Featured Newsweek on the Bible - "So misunderstood, it's sinful"

Crabtownboy · Dec 29, 2014

annsni said: ↑

Have you looked at the manuscript evidence? There are about 5500 manuscripts. Not even 10,000 no less 20,000+!
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Not from what I have read.

It’s a popular Christian argument: historians have roughly 25,000 manuscripts of New Testament books, far more than any other book from ancient history.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crosse...testament-manuscripts-big-deal/#ixzz3NLM2mEUn
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The NT has been copied from the earliest time in many of the languages of nearby countries, including Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Latin, Coptic, and others. The total number of copies of the NT in these languages is now about 18,000 of which 10,000 are Latin (Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ [1998], 63. Added to the 5800 (nearly 6000) Greek manuscripts, this gives a total of nearly 24,000 manuscripts of the NT. There is no other book from the ancient world that even comes close to these numbers.

In 1707 John Mill collected about 30,000 variants in the NT (James Hastings, ed. A Dictionary of
the Bible, 4:735). By 1874 F. H.A. Scrivener counted nearly 50,000 (see Neil Lightfoot, How We Got the
Bible, p. 530). Until fairly recently the variants were estimated at about 200,000 (see GIB rev., 468).

Due to more recent studies, the number has now swelled to 400,000 (Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, pp. 89-90). Wallace agrees with this number, citing several sources

http://www.normgeisler.com/articles...Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament.pdf

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annsni · Dec 29, 2014

Crabtownboy said: ↑

Not from what I have read.
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Yet he is speaking of Greek manuscripts, not other languages which are translations.

These manuscripts were originally written in Koiné, or “common” Greek, and not all of the amateur copyists spoke the language or were even fully literate.
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But in the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries.
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So where are these tens of thousands of Greek manuscripts?

annsni · Dec 29, 2014

Crabtownboy said: ↑

Not from what I have read.
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Interestingly, from your second link, we read:

New copies of ancient manuscripts, both biblical and non-biblical, continue to be found. This necessitates an update of the figures and charts used in various books on the topic. For example, in the original version of Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, General Introduction to the Bible (Moody Press, 1968), we noted that there were about 5,000 Greek NT manuscripts (p. 285). This followed acknowledged manuscript authority Bruce Metzger in his book The Text of the New Testament [TNT] 1964 edition (pp. 31-33). By 1986 when we revised General Introduction to the Bible (GIB rev, 1986), there were 5,366 NT manuscripts (p. 387). This followed Metzger’s updating “Appendix III: Statistics Relating to the Manuscripts of the Greek NT” in his 1981 Manuscripts of the Greek Bible (pp. 54-56). By 1999 when we helped revise Josh McDowell’s More Evidence that Demands a Verdict, we contacted the manuscript institute founded by expert Kurt Aland that gave us the latest number as 5,656 as of August 1998 (see McDowell, NEDV, 36). To date (2013) there are nearly 5,800 NT manuscripts. For this general figure we can thank both Kurt Aland and Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary. Most of the descrepancies reported as to the number of NT manuscripts can be traced to the different times to which they refer.
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That is exactly the first paragraph of the article.

sag38 · Dec 30, 2014

Due diligence was not the intent of this author. When the same old lies are repeated and repeated they become truth to those who will not check the facts. Josh McDowell in his book, More Than a Carpenter does a great job dealing with some of the inaccuracies found in this article.

Yeshua1 · Dec 30, 2014

sag38 said: ↑

Due diligence was not the intent of this author. When the same old lies are repeated and repeated they become truth to those who will not check the facts. Josh McDowell in his book, More Than a Carpenter does a great job dealing with some of the inaccuracies found in this article.
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The truth is that the source material, the manuscripts, are MUCH closer to the beginnings of an historical event than in any other writtings concerning historical accounts in ancient history!

Applying that very same logic and reasoning, we would have to conclude that neither caesar nor the stories of homer ever really existed!

franklinmonroe · Dec 30, 2014

annsni said: ↑

http://danielbwallace.com/2014/12/28/predictable-christmas-fare-newsweeks-tirade-against-the-bible/
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Thanks, annsni. Dan Wallace writes --

Altogether, we have at least 20,000 handwritten manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other ancient languages that help us to determine the wording of the original. Almost 6000 of these manuscripts are in Greek alone.

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