Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school
English, Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer
in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest book, Don’t
Throw Out Your Bible, from which the essay below is
excerpted, is now in print.
I
have previously argued that supernatural events in the Bible
may become believable if we stop thinking of them as violations
of natural law, and see them instead as God’s use
of possibilities that God had already built into his creation.
That means that such events were at the same time both natural
and supernatural. Of course, the most significant “both-and”
event is God’s coming among us uniquely in the person
of Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians believe to be both
human and divine. As Christians understand it, the coming
of the God-man is the event to which the whole of the Bible
was pointing, and his second coming is the event for which
the whole of human history is waiting.
But for anyone who is unaccustomed to viewing the world in
such terms, this certanly does stretch the imagination. Which
makes it critical to show that the New Testament writings,
especially the accounts of Jesus in the gospels, are reliable.
For if the accounts of what Jesus did and said are not reliable,
we cannot justify making him the focus of anything, let alone
our understanding of God, the universe, and the meaning of
life.
We have to start our inquiry with the reliability of the text
of the New Testament, for if our current Greek text is not
close to what the original authors wrote, we may already be
at a dead end. A lot of people do not realize what an abundance
of evidence there is for the integrity of the New Testament
text. That evidence includes more than 5600 early manuscripts
and fragments, including 11 from barely 100 years after the
actual events. By contrast, we have only 7 copies of the works
of Plato, the earliest of those coming from 1200 years after
the author. We have only 10 copies of Caesar and 49 of Aristotle,
and the earliest of those come from 1000 and 1400 years after
their authors. Only Homer gets even close, with 649 manuscripts,
the earliest dated 500 years after him.
In the case of the New Testament, which has about 800,000
words, the copyists were remarkably accurate. The variations
among all 5600 manuscripts amount to only about 2% of the
total text, and none of those variations affects any significant
teaching. Actually those differences afford an advantage:
by analyzing them, manuscript science is able to establish
the original text with something like 99% accuracy.
So much for the reliability of the Greek text. What about
the actual content? That will depend on whether the gospels
are based on reliable eye-witnesses to the words and deeds
of Jesus, and whether they were written while the church’s
corporate memory was still trustworthy.
The earliest books of the New Testament, Paul’s letters
to the church at Thessalonika, were written around AD 48,
which was only about 20 years after the crucifixion and resurrection.
Paul’s letter-writing continued until the mid-60s when
he and many other Christians were martyred under the Emperor
Nero. It is hardly surprising that the mid-60s is also the
time when the gospels began to be written, in response to
the need for a more permanent record of the Christian teaching.
Mark, the earliest gospel, is thought to have been written
around AD 65, in anticipation of Peter’s martyrdom.
Peter promises his readers: “I will see to it that after
my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.”
(2 Peter 1:15)
Eusebius (263-339 AD) quotes a writing by Papias (60-130 AD)
who recalls that the Apostle John used to say: "Mark
became Peter's interpreter and wrote accurately all that he
remembered, though not in order, of the things said or done
by the Lord. For he had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed
him, but later on, as I said, followed Peter, who used to
give teaching as necessity demanded, but not making, as it
were, an arrangement [that is, chronologically] of the Lord's
oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down
single points as he remembered them. For to one thing he gave
attention, to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to
make no false statements in them."
That seems to have been the general understanding among First-Century
Christians. Irenaeus (AD 135-202) confirms Papias’ statement:
"After their departure [martyrdom], Mark, the disciple
and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing
what had been preached by Peter.”
A common theory among New Testament scholars is that the gospel
attributed to Matthew was compiled from Mark’s gospel
(there are many passages where they are almost identical),
plus a collection of “Jesus sayings” that the
scholars call “Q” (from the German word Quelle,
“source”), plus some other details of Jesus’
life that the compiler had access to. Eusebius, again quoting
Papias, says that “Matthew put the ”logia”
of Jesus in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language,
but each person interpreted them as best he could.”
”Logia”, here, means “sayings”, but
also implies the stories that contain those sayings. “Hebrew”
likely means Aramaic, the language spoken in First-Century
Israel. So it seems likely that Papias (AD 60-163) had already
identified the mysterious “Q” and its author,
centuries before contemporary scholars had even theorized
its existence. What is less certain is whether Matthew himself
was also the final compiler of the gospel that bears his name.
The gospel attributed to Matthew is dated around AD 75.
Just as Peter, Irenaeus, and Papias give us clues about the
writing of the gospels of Mark and Matthew, so Paul gives
us clues about the writing of Luke’s gospel and its
companion volume, the Acts of the Apostles. While under house
arrest in Rome, awaiting trial and expecting martyrdom, Paul
sent an intriguing request to his protégé Timothy:
"Do your best to come to me soon. Only Luke is with me.
Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful in my ministry.
When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at
Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments."
(2 Timothy 4:9,11,13)
What makes that request so intriguing is that Paul is deliberately
bringing together Mark and Luke, along with some important
books and parchments. The words “the books and the parchments”
imply that Timothy knew which books and parchments Paul wanted.
But what might they have been? The gospel that Mark had previously
written? Matthew’s collection of Jesus-sayings? Notes
on passages in the Old Testament that foreshadowed the Messiah?
Luke’s diary of his journeys with Paul? Early Christian
instructional texts?
If you take Mark, who recorded Peter’s teaching, and
Luke, the physician who accompanied Paul in his travels and
had first-hand conversations in Jerusalem with people who
knew Jesus, including family members like “James, the
Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19), and maybe even
Mary, and if you set them up with certain important manuscripts
at Paul’s direction, it is hard not to see this meeting
as the publishing conference that resulted in Luke’s
gospel and its companion volume, the Acts of the Apostles.
Luke-Acts has traditionally been dated ca. AD 85, but Acts
ends with Paul under house arrest and not yet a martyr, so
Luke-Acts might actually have been started as much as two
decades earlier.
John, the latest of the gospels, is traditionally dated around
AD 90. But I once heard Dr Ernest Marshall Howse assure his
congregation at Toronto’s Bloor Street United Church
that the gospel attributed to John was actually written a
century later, around AD 200. Of course, that sort of early
20th-Century skepticism discredits the reliability of John’s
gospel and casts doubt on the truth of the stories it records.
But in fact, there was no justification for Dr Howse’s
skepticism, because at the time of his sermon the John Ryland’s
Fragment had already been known to New Testament scholars
for 40 years. Discovered in Egypt in 1920, this small piece
of parchment contains five verses from John’s gospel;
the handwriting dates it around AD 125 (+/– 25 years).
So if people were already copying John’s gospel as far
away as Egypt in the first part of the Second Century AD,
dating the original within 60 years of the events is not improbable.
Of course, John’s gospel does pose some difficulties.
Some critics object that John recounts incidents in Jesus’
life that are different from those in Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
as if that should somehow discredit John’s story. In
fact, John acknowledges that difference and says he chose
his incidents because they suited his particular theological
focus (John 20:30f). The synoptics record only one Passover,
so it might be inferred that Jesus’ ministry lasted
only a year; John, on the other hand, records a cycle of three
Passovers. Again, there is no puzzle about the difference,
because Papias (above) has already told us that Mark, on whom
Matthew and Luke depend, recorded his material without having
a particular chronological schema.
For many readers, the major difficulty with John’s gospel
is the lengthy prayers and speeches, which we moderns might
think a writer would not still have remembered verbatim sixty
years after the events. There is a partial truth there, for
the convention among ancient historians was to reconstruct
a famous person’s speech, reflecting its purpose and
whatever was known about its content. But as we shall see
shortly, the likelihood that John reconstructed Jesus’
words accurately was higher than it might have been among
Greek and Roman writers, because of its Jewish context. As
a rabbinic rule stated, “It is a man’s duty to
state [a tradition] in his teacher’s words.” In
the Jewish oral tradition, accuracy was ensured by the teaching
methods that the rabbis used and by the diligent repetition
that they required of their students.
For some aspects of Jesus’ life the compilers of the
gospels can claim “straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth”
reliability. One such source, as noted above, was “James,
the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:18), where “brother”
may mean that James was an older half-brother or cousin rather
than a full-sibling,. At the Council of Jerusalem, you see
James as leader of the church there (Acts 15:13,19). And you
see from the “we” at Acts 21:17 that Luke himself
met James during one of Paul’s visits there. Another
such source was none other than Jesus’ mother. At Jesus’
death the Apostle John took Mary into his care (John 19:27),
and Mary, who would have been about 50 years old at that time,
would have been a beloved figure in the early Christian community
for several decades. They could not have had a better source
for the infancy narratives and many other events.
So we have a Greek Testament whose text reflects the originals
with 99% accuracy, and was composed over a 40-year period
between 20 and 60 years after the events it describes, by
writers who were either eyewitnesses themselves or had contact
with eyewitnesses and eyewitnesses’ written records.
No other document from the ancient world can claim that degree
of validation.
But a question remains with respect to the oral period of
about 30 years between Jesus himself and the actual writing
of the gospels: How can we be sure that the eyewitnesses reported
accurate information untainted by pious imagination? That’s
our topic for the next issue of Arts & Opinion.
