The Early Textual Transmission of the NT

So, just a few moments ago, we had someone pop into our chat channel, and you can always tell when someone just flies into the channel, as soon as they join, they immediately throw out a challenging statement, that things are going to be interesting, and this is probably the first time they've used your chat channel, and I could tell, because the initial challenge was about the first couple hundred years of the transmission of the text of the New Testament, we were probably dealing with a Muslim, and looking at the host mask, when you come into a chat channel, by the way, if you've never done it, those who are used to dealing with chat channels can sort of tell where you're coming from, sometimes, by what's called your host mask, it looked like this person was coming from England, and so after a little bit of chit-chat and trying to find out exactly where this person was coming from, we found out, indeed, he is a Muslim from England, and basically, he was challenging me, looking for me, and challenging me, on this issue of why we believe that the form of the text that we have in the earliest papyri manuscripts of the New Testament reflects what was originally written by the authors.

Now, of course, if there is reason to assume some sort of redaction or editing in the history of a text before its earliest manuscript evidence, then that's a question that needs to be addressed. From the Muslim perspective, this is absolutely necessary, because in the modern Muslim understanding, notice I said modern, this was not the view of the earliest generations of Muslims, but in the modern Muslim understanding, the New Testament, the fact that it teaches things so contrary to those things that are taught by Muhammad and the Quran, therefore, clearly, the New Testament cannot reflect the original followers of Jesus, though that was not the primitive Islamic belief.

Well, because of that, then, they want to cast doubt upon the veracity of the transmission of the text in the New Testament, and it was a good question. I mean, how do we know, or do we know, that the text that is written, let's say, I happen to throw out in this conversation, Luke Acts, somewhere around the early 60s, we get our first evidence of that, not including the Church Fathers, which is a very important aspect of it, not including manuscripts like P52, very small little fragments, but we get a full enough manuscript of Luke or Matthew or whatever of these texts we want to look at, around the year 200 or so, P46, P66, P75, P72, we start really seeing the New Testament text as a corpus existing around that time period, and what it reflects is what we have in the modern editions of the Greek New Testament today.

But what about that in between time? Well, it almost seemed like what he was saying was that if we don't have the originals, then we just can't know, which would mean that you'd have to engage that kind of radical skepticism about any ancient document whatsoever, because the same thing is true in regards to the Quran or to the Hadith or any ancient document whatsoever.

You don't have the originals, and in the New Testament, you have a very, very, very early witness, but you don't have the original documents. And so I tried to explain to him, I said, well, look, what you need to realize is not only the context in which the New Testament was originally copied, that of persecution, you also need to recognize there are multiple authors writing from multiple places at multiple times.

That makes trying to make wholesale changes very, very difficult. And if we have a textual platform that appears in AD 200, and we don't have any evidence whatsoever of a wildly variant textual platform that, oh, maybe wouldn't teach that Jesus was the son of God, or maybe would present Jesus as a Muslim, or maybe would have prophecies of Muhammad in John 14 and 16, perhaps, where is the evidence of the existence of this textual platform?

If it existed, it disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving the slightest bit of evidence behind. How could that have happened? If a person is going to say, well, I believe that that's what was there originally, then they probably need to give some evidence to substantiate that kind of assertion, and they then need to explain how it is that you can get the New Testament text appearing in separated geographical areas of the New Testament universe, if in point of fact the transmission of that text up to that time was actually the transmission of a number of different kinds of text.

How does one text end up every place if there are all sorts of different texts being transmitted? And that, again, raises the issue, and how could any one of those texts have just, poof, disappeared from the face of the earth?

Those are the questions I was asking, and I honestly didn't get much of a response, but it was somewhat refreshing in comparison to some of the conversations that we have had with some of the Muslims that have come and channeled.

But it was also interesting then to recognize that our Muslim friends are listening and was aware of the doctoral program in regards to studying the transmission of the text of the Quran, the transmission of the text of the New Testament, and that's exciting as well.

And so it was a very excellent question, but I think we provided a response, and unfortunately all our English Muslim friends seemed to hear was, well, it's just a theoretical reconstruction and you can take it one way or you can take it another way.

That's not what I said. When we kept asking, all right, if you're going to say that there was this other textual platform that's just simply disappeared, then what evidence do you give positively of its existence, and secondly, how do you explain the cohesion, coherence, consistency of the textual platform that we see in those earliest papyri manuscripts that then continues into the great unsealed texts and so on and so forth?

How do you explain these things? And we didn't get a response from that, and maybe sometime in the future. We'll see. But it was an interesting conversation that we had there in the chat channel, and I have a feeling we're going to have a few more in the future as well.

Thanks for watching.