Biblical Manuscript Evidence of - TopicsExpress

Biblical Manuscript Evidence of Jesus: ============================= Also, the fact that we have very early manuscripts and fragments of New Testament mean that we can be confident that what we read today is what the original authors first wrote. The earliest fragments that exist include the the Magdalen fragments which date from about 65 - 70 AD (the date, however, is still open to debate) and are housed in the Magdalen College Library in Oxford, the Bodymer Papyrus (120 AD), the John Ryland fragment in the John Ryland Library in Manchester which date from 125 AD, and the Chester Beatty Papyrus from 3rd century (including the Gospels, Acts and Revelation). What is remarkable is that these date from either the life-time of the Apostles (in the case of the Magdalen fragment) or from the life-time of those who knew the Apostles personally. This is despite the fact that they were written on papyrus which easily disintegrates after 200 years. There are also complete manuscripts of the New Testament from the third century after Christ including the Codex Sinaiticus (4th c. AD) and the Codex Alexandrinus (5th c. AD) in the British Library, and the Codex Vaticanus (4th c. AD) in the Vatican Library in Rome. In fact there are at present over 230 New Testament manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament (in about eight different languages) which have been found which pre-date the 6th century, thus pre-date the Qur’an. In addition to this there are 86,000 quotes from the New Testament in the writings of the ‘church fathers’, 36,000 of which date from before the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, which when placed chronologically, reproduce the entire New Testament, except for 11 verses! We find nothing like this sort of documentary evidence for the New Testament in any other secular or religious literature from antiquity, in either quantity or quality! For example, we know about the life of Julius Caesar from a mere ten documents, the earliest of which is a copy written 1,000 years after his life-time. One of the best documented literatures in antiquity is that of Homer’s Iliad; yet we posses only 643 copies, the earliest of which was written 500 years after the original. Clearly, the New Testament manuscript evidence is extremely reliable. One can then well understand why it is to this body of literature that historians go today to ascertain the life and times of Jesus Christ. Has the New Testament been changed? ============================== It is often said by Muslims that the Gospel accounts can not be trusted, as they have been changed, and therefore are corrupted. Yet, one needs to ask when it could have been changed in relation to the writing of the Qur’an? It cannot have been after the Qur’an was written since we have numerous New Testament manuscripts pre-dating the Qur’an, as we have already noted. Equally, it cannot have been changed before the Qur’an was written because otherwise the Qur’an would have certainly mentioned it. Interestingly, the Qur’an does not say that the Bible has been changed at any point. In fact, to the contrary, the Qur’an encourages its readers that when they have any questions, they are to compare its own teaching with the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, in order to confirm the truth of the message (Suras 10:64, 94; 21:7; 29:46). This assertion seems odd, in light of the many contradictions between the Bible and the Qur’an concerning the person of Jesus, until one notes that the New Testament was not translated into Arabic until after the Qur’an was written (late 8th century), and thus the writers of the Qur’an were not privy to the content of the Gospel account of Jesus Christ, and thus couldn’t have realised that there were clashes between the teachings of the two books. This explains why the Qur’an refers a number of times to the Bible for guidance (Sura 5:43, 46 and 6:34). More importantly, how could God have allowed the Bible to be changed, when Jesus himself said that the ‘Scripture cannot be broken’ (John 10:35). Why would anyone subsequently have dared to try and change it when faced with the warnings of damnation for doing so (Revelation 22:19)? It is significant that the early Muslim commentators Bukhari (Al-Razi) were all agreed that the Bible could not be changed since it was God’s Word, and the Qur’an distinctly stipulates that God does not change his word’ (Suras 6:34,115; 10:64; 18:27; 50:29). In fact, several centuries passed before Muslims formally claimed that it had been changed. Though there are references to tampering in the earliest debates of the 8th -9th centuries, the first documented polemic is that of Ibn Hasm in 1056 AD. Surely if the Qur’an was indeed given by God, as Muslims claim, it would record the plain fact that the Qur’an and New Testament disagree. Instead, the Qur’an affirms the New Testament (the Injil), the depository of so much of what we know Jesus said and did.