Textual Reliability of the New Testament

Introduction
While modern biblical researchers such as Bart Ehrman have contended that textual reliability of the New Testament is absent under close historical analysis,[footnoteRef:2] other scholars such as Michael Kruger have resisted the argument and shown that the New Testament contains textual integrity and reliability from start to finish.[footnoteRef:3] This paper argues that those who doubt the textual reliability of the New Testament are doing so from the standpoint of conjecture and subjective critique rather than from the standpoint of both logical inference and deduction. This topic is relevant for today’s world because it affects the question of faith and whether it can be possible. Faith should rest upon reason—but if one believes that the text of the New Testament is unreliable one has no reason to believe in its message of redemption. On the other hand, if one can show that the New Testament has textual reliability, one can support the faith. Ehrman believes that scholarship should be conducted regardless of faith and that if the scholarship leads one away from the faith then one must not fault the scholarship. However, this paper will show that in Ehrman’s case he misleads himself into putting his faith in scholarship rather than in the words of the New Testament. In other words, he abandons his youthful conclusion that the New Testament is integral and reliability after falling under the persuasion of the faithless scholars at Princeton.[footnoteRef:4] What if one starts with the conclusion that the New Testament is textually reliable? Or what if one starts with the premise that the authors of the New Testament knew of their authority and that their words were inspired by God—as Kruger does?[footnoteRef:5] This paper will show that one can both infer and deduce the textual reliability of the New Testament. [2: Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (HarperCollins ebook), 10.] [3: Michael Kruger, The Question of Canon (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2013), 20.] [4: Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (HarperCollins ebook), 4-10.] [5: Michael Kruger, The Question of Canon (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2013), 25.]
The Arguments Against
Some of the main arguments against the textual reliability of the New Testament are 1) that the message it delivers is often contradictory, 2) the original books themselves have been lost so it is impossible to know whether the versions available now represent the same ideas as the original works, and 3) their authority was implied over time by the Church rather than by the authors themselves and therefore the New Testament became a way of creating a new religion and consolidating power into the hands of Church leaders. These arguments are facile at best and betray an antagonistic rather than an objective mindset.
The fact is that in terms of the kinds of textual evidence, “only the patristic can be dated and geographically fixed with relative certainty.”[footnoteRef:6] And if this is the case, can one assume that the text has been corrupted? Is it logical to assume that the text has been changed in some way from its original? Some argue that it is logical to assume a change and they point to Scripture itself for support of this argument, highlighting the differences in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, i.e., who was there first, what happened, how it was reported; or they point to “places where the text seems to embrace a view that seems unworthy of God or of his people.”[footnoteRef:7] But who has made them authorities on what is worthy of God or of his people? It is a power that they take on themselves and declare with a great deal of pomposity. It is not the sign of objective criticism. Indeed, there are many scholars throughout history who have studied the New Testament with as much focus as modern scholars and have never once put forward such a bold and rather Pharisaical criticism. [6: Bart Ehrman, “The Use and Significance of Patristic Evidence for NT Textual Criticism,” in Aland, Barbara, ed. New Testament Textual Criticism, Exegesis, and Early Church History (Kampen: Pharos,1994) 118.] [7: Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (HarperCollins ebook), 10.]
Disputes over the meaning of differently related events in the Gospels and interpretations aside, one can attempt to trace the history of editions of New Testament texts, as Kurt and Barbara Aland attempt to do[footnoteRef:8]—but does it do much good to begin with Erasmus and trace the history of Protestant editions of the New Testament? There should be no doubt whatsoever that these versions have changed—it does not take a scholar to see that. But what about in the early Church? What were the principles that went into establishing and maintaining the canon of texts now known as the New Testament? Opinions have been divided on this matter for centuries—indeed since the time of the Gnostics.[footnoteRef:9] It may be argued that in the Protestant era, retaining any authoritative control over the New Testament constituted an incredibly feat that simply could not be accomplished. The Protestants anointed themselves as heads of their own churches and declared themselves authorities. The Church’s history was a bit different, somewhat more structured and more authoritative. [8: Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 3.] [9: George Reid, “Canon of the New Testament,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3 (NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1908).]
The Arguments for Textual Reliability
Though the Church Fathers did not use the phrase “textual reliability” they did address the question of authority. For them, the authority of the New Testament was dictated by its Apostolic origin—i.e., by the fact that the writers of the text were divinely inspired. In the 2nd century, one can find Ireneaus referring to a Tetramorph—the four-fold Gospel—whose authorship was even then accepted to be by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It was the argument of Ireneaus that to do doubt that the Tetramorph was divinely inspired was to commit a grave sin against the Holy Spirit of God and against God’s revelation. Ireneaus described that there were individuals in the 2nd century who attempted to alter the Tetramorph, edit it, and create a gospel that aligned with what they themselves wanted to teach.[footnoteRef:10] And Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians warned the church there to beware false teachers who were already even at that time attempting to pervert the doctrines of Christ that the Apostles were spreading (2 Cor 11:13). Kruger notes that the awareness of the implicit authority of the Scriptures was there among the early Christians from the beginning.[footnoteRef:11] [10: Irenaus, “Against Heresies,” Gnosis.org. http://gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm] [11: Michael Kruger, The Question of Canon (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2013), 25.]
Kruger also notes that the writers of the Gospels and Epistles had a sense of the authority that they had been given. This is evident in the New Testament itself when Peter writes: “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15-16). In other words, even the Apostles were aware of the challenges to the doctrines they had been tasked with communicating. Thus it should not be surprising to find Ireneaus addressing this same challenge in the following century. And yet modern scholars like Ehrman doubt that the original authors of the New Testament works really had such a sense about them. More than that, they doubt the entire Christian mythology. Yet what is found in the words of Ireneaus? He states in his “Against Heresies” that men like Marcion of Pontus, who “advanced the most daring blasphemy against Him who is proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, declaring Him to be the author of evils, to take delight in war, to be infirm of purpose, and even to be contrary to Himself” should be avoided for they are the corrupters.[footnoteRef:12] Others aside from Ireneaus made similar references to the Tetramorph, indicating that it was known and viewed as authoritative and that its contents were guarded jealously by the Church for the very reason that so many were attempting to pervert its contents to their own purposes.[footnoteRef:13] Justin Martyr makes reference to the “memoirs of the Apostles, which are called gospels” while Marcion and Basilides of the Gnostic sect wrote their own commentaries on the Gospels and wrote their own apocrypha, as the historians of their age have recorded.[footnoteRef:14] [12: Philip Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography and Textual Criticism (Broadman and Holman, 2005), 125, 345, 352, 356; Irenaus, “Against Heresies,” Gnosis.org. http://gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm] [13: T. C. Skeat, “Irenaeus and the Four-Gospel Canon” in Novum Testamentum 34 (1992), 194-99.] [14: Eldon Epp and Gordon Fee, Studies and Documents: Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (Eerdmans, 1993), 276.]
Bruce Metzger observes that the textual reliability of the New Testament has been a fundamentally important issue of the Church from the beginning and that the reason the canon exists in the first place is because they took the Scriptures seriously and knew they had to be protected from those who sought to pervert them. Thus, though the process of how it all came about is unknown. But Metzger writes that “despite the silence of patristic writers as far as explicit accounts of the canonization process are concerned, there is general unanimity among modern scholars as to what must have been some of the factors that brought about the recognition of the New Testament canon.”[footnoteRef:15] The factors were that the early Church authorities, who received their authority not of themselves but as handed down to them through the Apostolic line, were responsible for ensuring the integrity of the canon—the New Testament. It is upon their efforts to ensure its integrity that one can make the case for textual reliability. Metzger explains that it was an organic developed that arose out of respect for the Lord and the Apostles of Christ.[footnoteRef:16] But it was an organic process that took up to the 4th century to be completed. Why till then? That was when the Arian heresy was ransacking the Church. The Church has typically only ever acted to define with certainty the parameters of the doctrines of the Lord when forced to do so by those who would attack them. The attacks are what generally yield the defense—i.e., the definition. Thus, it was Athanasius of Alexandria who established clearly the “limits of the New Testament canon as we know it…set forth for the first time in a Festal Letter.”[footnoteRef:17] But, again, it was Irenaus who set the stage for this, by appealing “to several sources of knowledge as authoritative, but clearly saw them as one larger revelation of God.”[footnoteRef:18] [15: Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), vi.] [16: Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), xi.] [17: Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), xii.] [18: Bradley Green, Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy (IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010), 27.]
Then there is Hegesippus, who is the first patristic writer to leave a record that delves extensively into the problem of heresy—i.e., those who would corrupt the integrity and textual reliability of the New Testament. Hegesippus wrote that “they call the Church a virgin because she had not yet been corrupted by vain teaching.”[footnoteRef:19] Tertullian likewise observed that the Church understand the gravity of what it had been left by the Apostles.[footnoteRef:20] The texts were not treated haphazardly as though they were mere recommendations from an old uncle. They were cherished and preserved. To claim otherwise is to attack and impugn the character of these men who lived thousands of years ago from the comfort of one’s own home, assuming that one has a better sense of the layout than they did back then. [19: H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth (OR: Wipf & Stock, 1958), 3.] [20: H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth (OR: Wipf & Stock, 1958), 4.]
Origen traveled among the different ancient churches to develop a better sense of their local traditions and from this first-hand experience he grouped the texts the early Church into three: first, were the texts that were embraced by all the churches without question as being from the Apostles; second, were the texts about which there was some doubt as to whether they came from the Apostles directly or not; and, third, were the apocrypha—texts that were invented to help establish a more complete narrative. More importantly, however, is the argument that Kruger makes here, which is that Origen’s first group was comprised of a list of the 27 books of what today make up the New Testament. In other words it was an already clear “concept of a closed canon” that existed in the Church “a century before Athanasius’ famous Festal Letter.”[footnoteRef:21] In short, the Church was focused on textual reliability from the beginning because the Church believed in the Gospels and the Epistles and it meant the world to them to preserve. Christians were dying for these words and for this faith. It is an insult to their memory to launch the kind of argument that some like Ehrman make—i.e., that the New Testament has no textual reliability. [21: Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament (IL: Crossway, 2012), 284.]
Conclusion
The New Testament does contain textual reliability. This is evident in the fact that the early Church was aware of the authority of the texts, preserved their copies, believed in them, and died for them. One can deduce and infer from the past and the present what the reality was for the early Church. As Kruger points out, the development of the canon was an organic process that ensured the textual reliability of the New Testament. The Church Fathers all attest to it. If one is going to be skeptical about the reliability of the New Testament, one must be skeptical about all history.
Bibliography
Aland, Kurt and Barbara. The Text of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.
Comfort, Philip W. Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography and Textual Criticism. Broadman and Holman, 2005.
Ehrman, Bart. Jesus, Interrupted. HarperCollins e-book.
Ehrman, Bart. “The Use and Significance of Patristic Evidence for NT Textual Criticism,” in Aland, Barbara, ed. New Testament Textual Criticism, Exegesis, and Early Church History. Kampen: Pharos, 1994.
Epp, Eldon J. and Gordon D. Fee. Studies and Documents: Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism. Eerdmans, 1993.
Green, Bradley. Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy. IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010.
Irenaus, “Against Heresies,” Gnosis.org. http://gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm
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Metzger, Bruce. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
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Skeat, T.C. “Irenaeus and the Four-Gospel Canon” in Novum Testamentum 34 (1992), 194-99.
Turner, H. E. W. The Pattern of Christian Truth. OR: Wipf & Stock, 1958.