Debunking Silly Statements about the Bible

There is a post about the textual transmission of the Bible at the (US) Gospel Coalition website: Debunking Silly Statements About the Bible. Unfortunately all around (for the author, Greg Gilbert, his book, the Gospel Coalition) this post contains a number of Silly Statements about the Bible. Christians who want to defend the Bible have a responsibility to know what they are talking about. Here are some quotations from the first half, with brief comments.

1. Whatever pieces of paper Luke, John, or Paul used to write Luke, John, or Romans have been lost to history, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever find a biblical manuscript about which we can say, “We are 100 percent certain this is the original piece of paper on which the author wrote.”

I think if we find a biblical manuscript on paper we can be 100 percent certain it is not the original.

2. even though we don’t have the originals, we do have thousands of other pieces of paper that contain original-language text from each book of the Bible—about 5,400 when it comes to the New Testament. These go back to the third, or second, or even (perhaps?) to the first century.

(just stepping over the ‘pieces of paper’ thing going on here) I think that it is seriously misleading to leap from a figure like 5,400 manuscripts to then say ‘these go back to the third ... century’. These 5,400 manuscripts do not go back that far. Less than 1% of that 5,400 figure goes back to to anything like the third century (or earlier, although clearly at this point none of them go back to the first century).

3. After all, the New Testament was written in the mid-to-late first century, and the earliest copies we have are from about the years 125 to 200. At best, then, there’s a gap of some 45 to 75 years between the originals and our earliest copies.

This is also potentially misleading. If we date P46 to around AD200 then we are looking at more like 140-150 years for the Pauline letters. For Mark we might have a gap of 200 years. For John perhaps 45-75 years works, but not for any other portion of the NT. Generalisations are not helpful.

4. One fascinating example is what’s called the “Codex Vaticanus,” a copy of the New Testament originally made in the fourth century, but which was re-inked in the tenth century so it could continue to be used. Do you see what that means? Codex Vaticanus was still in use 600 years after it was originally made! Therefore the claim that all we have are “copies of copies of copies of copies” of the originals is far overwrought. Indeed, it’s well within the realm of possibility that we have in our museums today copies of the originals, full stop.

A better example would be a manuscript (e.g. Sinaiticus) which shows more evidence of continuous usage than does Vaticanus. Nothing in this suggests that we have immediate copies of the originals in our museums, and as far as I am aware no one has ever argued such a case in any scholarly publication. Wishing doesn’t make it so.

5. Also, when you consider the gap between the originals and first copies of other ancient works, you can see just how small this “gap” for the New Testament really is. For example, for Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, we have exactly eight surviving manuscripts, the earliest of which is 1,300 years removed from the original!

I really wish people wouldn’t keep saying this sort of thing. It is nonsensically ill informed. In fact there are 99 early mansucripts of Thucydides, mostly papyrus, some of which go back to the third century BC, dozens from the first and second centuries (LDAB).

6. One scholar has asserted there are, astonishingly, up to 400,000 variants in the New Testament! There are several things to say about this charge. First, the manuscripts are not in fact riddled with variants, and that 400,000 number isn’t nearly as scary as it seems, even if it’s accurate. The scholar who used that number wasn’t just looking at the 5,000 pre-printing-press, original-Greek manuscripts we have, but also at 10,000 other manuscripts in other languages, and then on top of that another 10,000 or so instances where people quoted the New Testament during the first 600 years of church history! Put it all together, and what you’re really talking about is 400,000-ish variants across some 25,000 manuscripts and quotations covering 600 years. But at the far upper end, this comes out to . . . only about 16 variants per manuscript. To put it nicely, that’s really not many.

I’m really not sure where to start on this. It is nonsense from beginning to end.

Up-date: I don’t know who this “one scholar” is, there are several possible candidates. It is not particularly astonishing, but without any careful definition of “variant” it is not even clear what we are talking about. It is not the case that these relate to 10,000 other manuscripts in other languages (although being manuscripts they will have variations) since the languages tend to be cited as a unit in critical discussions. The purported logic of dividing 400,000 by 25,000 and coming up with only 16 variants per manuscript is completely vacuous. It suggests a lack of understanding of how the standard critical editions actually work, and no one who works with manuscripts would think like this. Do we forget that one single manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, has 23,000 corrections reflecting within itself at least 23,000 “variants”? Of course we should define that term whenever we use it in that context. For the only reputable published discussion of the subject see Peter Gurry, “The Number of Variants in the Greek New Testament.” New Testament Studies 62.1 (2016): 97-121. He certainly was not concerned with variants in versions and quotations in church fathers.  

7. Finally, it’s not as if the variants in all those 25,000 manuscripts just show up everywhere; rather, they tend to cluster around the same few places in the text over and over again, which means the number of actual places in the New Testament really at issue is surprisingly small. The point is that when you think about it beyond the soundbites, you don’t get a picture here of a mountain of copies with so many variants that we can’t make heads or tails of it. Not even close. On the contrary, you get a picture of a remarkably stable transmission history for the vast majority of the New Testament, and a few isolated places where some genuine doubt about the original text has given rise to a relatively large number of variations.

This is so wrong. I doubt this person has ever read a manuscript.

Up-date: Remember that there aren’t actually 25,000 manuscripts (since even on the figures provided there are only 15,000 manuscripts and another 10,000 references in church fathers [where these figures come from I do not know]). The claim that textual variants within the New Testament “tend to cluster around the same few places in the text over and over again” is not supported by any sort of reality. Open the standard critical edition, some pages have more variants than others, some passages have more variants than others, but by and large variants are spread over the whole text of the Greek New Testament, from Matt 1.3 (whether to read ZARA or ZARE) to Rev 22.21 (whether to read AMHN at the end or not), there is no real clustering in the sense that only a few places within the New Testament text have variants - every page normally has dozens of variant readings cited with manuscript and versional support. How many passages are really “at issue” in the sense of textually uncertain is an interesting question and could be answered in different ways depending on the scholar or group of scholars (in NA28 there are diamond readings indicating that the editors are uncertain; there are many differences between different editions). Uncertainties exist even in relation to some questions of theological significance. And finally, to say that there are “places where some genuine doubt about the original text has given rise to a relatively large number of variations” has things the wrong way around: it is the variant readings in the manuscripts that give rise to our genuine doubt about the original text.

Surely we can do better than this.