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📜The vast array of manuscripts has enabled textual scholars to accurately reconstruct the original biblical text with more than 99.9 percent accuracy. #apologetics
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■The vast array of manuscripts has enabled
textual scholars to accurately reconstruct the
original biblical text with more than 99.9
percent accuracy. #apoloqetics
A.T. Robertson
Another noted Greek scholar, A.T. Robertson, said the real concern of the controversies surrounding the original wording
of the New Testament is on "a thousandth part of the entire text."35
Furthermore, the one-tenth of a percent in dispute does not influence any foundational belief.
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Hoeksema
It is in this connection that I said we should keep the proper perspective. In the first place, lest anyone imagine that this makes all of the New Testament highly doubtful, it should be emphasized, on the contrary, that the New Testament is extremely well preserved. A.T. Robertson,
An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament Broadman Press, 1925, writes, pp. 69, 70:
But the wealth of manuscript evidence is a great blessing and helps us to restore the original text. There is but a single manuscript that preserves most of the Annals of Tacitus. Only one manuscript gives the Greek Anthology. The poems of Catullus come to us in three manuscripts later than the fourteenth century A.D. The best attested texts like those of Sophocles, Euripedes, Vergil, and Cicero can only count the manuscripts that give them by the hundreds. And these are from 500 to 1600 years after the autographs were written. The manuscripts of AeSchylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Thucydides are 1400 years after the death of the authors. Those of Catullus and Euripides are 1600. Those for Plato are 1300 and those for Demosthenes are 1200. Only Vergil has one manuscript in the fourth century and two in the fifth (cf. Kenyon, op. cit. p. 5).
But this is not all. There are some 8,000 manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate and at least 1,000 for the other early versions. Add over 4,000 Greek manuscripts and we have 13,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament. Besides all this, much of the New Testament can be reproduced from the quotations of early Christian writers. It was obviously impossible for the New Testament to perish from the earth unless the world itself were to be destroyed. Even then much of it will go to heaven in the minds and hearts of the saints.
But, secondly, of how much importance are the textual variations? One scholar, Nestle, sets the number of textual variations at about 150,000. He tells us that only one-twentieth of these has any significant authority to support it. But, mind you, of this one twentieth there is again only one-twentieth which is of any significance for the meaning of Holy Scripture. This already reduces that 150,000 to about 375 significant variations in the whole of the New Testament! Add to this the fact that there is no single article of faith which depends on these variant readings! And add to this the fact that even of these 375, many are of very small importance! Another scholar, Hort, tells us that “the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation . . . can hardly form more than a
thousandth part of the entire text.”
Geisler
Where did the Bible come from? How do we know the right books are in the Bible? Does the Bible contain errors? What are the oldest copies we have of the Bible? How do we know that the Bible hasn't been changed over the years? Why are there so many translations of the Bible, and which one should...
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