, I grew up in a Christian family I had the blessing of having well as I said as far back as we can trace and my father's side Ministers all the way back to Scotland and so I heard the gospel at a very very young age and As a very young man the Lord had mercy upon me.

I remember very clearly the little little church in the Minneapolis in the Minnesota area Where I gave my my heart to the Lord. In fact just only right at about seven weeks ago my mother passed away and I Had the recollection of seeing her as I as I my dad picked me up it as a young boy in that church service looking over his shoulder and seeing her playing the piano and weeping away as she did.

So a wonderful thing to Have a Christian family that kind of Christian upbring. I live in Phoenix, Arizona which is about as unlike London weather-wise as you can possibly have and consider that home have been there for Coming up coming up and getting close to 40 years there now, and we've seen 50 degrees C in the shade there Which is a little bit on the warm side, but I love it there and I'm an elder in the church at the Phoenix Horn Baptist Church there.

My wife is a native there both of my children have been born there and.

So it's a it's a beautiful place to live well. I had the privilege of visiting Phoenix. I understand exactly what you mean by the 50 degrees. I remember taking about four. Four showers on the day now.

Let's get to the serious matters. You mentioned about faith. You talk about your. Your encounter with Jesus or Jesus encounter with you in Romans 10 17 tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing the Word of God.

How can we be sure that the very words of Jesus and the teachings of the Apostles which followed? are accurately documented in the New Testament and.

Therefore reliable. There are two things that I think we need to we need to emphasize. First I since we're gonna be talking a lot about history and manuscripts and translations. Sometimes people get the feeling that there's not a spiritual aspect to these things.

But there is in Luke chapter 24 when the Lord Jesus is meeting with the disciples after his resurrection. It specifically says that he opened their minds so that they might understand The scriptures and specifically what the scriptures had said about him.

So there is a spiritual aspect that I'm afraid is very frequently missing in the public discussions about the Bible. There is an unprecedented attack upon the reliability of the text of New Testament today on both sides of the pond.

Shall we say? There are so many people that are given free reign in most of the media to say anything about the New Testament and very Rarely do the mainstream outlets want to allow any response? From a Christian perspective on this that's one of the reasons we do debates in these subjects.

I've debated John Dominic Cross and one of the co-founders of the Jesus seminar on the historical reliability of the Gospels. Last year I debated Bart Ehrman who's probably the leading critic of New Testament Christianity in the United States today.

Again on the subject of the reliability of the text in New Testament so we can go toe-to-toe in the public arena. We're just not given very many opportunities to do it and Certainly today believers need to understand where their Bible came from and why they can trust that when You read Romans chapter 10 or when you read John chapter 6 or Matthew chapter 11 or whatever it is.

You're looking at that what you're reading has been preserved by God over time for us. So that it is an accurate representation of what the original authors Wrote and what was transmitted from those disciples to us today?

That's extremely important especially because there's so many people that are trying to. I don't know if over on this side of the pond you remember a actress by name of Shirley MacLaine. But Shirley MacLaine in the United States went off into New Age mysticism and things like that and she started going around telling people that when The Bible is originally written it used to promote reincarnation and then a certain counsel came along and took it all out.

And We need to as Christians recognize those kinds of arguments and understand why those things are completely impossible. Not only did it not happen historically. But why it is impossible that it could have happened in a historical sense.

Because the internet especially has made it possible for every kind of wild-eyed theory to be given a Tremendous voice that that couldn't have happened only 20 years ago. And so we need to know the history of the New Testament.

We need to know where it came from why we can trust it and When we take the time to learn those things then we learn that we can truly believe that that's what Paul wrote to the Romans. That's exactly what he meant to write the Romans and we can understand what he said time and time again.

What we get is from the people who you mentioned and others who meant it was sympathetic to Christian ideas. And they use this whole argument. Oh. Where are the original texts right? You know how how was it transmitted?

It's all Chinese whispers. You know, it's all it's all you know. We can't be sure as to what you know. Is do we have the very words of Jesus or has it been tampered with has it been you know? It's it's coming from all angles religious angles, you know, there are those who?

Say, you know, this is not reliable. You can't trust it. So when people say I believe. That's a question. They are they need to have a good foundation.

You know a lot of people when they are introduced to the faith assume that the Bible Has always existed in a leather-bound copy with gold edges and thumb indexing and that's that's not really how the Bible came to Exist.

In fact, that's a fairly modern version of the Bible. Once Christians come to understand that God has always worked with his people in bringing his word into existence in the Old Testament through the prophets his people Israel very very carefully preserving those texts and it was primarily a Text written to the people of Israel, but then we come to the New Testament.

The fact that these authors are writing at multiple times. They're writing to multiple locations. The New Testament was not written by one group of men at one time to where they could edit. Control these are written by multiple authors at different times going to different places now.

That bothers some people. Some people wish that sort of like a modern computer manual. The New Testament was was very closely edited and controlled by one small group so that you could make sure that there's no Differences in style, but there are differences in style.

Anyone who reads first John and then reads Hebrews knows that there's a tremendous Huge difference in style there that is one of the problems of some of the English translations We have today that simplify the text so much is you don't see as much of that.

When you actually read it in the original languages there's a huge difference between first John and Hebrews or Luke or something like that and that sometimes troubles people that's actually a wonderfully positive thing because you see.

Most of the accusations that are made against the New Testament have to do with controlled editing. Putting in doctrines that were not there originally. Taking out doctrines that were there originally the only way that you could do that is If you had a man or more likely a group of men.

Who could control the text as it's being written and then as it's being in essence sent out to the world once? It's sent out and people start making copies it's no longer under anybody's control and. So you'd have to have that kind of centralized editing and unfortunately you see things on television all the time.

Alleging exactly that you'd have these hooded monks in dark rooms. You know and they're they're they're making things up as they go along the fact the matter is. That's not how the New Testament was ever existed.

It's not how it was written in any way shape or form. There's never been a man or a group of men that controlled the text of New Testament. Paul is traveling from city to city to city and When he when he has need to write to the church of Corinth because they're having some major problems.

He writes the church of Corinth when he's in prison in Rome. He writes to other churches and and these are simply letters that were Folded up or rolled up and stuck in a you know a leather pouch and a man walking along roads or maybe riding a horse or a donkey or something like that and Riding on a ship took these letters to those various churches.

It was not carried by angels. It didn't glow in the pack these were the ways that God worked with his people and Those letters went out and they were then copied. You may you may notice in Colossians chapter 4 verse 16 for example Paul says that to the church there that they are.

Yeah, I'm claustrophobic therefore that they are to You know be looking for a letter that was good. That's gonna be coming to them. We've always wondered well what letter might that might that be that was probably Ephesians.

Which was a letter that was circulated around the Lycus River Valley and so they would have that one. They would then have another and then maybe someone comes through and they have a copy of Paul's letter to the church of Philippi.

Well, we'd like to have that too. So they'd make a copy these copies began to go all Over the Roman Empire very very quickly. We have some ancient ancient papyri of These letters from a very early papyri.

So papyri is is is the early church wasn't filled with rich people and They used the the cheapest kind of writing material available Which was made from taking the leaves of the papyrus plant putting them at 90 degree angles to one another and there's a drawing process.

It makes a fairly fairly smooth surface. And so they would Write on this this material and they would want to make copies and so we have found some of these ancient ancient Copies of Paul's letters of the Gospels of of all portions of New Testament from the 2nd century which is you know within a hundred years of that that that important initial period of time and Some of those have been buried in the sands of Egypt for forever.

Now think about it. Let's say 300 years after the time of Christ some Roman Emperor does decide that he wants to Change something about the New Testament. And so he gathers up what he can find in Rome and Makes a bunch of changes and puts out a new version then 500 years a thousand years later.

We start digging up these other papyri. The changed versions which come later are going to stand out By comparison with these earlier manuscripts. But that's not what has happened as we find the earlier and earlier Manuscripts and you have a number of them right here in in in the United Kingdom.

Some of the earliest papyri available right here for study. They show us that those kind of things never took place. And so for example, remember how popular Dan Brown's the Da Vinci Code. I was going to come to that.

Here you have this this fictional work and it's a work of fiction. Unfortunately, many people think that it's not a work of fiction.

But this work of fiction is a work of fiction, isn't it?

Well, it's it's actually the first page when it was originally printed said that all the factual information in this book is true. And that's just not the case at all. In fact, Dan Brown had most things exactly backwards.

For example, he talked about the Gnostic Gospels and how they presented Jesus as just a regular man and then Constantine comes along and writes the Matthew Mark Luke and John and Turns Jesus into a God.

The exact opposite is the case. The Gnostic Gospels are the ones that present Jesus as not having a real physical body just sort of floating around and doing miraculous things. And not only that but we have manuscripts of for example, the Gospel of John that predate Constantine by over two centuries that clearly proclaim him to be God so.

That type of stuff. Unfortunately when people take their their history of the Bible from works of fiction It produces some some real problems. But the reality is that when you compare the New Testament to any other work of antiquity contemporaneous with the New Testament, for example Pliny Tacitus Suetonius, these are Latin historical writers.

When you compare the New Testament to them, what do you discover? Well the average time frame between the writing of a classical work and our first copy is between five and 900 years.

Five to nine hundred years. We have. There's a there's a gap.

There's a gap between when it was originally written and the first copy we have of half a millennium to almost a full millennium. That's average for works of that time period. What about the New Testament better or worse?

Actually, we have at least 12, maybe 13 papyri fragments dated to the second century of a number of the New Testament books not all. But a number of the test books because remember the New Testament was not written as a single body.

It was written as multiple works and collected together over time. And so 500 to 900 years. 100 years for major portions of the New Testament. So in my debate with Bart Ehrman in Early 2009. I asked him the question.

He had been on a radio program here in London in fact and had talked about the enormous time period between when Paul wrote Galatians and Our first copy which is only about a hundred and fifty years. And so I asked him if that's enormous.

What would you describe as the time period between when Suetonius was written and the first and he said?

Very enormous because Ehrman is a Believer. Oh, no, he's not. He used to be a believer of some sort. He's an apostate. Yeah, and that's it. That's not an insult. Well, he's not here to he's not here to defend himself.

He himself in his book says that he was once a believer. Let me just track back. Yeah.

Let me just track back a little bit because you mentioned the fact that the papyri used and then we get the codex kind of books situation, right the. Because the New Testament writers were Jews apart from Luke being maybe Gentile of origin.

But would they have not used the scrolls as the the Old Testament people. Very interesting question.

We have found very few New Testament manuscripts in a scroll format. Some have found that to be so compelling that they theorize that Christians actually in the West invented the codex format. One of the reasons for that might be ease of Finding certain references in the teachings of Jesus.

It's a lot easier to find something in a book than it is in a scroll. I mean you can get huge forearms working with a scroll but but it's a pretty difficult to find things quickly. The other more likely possibility is that it was much less expensive.

Most people only wrote on one side of papyri because you'd sort of have the Backside would be much more rough. But almost every New Testament papyri manuscript we have is written on both sides because remember as Paul said the early Christians What were they?

There were not many wise among you not many well-born. There weren't. They were the lower classes and so they wouldn't have money to be buying a whole lot of Extra paper and things like that when they were hand copying the text.

So they may have been the ones who actually originated the codex format.

The reason I asked that because because there's a scribal tradition among the Jews is also the oral tradition. And they were very good at they were much better at listening because they didn't have the distractions of Internets and microwaves and televisions and they're very good at you know, remembering or retaining information and and repeating them.

Verbatim and I've been to India and other parts part of the world I've seen people who are illiterate who could just listen to the Word of God and actually Speak it out and you know Astonishing. And I met people who can do the whole of the book of Romans.

They're in the 80s and they still can do that so if people modern man can do that how much more the ancient people who were Very astute in these things. So could there be something about the way that they preserve these things and in oral traditions?

The the oral tradition issue primarily comes up when you're talking about how especially the the Gospels themselves were written and. The question becomes when were the Gospels written now. Many in scholarship today opt for rather rate late dates on the writing of the gospel.

Personally, I have found the the theory that as you know, Luke writes Luke and acts together. I have a feeling that there's there's fairly decent support for the idea that Luke wrote that as what might we might call an amicus brief for Paul's trial in Rome.

He was demonstrating that Paul was not a revolutionary why the the Jewish people were opposing him the way that they were and If that's the case and his trial is around 60 ish. Then if that puts Luke around that point it would probably put mark earlier than that into the 50s or even late 40s.

And so there's I don't see any reason not to view it that way and yet people would still say well Let's say let's say mark was in 50 that's still 17 years after the time of Christ. What about that? Intervening period.

How can we know that that that information is passed on accurately and as you may well know a? Scottish New Testament professor Dr. Richard Balcombe here in the kingdom has written a tremendous book called Jesus and the eyewitnesses.

Where he reminds us that the eyewitnesses remained an extremely important part of the early church. For many many decades and certainly all through that period. When the oral traditions would be being passed around it wasn't just simply I whisper something in your ear.

You whisper in somebody else's ear like the old phone game where it gets to the fourth or fifth person. And it's no longer even the same language. That's not how the traditions of Jesus teaching would have been Possessed within the the the congregation.

It wouldn't have been just one person there would have been maybe some eyewitnesses. But it would have been many people passing this along and that that provides a very good Control shall we say for the accuracy of those stories as they are passed along.

Can I throw in something else also?

The 27 books of the New Testament. And there are those who argue that that the these were written completed before the 70 80s. And because there's no mention of the destruction of the temple on these right and also the fact that John being the one to die naturally I in that island of pub knows he wasn't martyred like others.

He he would have been a person to attest to many of the writings about even the Gospels. So there's a living Apostle who can look back and correlate and and and maybe Go through it if you like. And then there are his disciples Polycarp and others who lived on further than them that they were able to attest to the New Testament document and say this is good.

This is wrong. And could you tell us a little bit about the canon you mentioned about the fact that these were all over the place going all over the place. Where's that an attempt? I mean I know Dan Brown talks about the Constantine coming together and all that and all that maybe you can address that well.

That's this before that because you'd be coming to 325 320 there so we can you just mention the fact is there any argument for the fact that because the persecution had broken out and The church was persecuted so any document.

They had would have been subvert subversive because it spoke against The the system. Laban I say so so to speak and Obviously mentioning that Jesus is Lord and Caesar being God and all of those tensions.

So they were risking their lives with the document. So is there is there?

An argument for for these things about an entire history of the Roman Empire from the time of Christ the Constantine. How much time do we have. There's so much there. In regards to the canon as well as I'll put it as succinctly as I can.

It is important to remember that the early Christian movement was a persecuted movement. This is especially important regards to New Testament manuscripts because we know that the Romans especially in the later Persecution for about 260 through 313 when the persecution ended.

That was the most severe portion of it Empire wide and they were focused upon the destruction of manuscripts. Thousands of manuscripts were destroyed during that time period and so in light of that. Keeping that in mind when I look at those ancient manuscripts I think of these fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who risked their lives.

To possess the Word of God we can go down to a bookshop and buy multiple translations. But those folks had to hand copy what they had. I wonder how much most of us would have if we had to hand copy the only portions of scripture.

We would have they truly loved those those scriptures, but when it comes to the issue of the the canon of scripture You need to recognize that the Council of Nicaea had absolutely positively nothing to do with the canon of scripture.

I cannot tell you how many groups Believe that the Council of Nicaea Added this book or took that book out. Dan Brown hasn't helped with that. But that's something that comes up all the time. The Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of scripture.

In fact around 180 185 we have what's called the Muratorian fragment and This is a fragment that contains depending on how you read it as much as 95 of our modern New Testament now remember. They didn't have fax machines back then they didn't have the internet and so.

Thankfully there was a discernment process that went along and you're probably aware of the New Testament book that had the hardest time gaining eventual full support of all believers. And that was the book of Revelation right and I'm thankful for that because any book that talks about seven-headed creatures I want it to be examined very carefully before it's put into the canon of scripture.

It wasn't like the Christians were just going. Oh, well this you know does it say something about Jesus? We'll take it. That's not how they that's not how they operated. In fact it's very common for people to say that there are all these Gospels running around and It was not till the Council of Nicaea.

They voted on it. And they kept only the four and they they got rid of the gospel of Thomas and all the rest of stuff. That's just simply not the case. The reality is that There are no Gospels that are meaningfully Capable of being traced to the first century other than Matthew Mark Luke and John there are Fringe scholars who would say that well, maybe there's you know.

Maybe there's some tradition in the gospel of Thomas or something that might go back to the time of Jesus. But they have absolutely no Documentary evidence of this whatsoever and the reality is that the viewpoints expressed especially the Gnostic Gospels Clearly come from the second century and they come from a completely different worldview than would have been present in first century Jerusalem or Galilee Where you used to have clear evidence that Matthew Mark Luke and John are Firmly rooted in that historical setting and so what you see is the same kind of process between the time of Christ and Normally, the New Testament is considered to be Fully recognized by the end of the fourth century that the first list we have of all the New Testament books like we have them Is Athanasius 39th Festal letter and I believe is 367 and then you have some counsel at the end of time.

But remember those counsels first of all, they were not worldwide counsel. Secondly, there was never a council sat around said well Shall we have Matthew or shall we not have method that never took place?

The church never thought it had the power to create the canon of Scripture Instead just as in the Old Testament. There was a period of time where God's people passively Recognized what was scripture and what was not the the 39 books of our Old Testament?

They counted them as 22 back then because the the minor prophets were considered one book and Lamentations was in with Jeremiah and so on so forth. Those were laid up in the temple and considered holy as much as 200 years before Christ.

So it took about 200 years for that to be seen. Muratorian fragment is about 200 years after the time of Christ very similar time frames. That we have for both the Old Testament in the New Testament as far as the recognition recognition of the canon.

It was never a matter of Oh, we had all these other books. The Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel the Egyptians and and those mean nasty bishops took them out or something like that.

That's just that's wishful thinking as far as church history is concerned. Okay, let me just throw this at you because it keeps coming up I mean wherever I go this comes to me as well. So I'm gonna try this on you the whole area of this that the movement of the text, you know.

The the ones that is going south to Alexandria the ones going to Antioch. Later becomes a Byzantium text or the received text or the Texas Receptus. Versus that there is a there's a thinking that says that the the ones that went northwards and the ones that went southwards.

There's a difference between them that one being corrupt the ones being gone to the south being corrupted Through Gnostic ideas and people messing about with it twisting the words adding taking away whereas the the the ones that went northwards were true to the original Language and Greek etc.

And and this whole debate with the King James Bible and there are those who promote that the King James only is the true version. Of course, we're not talking about English here. We're talking, you know, there's a two arguments to that if you can address the both things if possible one is the the the root in which this translations come from and then there's a Westcott and Hort debate of 1881 and all that and the new versions has come out out of it.

I'm giving you a big big question. People like Marcus I was talking about and Carol Talk about all these kind of things, you know, they're talking about the apocrypha. What's that doing in the Bible? Oh goodness, and it's talking about our Roman Catholic friends having the apocrypha including into that text.

If you can talk about the the movement of the text and are there any there are variants obviously we come up come. We'll come to that because some of the questions are talking about there's different variants.

So if you can just touch on that very very quickly.

You have Manuscripts that are found the most ancient manuscripts are found in Egypt. The reason for that is primarily climatological that is that's one of the few places in the world where papyri could last for 1800 to 2 ,000 years because it's so dry.

You just are not going to find ancient papyri manuscripts in Italy. It rains too much so. What has happened is the earliest manuscripts have been identified as the Alexandrian? Manuscripts and there are those who claim that there are particular biases and in fact corruptions in these Alexandrian manuscripts.

Especially allegedly denying the deity of Christ and things like that over against what's called the the Byzantine Manuscript tradition which primarily flows from around Byzantium ancient Constantinople modern-day Istanbul.

The the problem with these theories are many first of all just simply as one who studies these Variations in depth. I mean I debate with Muslim apologists all the time. I need to know those variations intimately.

The reality is that the Alexandrian text is not in any way shape or form corrupted. It very plainly teaches the deity of Christ, etc. Etc. And in fact interestingly enough in history Those who denied the deity of Christ called Arians were primarily focused in the area around Byzantium.

And the great man who defended the deity of Christ in fact kicked out of his church five times for doing so was the Bishop of Alexandria Egypt Athanasius and so. There needs to be some care taken in you know, just knowing your church history at things like that.

But in the modern times what has happened is We have a text a called the textus receptus. It's called that because of an advertising blurb in 1633 the Elsevier brothers had printed an edition of this Greek text.

And back then even advertising were done in Latin. Can you imagine if they were done in Latin today? And so. They called it the text that has been received by all. Actually, that was a text based upon the work of Desiderius Erasmus the great Dutch humanist scholar Who put out the first published and printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516.

He did five editions. Stephanus in the middle of the century did an edition and Theodore Beza Calvin's successor Geneva did an edition at the end of the century the King James translators between 1604 and 1611 as they translated the New Testament, especially Drew from those printed texts primarily using the 1598 Beza.

The blue case bound Texas receptus that you can buy here in London today Is actually a Greek text based upon an English text. What happened was a man by the name of Scrivener Went back. He looked at the choices that the King James translators made between those various printed editions of Greek New Testament Erasmus Stephanus and Beza.

He saw which ones they chose and he created a Greek text based upon the textual decisions made by the King James translators. There is no manuscript in the world that reads exactly like that. TR. It is a text based upon the choices made by the King James translator are those who argue against that obviously.

Well, they I don't think they argue against its history. Its history is is well No, what they would argue is that the Byzantine manuscript tradition as a whole. Yeah is.

Superior to the Alexandrian manuscript tradition because the fact that you mentioned the fact that it's older, right? But just because something is older doesn't mean is it is reliable. Well, that's the argument I'm aware of that.

The problem is first of all, I think we need to recognize there are at least 1 ,800 differences between the TR. And what's called the majority text which is what the text that you would create if you looked at all the Byzantine manuscripts Erasmus only had about half a dozen to a dozen manuscripts to work from so the TR is different than that.

So even if we put the TR aside for a second just look at the Byzantine manuscript tradition versus the Alexandrian manuscript tradition. Yes, the Byzantine does contain ancient readings that are a part of all modern English translations however, the prevailing viewpoint amongst the vast majority of scholars is that if you have Manuscripts that come from the 2nd century.

That they have far fewer generations of copying between them and the original. Then manuscripts that are from the 7th to the 10th to the 14th century. Now there may be there are for example of 1739 1881 our 10th 11th century manuscripts.

So we can we know we're copies from very ancient manuscripts. There weren't a lot of generations between them. So there are some that you know that are older. But they don't tend to agree with the Byzantine text the Byzantine text tends to be a text that has been smoothed out over time and so there's a lot of reasons why.

We need to look at the text and not take a dogmatic stance. We need to allow all the information to speak. We have over five thousand almost five thousand seven hundred and sixty Manuscripts today catalog manuscripts of the Greek New Testament today.

They had far fewer than that in the 16th century when these these texts originally Derived we have a tremendous amount of information more than any other work of antiquity. By far that leads us into the issue of the textual variance because obviously If you only have one text only one copy of a text how many textual variants you're going to have none.

But you also have to trust that one copy is it that person had to do a perfect job. Obviously, it's far better to have many copies of a book Especially hand in a handwritten form to be able to determine and understand what the original text actually said and there is no work of antiquity that has a greater textual witness than the New Testament earlier or Wides more widespread than the New Testament.