Yesterday during our BSU lunch program, I had a conversation with an atheist who wanted to know about the reliability of the gospels and New Testament. I gave him a number of resources and books to study; we talked in length about the historicity of the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John accounts. His ambition is to write a book in order denounce the gospel accounts as the primary evidence that God doesn’t exist. I want to provide a primer of evidence compiled from seminary, books, etc... If there are any questions about citations, please contact me.
There are several lines of evidence that supports the reliability NT manuscripts; i will only discuss the number, dating, accuracy of the manuscripts. The number of OT & NT manuscripts is overwhelming compared to any other manuscript in antiquity. The average # of manuscripts in antiquity is 7-10. By contrast, the NT has almost 5,700 greek manuscripts in existence. 2nd in line is Homer’s Illiad with 643 manuscripts.
Generally the older the manuscript the more accuracy to the original composition. The oldest manuscript for the Gallic wars in some 900 years after Ceasar. P52 (greek NT) manuscript is the earliest undisputed manuscript dated 117-138. This means it survived from within a generation of composition. Whole NT books are found traceable from 200 AD. No other ancient manuscript from the ancient world has such a small time gap as the NT. You would expect all of Roman History to have much better records than the life of a Jewish Carpenter who never wrote anything. Yet, we have 4 historical accounts of Jesus’ life written by contemporaries and eyewitnesses.
There are also more accurately copied texts in the NT than other books from the ancient world. Bruce Metzger compared the accuracy of Homer’s illiad to the NT and found 95% accuracy with the Illiad and 99.5% accuracy with the NT. The NT is also confirmed by Eusebius and other early historians.
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