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Mythicists and the Virgin Birth: Readers’ Mailbag May 6, 2017

I’ve been devoting the blog to some autobiography recently, so in this Readers Mailbag I’ll make a shift to a couple of academic questions, one about Mythicist claims on the virgin birth and the other about the usefulness of ancient translations of the New Testament for establishing the original text.   QUESTION: I often read mythicists argue that Jesus was a mythological figure because he (allegedly) has many parallels in pagan gods. One of the parallels, of course, is him being born to a virgin. My question is: do mythicists realize that the concept of the virgin birth is a much later development?   RESPONSE: I have spent time with Mythicist groups, and have always enjoyed myself, finding the people friendly, eager to talk, cordial, and interesting.  But the general lack of basic knowledge about the Bible is shocking, even among the most outspoken among them.  What is shocking is not that they don’t know much about, say, the New Testament – that’s true of most people on the planet  -- but that they have [...]

What We Now Know about the Manuscripts of the New Testament

I have talked about how the Greek New Testament was first published by Erasmus in 1516, and about how scholars began to realize, soon after that, just how many differences there were in our surviving manuscripts, with a key moment coming in 1707 with the publication of John Mill’s Greek New Testament, which noted 30,000 places where the manuscripts Mill had examined had alternative readings.    I should stress, Mill did not cite every place he found a difference in the manuscripts.  Only the differences he thought were significant.  Really. So where do we stand today?   Here is my summary of the modern textual situation, over three hundred years later, as drawn from my book Misquoting Jesus. ****************************************************** Whereas Mill knew of or examined some 100 Greek manuscripts to uncover his 30,000 variations, today we know of far, far more.  At last count there have been over 5700 Greek manuscripts discovered and catalogued.  That’s fifty-seven times as many as Mill knew about in 1707.  These 5700 include everything from the smallest fragments of manuscripts – the [...]

2020-04-03T02:35:17-04:00February 14th, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The Letters of Paul: Mailbag April 1, 2016

In today’s Readers’ Mailbag, I will be answering questions connected with the writings of Paul: what is the earliest manuscript of his letters; did the author of Acts know Paul’s letters; and is Paul described as a heretic in the Dead Sea Scrolls. ******************************************************************************************* QUESTION Bart, early in your book Misquoting Jesus (p. 4) you wrote a sudden, shocking surprise (to many born-again Christians) when you said “As we learned at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament.” I’ve witnessed my own neighbor’s disbelief and visible anger when I pointed this out to him. … My interest is your response to my question “How old are the earliest copies we have of Paul’s letters 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians.” … As you know, these books describe, in part, the resurrection of Jesus.   RESPONSE It is a little difficult for me to know the question behind this question, so first let me answer the direct question and then to respond to [...]

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 24, 2016

A day late, here is this (past) week’s Readers Mailbag.   I will be dealing with two questions this time, one on why Mark includes Aramaic words in his accounts of Jesus’ sayings and the other on where someone might find English versions of the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.  If you too have a question, simply ask it here as a comment, or send me an email, and I will add it to the list!   QUESTION: Why is Mark sometimes quoting Jesus in Aramaic? I know, that Jesus cry on cross is possibly reference to the psalms, but why is Mark spicing his gospel with Aramaic much more than other gospel authors? Is it sign of a oral/written source used by Mark? RESPONSE: Ah, good question.   It’s true that Mark on occasion does record some of the words of Jesus in Aramaic.   For example, in chapter 5 Jesus is told that a young girl (daughter of Jairus) has died; he goes to her in her room, and taking her by the hand [...]

Guest Post by Brice Jones on the Reliability of the Early Manuscripts

Here is a second guest-written post dealing with manuscripts.   We are unusually lucky over the past two days!  This one is by Brice Jones, another ancient manuscript person who happens to be on the blog.   Brice runs his own blog devoted to issues related to papyrology (roughly: the study of ancient papyri manuscripts).   His very useful blogsite is:  http://www.bricecjones.com/blog Brice here is responding to some rather extravagant claims made by Craig Evans (my friend and erstwhile debate opponent) about whether we know what the original manuscripts of the NT said, based on a book recently published by George Houston (who is also – though neither Craig nor Brice knew this – also a friend and erstwhile colleague: he was a longtime member of the Classics department at UNC and is a very bright fellow, even if his work sometimes gets misused by others).   In any event, Brice summarizes Craig’s just-published article and shows some of the reasons it is problematic. - Brice Jones is the author of New Testament Texts on Greek Amulets from Late [...]

Would We Recognize an Original Manuscript?

READER'S QUESTION: Were we to have any *original manuscript* of any NT document in our midst, would we be able to recognize and confirm it as such?  If so, how? BART'S RESPONSE: Now that’s a question I’ve never been asked before!  And in fact, that I’ve never really thought about before.  It’s been fun to reflect on it a bit. To get to the short answer: I think the answer would almost certainly be "No". The reasons are of particular interest, though.   Suppose by chance a very early copy of the Gospel of John appeared.   How would we date it?  Manuscripts are dated on the basis of palaeography – an analysis of the handwriting.   Since, before the invention of printing, handwriting changed slowly, over periods of time, we can collect specimens of Greek manuscripts (or Latin or Coptic etc.) and find ones that have dates written on them.  We can then establish what Greek handwriting looked like at one period or another.   This, of course, has all been done for us already by experts [...]

2020-04-03T19:36:05-04:00June 26th, 2012|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Did the Gospels Originally Contain Miracle Stories?

QUESTION: I have looked up the content of all the papyri I'm aware of (off of links on wikipedia, so who knows if they're accurate). It is my understanding that although p52, p90, and p104 are dated around 125-150 AD, they contain fragments of John 18 and Matt 21 only, and that it's not until 200 AD that manuscripts emerge which actually contain accounts of supernatural actions by Jesus. So, it's possible that accounts of miracles existed in copies that got destroyed, but is it fair to say that the earliest available copies of accounts of Jesus's supernatural actions date from around 200 AD? In other words, assuming people on average had kids by age 20 back then, and thus 20 years counts as a generation, is it fair to say that the earliest available accounts of miracles by Jesus were written by the great, great, great, great, great, great, grandson of somebody who would have been alive at the same time as Jesus?   RESPONSE: This is an interesting question!   It is true that we do not start getting [...]

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