Ever since the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection first began to be preached there have always been those who have doubted and tried to refute Jesus’ life.  Matthew 28:13 records the lie the soldiers were told to offer after Jesus’ resurrection ­  “…Tell them, ‘His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept.’” (Matthew 28:13, NKJV). In our age of doubt and unbelief such  sceptics and critics stand ever ready to confound and captivate the minds of those looking for reasons to reject obedience to the gospel.  Jesus taught us that there comes a point at which it is futile to seek to turn the minds of those whose hardened hearts stubbornly refuse to hear the truth.    At that point the Christian must “shake the dust off their feet” and turn to others (Matthew 10:14, Acts 13:46).  Yet, for those hungry souls diligently searching for truth, yet puzzled by the claims made by enemies of faith, we have a duty to answer each charge to the best of our ability.  In this spirit, I offer a little “ammunition” to use in the fight!

Manuscript Evidence

     When scholars study ancient manuscripts they use a process known as “textual criticism” to analyze variant readings in order to reasonably ascertain an original reading.  This process is used in both secular and religious writings.  Two factors are important in such a process:  1.)  The numbers of preserved copies of early manuscripts, and 2.)  The time span between the original drafting of the work and the earliest preserved copy.  If a work has many copies produced relatively close to the time when the original was written we can be fairly certain that the original reading is preserved.

     Josh McDowell in his book Evidence that Demands a Verdict offers a number of evidences regarding the reliability of the Bible.  Among these evidences is a chart similar to the one below.  In this chart we see a comparison of the manuscript evidence for a number of secular writings in comparison to the New Testament.  Among the works listed are some works by ancient historians, such as Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides, Seutonius, etc.  It is from the writings of these men that much of what we know about ancient history has been drawn.  Yet, in terms of actual evidence regarding the accuracy and reliability of their texts there is very little manuscript evidence.  In the case of Caesar we see that only 20 manuscripts have been preserved, the earliest of which dates to 900 A.D. leaving a 1000 year gap between the time the work was actually written and the earliest copy we have.  Even in the case of Homer, one of the most widely read authors of the ancient world while some 643 copies of his work The Iliad have survived, there is a 350 year gap between the time the original text was written and the date of our earliest copy.
 

New Testament Manuscripts

     It has long been suggested by critics of faith that the New Testament was written generations after Jesus lived by those who were not eye witnesses of Jesus’ deeds.  Thus they argue ­ “How can you know that it is what Jesus really taught?”  Such critics have not looked at the evidence!  The fact of the matter is that there are over 24,000+ handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament which have survived to the present.  Over 4000 of these are in Greek, the language in which the New Testament was penned.  There are complete and near complete copies of New Testament books which date to the third and fourth centuries.  Among these are: the Chester Beatty Papyrus (p46),  c. 200 A.D., housed in the University of Michigan and in Dublin, The Bodmer II Papyrus (p66), c. 200 A.D. housed in Cologny Switzerland, The Sinai Manuscript (¿), c. 300’s A.D., housed in the British museum in London, The Vatican Manuscript (B), c. 300’s A.D., and the Washington Manuscript (W), c.300-400’s A.D.,housed in the Freer Gallery, in Washington D.C. 

    In addition to this there are a number of fragments which date even earlier than these.  The most noted, pictured on the previous page is housed in the John Rylands museum in Manchester England, and known generally as the Rylands Papyrus (p52) shown to the right.    This small fragment contains a small section of the gospel of John.  In paleographic (i.e. the study of handwriting to determine age) studies the style of this fragment matches most closely other works known to date from 94-127 A.D.  This would place place it late in the first century or early in the second.

     In recent years a good deal of attention has been focused on a couple of other manuscripts which some suggest may predate the Rylands Papyrus.  The first of these is actually a group of fragments known as the Magdalen Papyrus (p64), housed in the Magdalen College in Oxford containing a portion of the gospel of Matthew,  shown  below. In the December 24, 1994 edition of the Times of London an article ran entitled “Oxford papyrus is eyewitness record of the life of Christ.” The article presented the claims of scholars Carsten  Thiede and Jose O’Callaghan that recent discoveries of Greek handwriting dated to the mid and late first centuries match closely the style found on the Magdalen Papyrus.   Some years back it was determined that two fragments in Barcelona (p67), which also contain a part of the gospel of Matthew with the Magdalen Papyrus are actually fragments of the same work.  If this claim is correct it would give us five fragments dating sometime in the first century.

   The second manuscript which has drawn some attention is a small fragment, pictured to the right, discovered in one of the caves at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.  This fragment known as 7Q5 was found in a cave believed to house works written before 68 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the site.  Some argue that this fragment contains portions of a line from Mark 6:52,53.  If this is correct it would give us a fragment of the gospel of Mark dating to the mid-First century.

While Jesus was still upon the earth He promised His apostles that He would send them the Holy Spirit. Two important functions were connected with this promise: 1. the Holy Spirit would remind them of what Jesus had said (John 14:26), and 2. the Holy Spirit would guide them into all truth (John 16:13). As a result of this, when the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles, those things which they taught and wrote were the commands of the Lord (Matthew 10:19; I Corinthians 14:37). Their writings were called “scripture” (II Peter 3:16), and they were produced by the movement and inspiration of the Holy Spirit (II Peter 1:21; II Timothy 3:16).

     The New Testament which we read today came into existence through this means. Jesus promised that His words would not “pass away” but would endure longer than heaven and earth (Matthew 24:35). The fact that some 4000 handwritten manuscripts of the Greek New Testament have survived into modern times stands as a striking illustration of the truth of Jesus’ statement.

Papyrus 52 (52)

Since 1935 most of the scholarly world held that the oldest portion of a New Testament manuscript which had survived was a small papyrus fragment of the gospel of John housed in the John Rylands University library in Manchester, England. This manuscript, known as Papyrus 52 (⁵²), was discovered in Egypt in 1920 and dated by C.H. Roberts to 100-125 AD. when he first published the fragment.¹ In recent decades some profound developments and debates have been going on behind the scenes which may eventually move Papyrus 52 out of its place as our oldest surviving New Testament fragment.

In 1901 three small fragments of a papyrus of the gospel of Matthew were discovered in Luxor, Egypt and sent to the Magdalen College library in Oxford. Classified as Papyrus 64 (⁶⁴), these fragments received little attention for over fifty years, until C.H. Roberts published the fragments in 1953 and revised their previous dating from the 3rd or 4th century to the late 200’s AD.² In the years that followed Roberts and other scholars discovered that Papyrus 64 was actually part of the same manuscript as two other fragments Papyrus 67(⁶⁷), a fragment of Matthew housed in Barcelona and Papyrus 4 (⁴) a near complete page from the gospel of Luke housed in Paris.³

Papyrus 64 (64)

     In 1995 the German scholar Carsten Peter Thiede took another look at Papyrus 64 in light of recent discoveries. Thiede concluded that based upon comparison with other papyri known to date to the late 1st century and before, an earlier date of 70-100 AD. should be assigned to Papyrus 64 (and thus the other two papyri produced by the same scribe).⁴ This generated an uproar in the scholarly world. Graham Stanton, a liberal scholar who had written extensively on Matthew, published a book later the same year which began with a chapter dismissing Thiede’s arguments because he had compared manuscripts from different locations.⁵ In response to this Thiede devoted an entire book to the subject in 1996 entitled The Jesus Papyrus.⁶

     While it must be acknowledged that Thiede has a bit of a sensational flair,⁷ the evidence which he presents is reasonable and should not be so quickly dismissed. Some of Thiede’s critics, including Stanton, hold the belief that the gospels were not verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit, but formed through an editorial process by the early church using a hypothetical text of Jesus’ sayings they call Q.⁸ Such critics cannot escape the fact that if they accept a first century date for a surviving gospel manuscript their liberal theories crumble.⁹ This cannot avoid coloring their appraisal of Thiede’s dating.

Papyrus 46 (46)

Even more compelling than the issues which surround the Magdalen Papyrus are some matters which have recieved even less attention regarding a huge papyri manuscript containing almost all of Paul’s epistles. Discovered around 1930, near Fayum, Egypt together with two younger manuscripts of the Gospels, Acts and Revelation it is classified as Papyrus 46 (⁴⁶) and housed partially in Dublin, Ireland in the Chester Beatty Collection and partially in the University of Michigan, Special Collections Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This manuscript was published only a few years after its discovery in 1936, by Fredric Kenyon, who dated it to the early 3rd century.¹⁰ Papyrologist Ulrich Wilcken, around the same time dated it to 200 AD.¹¹ and his views became the dominant acessment among scholars.

     Over fifty years later new discoveries and reevaluation of evidence was applied to Papyrus 46. Scholar Young Kyu Kim in a thorough and highly technical paper concluded that Papyrus 46 should be dated to the later 1st century before the reign of Domitian.¹² Kim compared handwriting styles and linguistic changes from papyri of various known dates and found that Papyrus 46 matched much more closely those found in late 1st century documents than those of the 2nd century.¹³

     Unlike the uproar which would surround the redating of the Magdalen Papyrus, while the later dating still remains the dominant accessment, scholarly criticism of Kim has been much more reserved. Philip W. Comfort in his wonderful book The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts, outlines Kim’s arguments and after offering some comparisons of his own seems to conclude that while Kim could be right, he leans more towards the later dating.¹⁴ This is amazing, because if Kim’s dating is correct it would mean that we could have a near complete copy of Paul’s epistles which was penned before the end of the 1st century!

As Christians, our faith in the reliability of the New Testament and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit does not depend upon manuscript fragments and debates among scholars. At the same time we must recognize that we live in a world in which intellectual assaults are made every day against young Christians and those we would hope to lead to the truth. These assaults attempt to undermine what the Bible teaches and discredit the truths we hold dear. The more that we can know about the nature of such challenges and the evidence which does exist, the better prepared we are to answer these assaults.

1. Roberts, C.H. An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel, in the John Rylands Library (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935).
2. Roberts, C.H. “An Early Papyrus of the First Gospel.” Harvard Theological Review 46 (1953):233.
3. Comfort, Philip W. “Exploring the Common Identification of Three New Testament Manuscripts: ⁴, ⁶⁴ and ⁶⁷.” Tyndale Bulletin 46.1 (1995):43. While most scholars agree that the same scribe produced all three manuscripts, not all agree that they were a part of the same manuscript.
4. Thiede, Carsten Peter. “Papyrus Magdalen Greek 17 (Gregory-Aland ¸64): A Reappraisal.” Tyndale Bulletin 46.1 (1995):29.
5. Stanton, Graham. Gospel Truth: New Light on Jesus & the Gospels (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press Int., 1995). See Chapter II, “First Century Fragments of Matthew’s Gospel?” pp. 12-19.
6. This book was published in the US under the title Eyewitnesses to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence about the Origin of the Gospels (New York: Doubleday, 1996) - Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D‘Ancona.
7. What actually provoked Stanton’s criticism of Thiede was an interview printed in late 1994 in which an interviewer of Thiede’s wrote that ⁶⁴ was dated to the middle of the 1st century. In Thiede’s much more reserved scholarly article cited above, which followed this interview, he suggested that ⁶⁴ “could be redated” to 70-100 AD. Thiede also argues that a fragment found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, known a 7Q5 is from a roll of the gospel of Mark. I don’t find his evidence for this claim to be as convincing.
8. See Stanton, Gospel Truth. Chapter VI “Q: A Lost Gospel?” pp. 63-76.
9. Stanton, in referring to Thiede’s claim admits that if it “Éturns out to be correct, parts of the history of earliest Christianity will have to be rewritten from top to tail” (ibid. p. 4).
10. Kenyon, Fredric G. The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, fasc. 3, supplement 3.1, Pauline Epistles, Text (London: Emery Walker, 1936). I was most fortunate to be able to secure a copy of this text when my brother made a trip to Ireland some years ago.
11. Wilchen, Ulrich. Archiv für Papyrusforschung 11 (1935):113.
12. Kim, Young Kyu. “Paleographical Dating of ⁴⁶ to the Later First Century.” Biblica 69 (1988): 248-257.
13. Kim offers the following groups of handwritting forms from ⁴⁶
    () in contrast to the following “dominant” way in which these forms are found after the reign of Domitian
    (). In addition to this Kim shows that a linguistic change, in which the Greek prefix eg- (), which is found in ⁴⁶, was replaced by ek- () before the 200 AD. (pp. 254-55).
14. Comfort, Philip W. and David Barrett. The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1999) pp. 193-98.