Christianity emerged from Judaism's capital, Jerusalem and its vicinity: If the Gospels' portrait of Jesus was seriously wrong, then-living hostile witnesses (which were hardly few in number) could have easily shot it down. Peter and company didn't pack up and go to (say) Athens and start proclaiming the Gospel far away from where anybody could easily check up on their assertions, but started in Jerusalem within weeks of Jesus' death on Pentecost. All in all, these eyewitnesses proclaimed the truth as they knew it, having strong reasons for doing so: Who dies for a lie, knowing that it is a lie?²¹

Ancient People Knew The Difference Between Truth And Fables

Some today may believe that the educated people of the ancient world didn't have a real grasp of the difference between the facts of what really happened and telling moral stories to make points. In reality, ancient pagan historians of the West clearly knew the difference, even if they weren't always sufficiently critical of their sources. Herodotus didn't automatically believe his sources, and did emphasize the role of eyewitnesses. Although Thucydides presumably did invent most of the speeches found in his history of the Peloponnesian War, he still attempted to have them express the views of the speakers. He never felt free to invent any of the narrative. Lucian believed the historian's only task was to tell the story as it really happened, and Cicero thought similarly. Polybius advocated judging eyewitnesses and analyzing sources. More careful than most, Tacitus did attempt to test his sources and to avoid intentionally distorting what information he had received. The Jewish rabbinical tradition had a similar respect for what had really happened: The duty of the disciples of a rabbi was to pass on accurately what they had learned from their teacher, as described above. Josephus stated his commitment to being accurate and truthful, trying also to correct mistaken sources.

A standard higher critic view of the New Testament says the church made up stories about Jesus' life and teachings over the decades after His death because of later controversies it suffered. In fact, much indicates Jesus expressed Himself differently from how His disciples did. Jesus used questions and the Aramaic words "amen" and "abba" in unique ways. Sixty-four times Jesus uses threefold expressions (such as ask, seek, knock). He uses passive verbs when referring to God, such as in this case: "All things have been delivered to me by my Father" (Matthew 11:27). Paul, Peter, etc. did not copy His use of "how much more," "which of you," and "disciple."

Often when Jesus' words, as written in Greek, are translated back into Aramaic, literary qualities such as parallelism, alliteration, and assonance appear. Greek-speaking gentile disciples could not have fabricated His speeches whole cloth since their poetic quality in Aramaic can't be accidental. Also, if the church had created Jesus' ideas decades later, why is it that "Jesus" never was made to comment on major controversies that divided the church? The Jesus of the Gospels says little or nothing about circumcision, specific gifts of the Holy Spirit, food laws, baptism, evangelizing the gentiles, rules controlling church meetings, and relations between the church and state. Paul almost never quotes Jesus directly: If he felt free to make up stories about Jesus, he could have easily and directly justified what he did by manufacturing sayings supposedly by Jesus. (Some Muslims through the centuries evidently didn't hesitate to do this for the hadiths (traditional sayings) of Muhammad, "discovering" quotes convenient for the doctrinal or political controversies of the moment!)

Jesus' life and ideas also had aspects that were problematic, even embarrassing, starting with the deep shame of being executed by crucifixion. (Roman citizens had the right of being beheaded instead!) Facing opposition from within His own family, Jesus was a mere carpenter, not someone materially rich or powerful. Jesus had views about legalism, divorce, fasting, women, and sinners that certainly presented stumbling blocks to mainstream Jews. Similar to the Old Testament's portrayal of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David, and Elijah, the New Testament repeatedly and plainly describes the sins and personal flaws of the disciples, such as Peter denying Christ three times and their arguments over who was to be the greatest in the kingdom of God. Surely, if the church concocted the New Testament to spread its message about Jesus, editing out embarrassing facts about its founders should have been a top priority! If you invented a historical document to promote your beliefs, you could come up with something more favorable to your cause's leaders than this! The unfavorable facts about Christianity found in the New Testament show its early leaders didn't feel free to rewrite history or ignore historical facts, and the New Testament's contents point to a pre-70 A.D. date of composition.²²

The Battle Between The Received And Critical Texts Of The New Testament

To undermine people's belief in the New Testament, someone could seize upon the long running dispute between the advocates of the Westcott-Hort/"Critical" (Alexandrine and Western) text and the Received (Byzantine) text. By citing extremists in this debate, a skeptic can make the differences in the New Testament's Greek manuscripts seem worse than they really are. The Critical text basically underlies almost all modern Bible translations, while the Received text underlies the King James Version (KJV) and the New King James Version (NKJV). The basic dispute involves a trade-off of two competing, conflicting claims.

On the one hand, far more Greek manuscripts reflect the Received text. About 80-90% have this text type, but they are mostly later manuscripts. On the other hand, the earliest major manuscripts, such as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus from the fourth century, reflect the Critical text type, but they are much fewer in number. The biggest differences between the two concern the last twelve verses of Mark (16:9-20) and the episode of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). The Critical text omits them, but the Received text contains them. The dispute concerns (by McDowell and Stewart's account) 10% of the text, a figure that seems high, judging from some of the statements found below.²³

Furthermore, the Vaticanus manuscript, which is one of the foundational texts for the Critical (Alexandrine) text, undercuts its own evidence omitting Mark's last twelve verses. It (called "B" by scholars) has a blank column of the right size where the last twelve verses of Mark would have been, showing the original scribe knew something was missing. Before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were copied (c. 350 A.D.), Catholic Church Fathers also cited from Mark's last twelve verses, such as Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. The early Old Latin and Syriac translations also contain them. Altogether, since these sources were copied originally in the second or third centuries, before Vaticanus or Sinaiticus were in the fourth, excellent evidence exists for Mark originally writing them.²⁴ Importantly, the disputed territory (the 10%) can be further reduced after accepting arguments for the Received text's reliability (such as for the last twelve verses of Mark). Debates over 10% of the New Testament's text is a poor reason for doubting all of it, especially when no major doctrines hinge on this controversy's outcome.

The Battle Between The Received And Critical Texts Of The New Testament

Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religion says 150,000 variations have been computed to exist among the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Do they justify doubts about its textual reliability? True, since it has such a vast number of handwritten copies, a large number of scribal errors are inevitable. Having more manuscripts than any other anciently preserved document before the invention of printing and moveable type (in Europe), this reality should be regarded as producing more benefits than drawbacks. As scholars C.F. Sitterly and J.H. Greenlee comment:

Such a wealth of evidence makes it all the more certain that the original words of the NT [New Testament] have been preserved somewhere within the MSS [manuscripts]. Conjectural emendation (suggesting a reading that is not found in any MS [manuscript]), to which editors have restored in the restoration of other ancient writings, has almost no place in the textual criticism of the NT. The materials are so abundant that at times the difficulty is to select the correct rendering from a number of variant readings in the MSS.

How The Science Of Textual Criticism Can Rule Out Variations With Certainty

Having faith that the scribes preserved the New Testament accurately is rational because most of the variations between manuscripts can be ruled out by using the principles of textual criticism. By its standards, such a flawed text as 1 John 5:7's Trinitarian interpolation sticks out like a sore thumb. Very few Greek manuscripts contain it (exactly two, one from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and the other from the sixteenth). Even the earliest copies of the Latin Vulgate omit it. Furthermore, most of the "200,000 variations" (by another, more recent count) are spelling mistakes, homophones (such as in English, "two," "too," "to"), words accidently repeated twice by scribes, etc.

For example, if the same word is misspelled 3000 times, that counts for 3000 variations. The number of significant variations is relatively few. Ezra Abbott maintains 19/20ths of New Testament variations have so little support that they can be automatically ruled out. Scholars Geisler and Nix, building upon the work of F.J.A. Hort, say only about 1/8 have weight, and 1/60 are "substantial variations." Ironically, the high number of copies allows more scribal errors to develop while simultaneously providing the antidote for their elimination. The more the copies, the easier it is to find and delete mistakes. By contrast, since Caesar's Gallic Wars has a mere 10 copies, it might be harder to find the correct original text among the surviving old manuscripts. Philip Schaff declares that only 400 of all the 150,000 variations he knew of caused doubt on textual meaning. Only 50 were of great significance. Even then, no variation altered "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of scripture teaching." A citation of Sir Robert Anderson's found in The Bible and Modern Criticism explains how groundless are the worries about textual difficulties in the New Testament:

All of them face that formidable phantom of textual criticism, with its 120,000 various readings in the New Testament alone, and will enable us to march up to it, and discover that it is empty air; that still we may say with the boldest and acutest of English [textual] critics, Bentley, 'choose (out of the whole MSS) as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst by design out of the whole lump of readings, and not one article of faith or moral precept is either perverted or lost in them. Put them [the different readings] into the hands of a knave or a fool [to choose], and even with the most sinistrous and absurd choice, he shall not extinguish the light of any one chapter, or so disguise Christianity but that every feature of it will still be the same.'²⁵

Simply put, nothing major is at risk in the debate between the Critical and Received texts. (I think the Received text decisively wins this dispute, which means the real number of variations is far lower than 10%, but there's not the space to prove that here).

The Average People Of Judea Could Have Known Greek

Who really wrote the Gospels? They were written in Greek. Could have the simple fishermen and other disciples of Jesus, Jews one and all, have known Greek? It has been claimed that scholarly gentile Catholic monks and/or church fathers of later centuries really wrote the four stories of Christ's life and ministry found in the New Testament. This simply isn't true. First, although it was written in Greek, the New Testament reflects Semitic (not Greek gentile) language patterns, over and above the many scattered Aramaic and Hebrew words found on its pages. Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, differ sharply from Indo-European languages, such as French, Greek, English, German, and Russian. As a result, it would be easy to expose any attempts by any later gentile writers who were ignorant of Aramaic and/or Hebrew to pretend they were Jews by analyzing how they wrote the Greek of the New Testament. As William Most notes concerning Luke's Gospel:

All scholars know and admit that the Greek of Luke's Gospel shows far more Semitisms than do the Gospels written by Semites. A Semitism consists in bringing some features of Semitic speech or structure into Greek, where it does not really belong. For example, in the parable of the wicked husbandmen, Mark's Gospel is content to merely say that after the first servant was mistreated, the master "sent another," and later again, "he sent another." But Luke 20:9-12 reads oddly, "And he added to send another servant"; and later, he added to send a third." The language sounds stilted in English, and so did it in Greek. The reason is evident. Hebrew, in such a sentence, would use the root ysf, to add. So we can see Luke, who is not a Semite, is taking care to reproduce the precise structure of his source, a Hebrew source, although Mark, who was a Semite [i.e., a Jew], did not do it.

Another example of Luke employing Semitic language patterns was to use "the Hebrew (not Aramaic) construction called apodotic wau (which becomes apodotic kai in Greek, if used." For example, in Luke 5:1, in Most's literal translation, this construction appears: "It happened, when the crowd pressed on Him to hear the word of God, AND He stood by the lake." Inserting that "and" between an opening subordinate clause to connect it with the main clause sounds funny in Greek, not just English. Luke does this about 20-25% of the possible times it could happen, which evidently means he depended on a Hebrew-speaking source that often. He was so careful in using his Hebrew sources, he choose to reproduce literally what are rather clumsy grammatical patterns in Greek!

The Semitic (Jewish) Flavor And Language Of The Gospels

The words that definitely or are likely Aramaic appearing in the Gospels are further proof of their Semitic flavor. These include "abba" (father), "talitha cum," (maid arise), "Bar" (son), "perisha" (separated one), "hakel dema" (bloody ground), "shiloha" (Siloam), "reka" ("raca"--silly fool), "kepha" (rock), "toma" (Thomas), and "rabbuni" (rabboni). Even more Hebrew words than Aramaic ones appear in the Gospels. These include "levonah," (frankincense), "mammon," (money), "moreh," (rebel), "bath," (a unit of wet measure), "mor," (myrrh), "cammon," (cummin), "zuneem," (tares), "sheekmah," (sycamore), "Wai," (Woe!), "amen," "rabbi," "corban," and "Satan." Although the routine, everyday language of Jesus and His disciples was most likely Aramaic, they still could have known other languages. In recent years, newly uncovered evidence indicates that Hebrew still was a language in common, everyday use in Judea in the time of Roman rule.

Consequently, McDowell and Wilson say there are "good indications" that Jesus and his disciples were trilingual. Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during Roman rule. At that time, Hellenistic (Greek cultural) influences penetrated deeply into ancient Judea, including its language. Much like English increasingly has become late in this century, Greek was the language of "default" for educated people of different nationalities. When neither knows the native mother tongue of the other, they used it to communicate when encountering each other abroad or in their home territories. (English is the language for air traffic controllers at major international airports, regardless of their location or where the jet airliners land or take off).

The Ancient Jewish Historian Josephus Says Judea's Jews Often Could Speak Greek

Consider the witness of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus:

I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks, and understand the elements of the Greek language . . . for our nation does not encourage those who learnt the languages of other nations, and so adorn their discourses with the smoothness of their periods; because they look upon this sort of accomplishment [mastering Greek] as common, not only to all sorts of freemen, but to as many of the servants [slaves?] as pleased to learn them.

Josephus doesn't say the Jews felt only the scholarly learned Greek. Instead, he says no incentive existed to learn it as a mark of educational distinction because many common people could speak it in Judea. Another scholar confirms Josephus's account: "Although the main body of the Jewish people rejected Hellenism and its ways, intercourse with the Greek peoples and the use of the Greek language was by no means eschewed." Jesus himself must have spoken Greek. For example, in John 21, Jesus used two different words for "love," and two different ones for "know." Neither of these pairs can be replicated in Aramaic or Hebrew. Nor can the word play on the word for "rock" or "stone" (for the Greek words "petros" and "petra") in Matthew 16:18 be reproduced in these two Semitic languages. When conversing with the gentile Greek-speaking Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-28, Jesus used a diminutive Greek word (like "doggie" in English) for dogs that meant household pets, not strays or wild dogs. (This obviously softened His use of a traditional Jewish term of contempt, "dogs," for gentiles).²⁶ Since Greek was in common use by average Jews like fishermen, then, unsurprisingly, the disciples composed the New Testament in it in order to communicate with others in the wider eastern Mediterranean community about Jesus and His teachings.

The New Testament Was Not Written In A Highly Scholarly Greek

Was the Greek of the New Testament fluent and well done, such as a scholar might write? Or was it composed in the rough hewn language of the common people? The New Testament was basically written in the koine Greek of the average people of the Roman empire, not the classical Greek of the philosophers Plato (c. 428-348 b.c.) and Aristotle (384-322 b.c.), or the Athens of Pericles (c. 495-427 b.c.). Did a gentile write the book of Acts in a very polished Greek? Although Luke was a gentile, he generally used the koine for Acts. As historian Robin Fox, no friend of Christianity, explains: [Paul's] companion, the author of Acts [i.e., Luke], has also been mistaken for a Hellenistic historian and a man of considerable literary culture; in fact, he has no great acquaintance with literary style, and when he tries to give a speech to [by?] a trained pagan orator, he falls away into clumsiness after a few good phrases. His literary gifts lay, rather, with the Greek translation of Scripture, the Septuagint, which he knew in depth and exploited freely: to pagans, its style was impossibly barbarous.²⁷

Although Luke could write in a highly literary vein sometimes, such as in the parable of the prodigal son, he wrote other ways as well. The Holy Spirit allowed the distinct literary styles of different authors to shine through, even as it protected them from writing errors or contradictions. The apostle Paul clearly wrote differently from the apostles John or Peter, yet the Holy Spirit guarded them all against mistakes. The New Testament was written so average people could hear the Good News ("Gospel") of Jesus Christ. Thus, not having a highly scholarly or polished style, the New Testament was composed in the everyday, semi-universal language of the Roman empire, koine Greek.²⁸

How Can Anyone Be Certain That The Right Books Are In The New Testament?

What books should be in the New Testament? This subject raises the issue of the canon, which concerns which books should and shouldn't be in it. After all, up to 200 various "Gospels" floated around in the ancient Roman Empire. These apocryphal (so-called "missing") books boasted such titles as "The Shepherd of Hermas," "The Gospel of Peter," "The Gospel of Thomas," etc. Why should Christians believe only four Gospels were inspired by God? Since apocryphal books' quality is much lower and/or their teachings so greatly vary from the canonical books, they can be easily dismissed from serious consideration. The Christian community followed implicitly (at least) the procedure of Deuteronomy 13:1-5. This Old Testament text says that later revelations--here specifically ones about following false gods--which contradict previous ones are automatically invalid, even when the false prophet made some accurate predictions. Some of the apocryphal gospels supported the Gnostic cause. Claiming the Old Testament's God was evil and totally different from the New Testment's God, the Gnostics also denied Jesus had a body of flesh and blood before His crucifixion. Since their teachings totally contradict the Gospels and Letters (epistles) of the New Testament, not to mention the Old Testament, their writings could automatically be stamped heretical and rejected as fraudulent. As F.F. Bruce explains:

The gnostic schools lost because they deserved to lose. A comparison of the New Testament writings with the contents of The Nag Hammadi Library [a collection of ancient Gnostic books discovered in 1945 in Egypt] should be instructive, once the novelty of the latter is not allowed to weigh in its favour against the familiarity of the former.

Similarly, James comments: "There is no question of any one's having excluded them from the New Testament: They have done that for themselves." Scholar Milligan remarks: "We have only to compare our New Testament books as a whole with other literature of the kind to realise how wide is the gulf which separates them from it. The uncanonical gospels, it is often said, are in reality the best evidence for the canonical." And Aland maintains: "It cannot be said of a single writing preserved to us from the early period of the church outside the New Testament that it could properly be added today to the Canon." For these reasons it's absurd to claim that the Gospel of Peter's account of Jesus being resurrected on the Last Day of Unleavened Bread (which is a historical inaccuracy) proves the other four Gospels are wrong. Instead, the Gospel of Peter is simply false: It is just one document written later than the earlier four canonical Gospels. It also contains the false Gnostic/docetic teaching that Jesus did not come in the flesh. Even judging by secular criteria, the four Gospels are far more likely to be historically reliable. Furthermore, archeological discoveries have repeatedly sustained Luke's reliability as a historian. Their collective witness against this historical mistake found in "The Gospel of Peter" should be seen as decisive.

Apostolic Authority And Reactions Against Heresy Make The Canon Clear

In evident reaction against the heretic (and Gnostic) Marcion's (c. 140 A.D.) attempt to edit the canon, lists of the canonical books were made from the late second century onwards. These lists, even from the beginning, contain most of the books found in the New Testament today. The author of the Muratorian fragment (c. 170 A.D.), Irenaeus (c. 180 A.D.), Clement (c. 190 A.D.), Tertullian (c. 200 A.D.), Origen (c. 230 A.D.), Eusebius (c. 310 A.D.), and Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 348 A.D.) all compiled lists of canonical books. Furthermore, a fundamentally false skeptical assumption must be avoided: The Gospels are not canonical because the church decreed them to be authoritative, but because they are inspired, the church accepted them as having authority.

A leading criterion for the church to accept a book as scripture was whether the church believed an apostle (Paul, John, Matthew, James) or someone associated with an apostle (traditionally, Mark was seen as associated with Peter, and Luke with Paul) wrote it. Nothing written after c. 100 A.D. made it into the canon. Only the books written within a generation or two of Jesus' death were deemed proper to include in the canon. What mattered was apostolic authority, not just authorship. Thus, N.B. Stonehouse says: "In the Epistles [Letters, such as by Paul] there is consistent recognition that in the church there is only one absolute authority, the authority of the Lord himself. Wherever the apostles speak with authority, they do so as exercising the Lord's authority."²⁹ High levels of skepticism about the New Testament's canon simply aren't justified.

Was The Canon Determined From The Top-Down By The Catholic Church's Hierarchy?

Did the Roman Catholic Church chose the canon? It claims this, but this wasn't true. First of all, it is quite problematic to label "Roman Catholic" the persecuted Sunday-keeping church that survived before the time the Roman Emperor Constantine granted toleration through the Edict of Milan (A.D. 313). The increasing union of church and state in the fourth century and afterwards inevitably caused Rome to corrupt doctrinally and spiritually the church. Second, the Roman Catholic Church's leadership (which is the crucial issue) did not choose the canon, and then impose it from the top down. First, the Greek-speaking eastern churches were more slowly corrupted than those in the Western Roman Empire and in Egypt. Showing their independence of the Bishop of Rome, many of them, at least in Asia Minor (now Turkey), held onto seventh-day Sabbatarianism (Saturday observance) and a Passover (not Easter) communion for many years after 100 A.D. Second, this claim ignores how God can move men who are not true believers to make the right decisions. Would God be so careless to let those with false doctrines ultimately pervert His holy word? Similarly, the Old Testament was preserved and had the right books placed in it despite Israel often fell into idolatry and later rejected the Messiah as a nation. Third, the Sunday-observing Church before the time of Emperor Constantine and the Edict of Milan was hardly a tightly controlled, highly organized, monolithic group. It had suffered terrible persecution itself during the rule of Diocletian (284-305 A.D.) and earlier emperors.

Jerome, The Latin Vulgate's Translator, Refers To A Bottom-Up Determination

Consider this statement by Jerome (c. 374-419 A.D.) who translated of the Latin Vulgate Bible (at least for the Gospels and Old Testament). Even in the year 414 A.D., as he wrote to Dardanus, the prefect of Gaul (modern France), it shows the lack of top-down uniformity in the Catholic Church on the canon, long after the pro-Trinitarian Council of Nicea (325 A.D.):

This must be said to our people, that the epistle which is entitled 'To the Hebrews' is accepted as the apostle Paul's not only by the churches of the east but by all church writers in the Greek language of earlier times [note that he doesn't consider papal authority or synods of bishops as determining the canon's contents!--EVS], although many judge it to be by Barnabas. It is of no great moment who the author is, since it is the work of a churchman and received recognition day by day in the churches' public reading [again, this clearly denies a top-down approach--EVS]. If the custom of the Latins does not receive it among the canonical scriptures, neither, by the same liberty, do the churches of the Greeks accept John's Apocalypse [the Book of Revelation]. Yet we accept them both, not following the custom of the present time [which denies as binding the authority of recent council decisions, such as that of Hippo Regius in 393 and Carthage in 397, or the papal decree of 405--EVS] but the precedent of early writers [notice!], who generally make free use of testimonies from both works.

This statement shows the canon came from the traditional practices of laymembers, elders, and writers--from the bottom up. As scholar Kurt Aland remarks: "It goes without saying that the Church, understood as the entire body of believers, created the canon . . . it was not the reverse; it was not imposed from the top, be it by bishops or synods."

Persecution By Rome Plays A Role In Determining The Canon

Persecution was a major factor in forming the canon, especially the campaign lasting 10 years (cf. Revelation 2:10) unleashed by the Roman emperor Diocletian starting in 303 A.D. During those years the Roman government for the first time specifically targeted for destruction all copies of the New Testament. Believers in the scattered congregations throughout the empire had to know which religious documents they had they could hand over and which ones they should resist surrendering, even if that cost them their lives. As Bruce notes, handing over "a copy of the Shepherd of Hermas or a manual of church order" might be permissible if that would satisfy the Roman police for a time, but sacred Scripture never would be O.K. to give up voluntarily. "But for Christians who were ordered to hand over books it must have become important to know which books must on no account be surrendered and those which might reasonably be regarded as 'not worth dying for.'"³⁰ Decentralized decision-making for each congregation, or a group of congregations under one bishop, was the order of the day after local Roman officials launched their attacks. They show papal decrees or synods of bishops did not create the canon when they proclaimed its contents in the mid to late fourth century and early fifth centuries. Instead, the bishops or the Pope merely ratified pre-existing practice over the centuries and decades by multitudes of laymembers, elders, and church writers scattered within the confines of a vast empire.³¹

Written by: Eric Snow