The Early Textual Transmission of the NT

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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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 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 the text

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New Testament we are probably dealing with the Muslim and looking at the host mask when you come into a chat channel by the way 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

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Muslim from England and basically he was challenging me looking for me and challenging me on this issue of why we believe that the the form of the text that we have in the earliest papyri manuscripts of the

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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

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Muslim perspective this is absolutely necessary because in the modern Muslim understanding notice

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I said modern this was not the view of the the earliest generations of Muslims but in the modern

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Muslim understanding the New Testament has to have been corrupted because the fact that it teaches things so contrary to those things that are taught by Muhammad and the

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Quran therefore clearly the New Testament cannot reflect the original followers of Jesus though that was not the primitive

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Islamic belief well because of that then they want to cast doubt upon the veracity of the transmission of the text in New Testament and it was a good question

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I mean how do we know or do we know that the text that is written let's say

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I happen to throw out in this conversation Luke acts somewhere around the early 60s we get our first evidence 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 you know p46 p66 p75 p72 we start really seeing the

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New Testament text as a corpus existing around that time period and what it reflects is what we have in the modern editions the

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Greek New Testament today but what about that in in between time well it almost seemed like what he was saying was if we don't have the originals and 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

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Quran or to the Hadith or or any ancient document whatsoever you don't have the originals and in the

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New Testament you have a very very very early witness but you don't have the original documents so I tried to explain to him

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I said well look what you need to realize is not only the context in which

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New Testament was originally copied that of persecution you also need to recognize their multiple authors writing from multiple places at multiple times that makes trying to make wholesale changes very very difficult and if we have a a textual platform that appears in AD 200 and we don't have any evidence whatsoever of a of a wildly variant textual platform that all maybe wouldn't teach that Jesus was the son of God or maybe would present

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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

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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

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New Testament text appearing in separated geographical areas 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 issues and how could any one of those texts have just disappeared from the face of the earth those are the questions

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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

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Muslims that have come and channeled but it was also interesting then to recognize that our

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Muslim friends are listening and was aware of the the doctoral program in regards to studying the transmission of the text of the

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Quran transmission of the text New Testament and that's that's exciting as well and so it is a it was a very excellent question but I think we provided a response and unfortunately all our

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English Muslim friends seem to hear was well it's just a theoretical reconstruction and you can take it one way you take another way that's not what