Greek Manuscripts |
Ancient Greek Manuscripts
Greek ManuscriptsTwo things can be said about this. Firstly, our knowledge of the history of the early Roman Empire is based largely on The Annals of the Roman Empire, written in Latin by the Roman historian Tacitus in AD 116. Only two manuscripts of that in the original language exist today. One dates from the 9th century and the other from the 11th century. The details about Rome's origins stand on 2 manuscripts written about a thousand years after the original, while the details about Jesus stand on over 5,500 Greek manuscripts that date from only about 100 years after the originals. In other words, there is far stronger manuscript evidence for Jesus than for the history of early Roman Empire. Secondly, these 5,500+ manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek were discovered over a vast geographic area that stretches from the Middle East to North Africa to Western Europe. Imagine a primary school class playing a game of whisper phone. The teacher whispers, "Mary gave a crayon to Charlie" to two students, and they each whisper to two other students, and so on. If after five generations, the student at one corner of the classroom reports, "Mary gave a crayon to Charlie", while a student at another corner reports, "Mary and Charlie fought over a pen" the class won’t know what the teacher had whispered originally. But if the two student at distant corners say exactly same thing, the original message can be deduced without having been heard by everyone. What's the point? The original copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have not been and most likely won't be found since they probably disintegrated long ago from having passed from hand to hand to be read and copied. But almost all (95-99%) of the 5,500+ manuscript copies of the New Testament discovered to date all say in effect, "Mary gave a red crayon to Charlie." So we can deduce that what was originally written is what is in those 5,500+ copies, and today’s Gospels are translated directly from them. For more on these types of details, read The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. (The photo above is from Yardenit, the supposed site of Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River. It quotes Gospel of Mark 1:9-11.)
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