Scholars sometimes make an argument that they themselves surely (surely!) know isn’t very good, but that certainly sounds convincing to audiences that don’t know the full picture and so have little way of evaluating it.  I seem to run across that a lot.  Here in my 14th and final Anniversary Post celebrating the blog’s fourteen years of mortal existence, I give one from the very first month of the blog, the final post of April 2012, which dealt with a particularly common instance of just such an argument.

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I have had three debates with Dan Wallace (professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary and longtime friend) on the question of whether or not we can know for certain, or with relative reliability, whether we have the “original” text of the New Testament.   At the end of the day, my answer is usually “we don’t know.”

For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter.   And if I had to guess, I would would bet that in most cases we are probably close to what the author wrote.

But the dim reality is that we really don’t have any way to know for sure.   Our copies are all so far removed from the time when the authors wrote, that even though we have so many (tons!) of manuscripts of the New Testament, we do not have many (ounces!) that are very close to the time of the originals, and it is impossible to say whether the texts were altered a bit, or a lot, between the time the originals were penned and our first manuscripts appear.

But I do think the common guess is reasonable, that probably the texts were not altered lots and lots and lots, even if there is really no way to know.   This uncertainty doesn’t matter for most of us who are interested in the New Testament, both because there is nothing we can do about it and because it doesn’t have a huge bearing on other things we are interested in:  We simply create a little fiction in our minds that we are reading the actual words of Mark, or Paul, or 1 Peter, and get on with the business of interpretation.  It’s a harmless fiction, and very useful for all sorts of reasons that I may discuss in another post.

For this post I want to discuss briefly Dan’s typical counter-argument meant to show that in virtually all cases we DO know what the authors originally wrote.

His argument (which is given by myriad other apologists) is that we have SO many more manuscripts of the New Testament than for any other ancient author, that we are FAR better situated to know what these early Christian authors wrote than for any other work from antiquity.

Dan’s point is that we don’t sit around agonizing about whether the words we read in the dialogues of Plato are actually what Plato wrote; the same for the plays of Euripides, the histories of Livy or Tacitus, the epics of Homer, and so on.  If we have no problem accepting that we have something like the “originals” of these writings, why not for the New Testament?

Dan goes on and gives the statistics.  For some classical authors we have only one manuscript; or a dozen; or if we’re lucky a hundred.  In some very lucky instances, such as Homer, we have hundreds of manuscripts (though never a thousand).  And for the New Testament?  We have over 5700 manuscripts – just in the original Greek.  That is way, way, way, way more than for any other classical author!  And so, as Dan puts it, for the New Testament we have “an embarrassment of riches.”  Since we don’t doubt what these other authors wrote, why are we creating special problems for the New Testament  authors and claiming that we can’t know what they wrote?

Let me make just three points about this claim.

First, it is not true that scholars are confident that they know exactly what Plato, Euripides, or Homer wrote, based on the surviving manuscripts.  Not in the least.  As any trained classicist will tell you, there are and long have been enormous arguments about all these writings.  Most people don’t know about these arguments for the simple reason that they are not trained classicists.  Figuring out what Homer wrote – assuming there was a Homer (there are huge debates about that; as my brother, a classicist, sometimes says: “The Iliad was not written by Homer, but by someone else named Homer” ) – has been a source of scholarly inquiry and debate for over 2000 years!

Second, and more important: just because we are WORSE off for other authors than for those of the New Testament does not in itself mean that we can trust that we know what the NT authors wrote.  I am a lot stronger than my five-year old granddaughter.  But that doesn’t mean I’m, say, strong enough to bench-press a half-ton truck.  If you say that I must be because I’m MANY TIMES stronger than her, that would make no sense.  I’m nowhere nearly strong enough.   So too, just because we have stronger support for the New Testament than for other books — way more manuscripts — that doesn’t mean that we can therefore know what the originals said.  That in no small part is because we don’t have nearly enough of the right kinds of manuscripts.  Leading to my third point.

Third, even though we have lots and lots of manuscripts, the vast majority of them are comparatively late in date and not the kinds of manuscripts we would need to know with confidence that we have a very, very close approximation of the “original” text.  94% of our surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament date from after the ninth Christian century.  That is 800 years (years!) after the so-called originals.  What good do these late manuscripts do us?  They do us a lot of good if we want to know what texts of Mark, Romans, or 1 Peter widely looked like 800 years after the originals were produced.  But they are of much less value for knowing what the authors themselves wrote, eight centuries earlier.  For that we would need lots of very early manuscripts which, alas, we do not have.

In short, it is absolutely true that the New Testament is far better attested than other ancient writings – pagan, Jewish, and Christian.  But it is also true that this mere fact in itself cannot provide us with assurance that we know what the authors originally wrote.