In our previous discussion on chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel in the Bible, we verified the historical accuracy of the story in Daniel by archeological findings outside of the Bible. We used the Babylonian Chronicles to show that King Belshazzar really existed. With the writings from the historian Herodotus of the 5th century B.C., we concluded that the surprising finish of the Babylonian Empire was actually what had happened. It seems natural for us to ask:
Do we need to constantly verify the historical accuracy of the Bible with extrabiblical materials? How trustworthy is the Bible as an ancient document?
As we mentioned before, some people even claim that the Bible has been “composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”.
The 39 Old Testament volumes were written from about 1400 B.C. to 500 B.C., and the 27 New Testament consists of books and letters written from about 50 A.D. to 100 A.D. Let’s focus our attention on the New Testament in the following for now.
How are we to know that what we are reading today still accurately preserve the original content written more than 2000 years ago?
One indicator of the trustworthiness of ancient documents is the number of manuscripts that were copied soon after the publishing of the original documents. The more the manuscripts and closer to the time of the original document the better.
The famous ancient philosopher Plato has his work, Tetralogies, written between 427 to 347 B.C. The earliest copy is dated 900 A.D. There is a time gap of 1200 years between the earliest manuscript and the original. The number of manuscripts is around 210. Another beloved philosopher Aristotle has his work written between 384 to 322 B.C. The earliest copy dated 850 A.D. The time gap is again about 1200 years. There are about 1000 manuscripts found so far.
How is it compared with the Bible? The time gap between the composition of the New Testament books and the earliest manuscripts is about 50 years, and there are more than 25,000 manuscripts found so far.
Therefore, compare with other ancient documents, the New Testament of the Bible has far more support in its historical trustworthiness according to the exceedingly short time gap between the original documents and their earliest copies, and the large number of manuscripts available for cross checking.
Actually, even if we lose all the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament today, we can still be confident that our Bible accurately preserves the original content. Why? With the large number of quotations on the 27 books of the New Testament by the early church fathers, we can reproduce the whole New Testament just from the writings of the early church Fathers alone!
I think we can comfortably conclude that the New Testament is historically well-preserved. What we are reading today is what the original books write.
What about the Old Testament which were written centuries earlier than the New Testament?
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