In this episode Trent responds to atheist Youtubers who claim the thousands of existing biblical manuscripts aren’t anything to brag about.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Recently, I watched some videos from some atheist YouTubers who were critiquing how Christians present biblical manuscripts. These are the copies of the Bible that allow us to know what the Bible originally said since we don’t have the original manuscripts of the gospels or Paul’s letters or things like that. So these atheistic YouTubers, Prophet of Zod and Viced Rhino, I saw these clips. I thought it was interesting because they make some good points and some not so good points. So that’s what I wanted to get into here on today’s episode and welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.
Trent Horn:
So we want to focus on biblical manuscripts and how they’re misunderstood both by critics of Christianity, but also by defenders of Christianity that sometimes we misunderstand the nature of the manuscripts and what they prove. If you articulate the nature of these manuscripts incorrectly, it can leave you open to criticisms, like the kind that we find in these videos from Prophet of Zod and Viced Rhino. So what I want to do first is talk a little bit more about the nature of biblical manuscripts. Then I’ll get into the videos, the portions of the videos from these two atheist YouTubers and offer my thoughts where they are correct and where they misunderstand the nature of biblical manuscripts.
Trent Horn:
So to begin, I want to start with a criticism from Bart Ehrman. So Bart Ehrman is an agnostic. He is one of the world’s leading experts on New Testament manuscripts. He became famous several years ago when he wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus. The idea is that the book became a very, a popular bestseller and introduced people to the science of textual criticism. This idea of using the copies of the Bible to restore what the original said, because we don’t have the original manuscripts of Matthew or Mark or Romans or Corinthians. So introduced people to textual criticism and it created a lot of doubt in people and really overstated things for people to doubt when it comes to these manuscripts. But the differences are so minor. We can correct them and it doesn’t affect any major doctrines.
Trent Horn:
Craig Blomberg is a New Testament scholar and this is what he writes, “Only about a 10th of 1% of the variations are interesting enough to make their way into footnotes in most English translations.” So when you read your Bibles, you look at the bottom, there’ll usually be a footnote saying some manuscripts use this word instead of the word here.
Trent Horn:
Tellingly in the appendix to the paperback edition of Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman himself concedes that “essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” Then Blomberg adds his comment, “It is too bad that this admission appears in an appendix and comes only after repeated criticism.”
Trent Horn:
So I don’t want to focus on the science of textual criticism in this episode, though it is fascinating. We could do a whole episode on that. Instead I want to focus on the argument for the reliability of the preservation of the New Testament text that we can have confidence. What we read in our Bibles today is essentially what was originally written down in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Romans. There may be slight variations, but as Blomberg says, “They don’t affect major doctrines and it’s only a very tiny fraction of the total verses.” So this is the argument that I would make.
Trent Horn:
Premise one. There are a set of ancient non-biblical books that have been reliably preserved to the present day. So we think of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, historians like Tacitus and Herodotus, poets like Homer or Cicero. We would say that if you read Homer or Plato or Herodotus today, what you are reading is essentially what they wrote. We have that general assumption in academia and among common people, when we read these works that’s what was originally written. If we operate with that assumption that it’s been reliably preserved to the present day. That premise I think is pretty well established, people accept that.
Trent Horn:
Premise two. The New Testament has better evidence for its reliable preservation than these ancient non-biblical works. So then conclusion, therefore you should believe the New Testament has been reliably preserved. That logically follows, right, if you think that Plato, Herodotus, Tacitus has been reliably preserved to the present day. There is more evidence for the New Testament being reliably preserved than you should believe that about the New Testament, because it’s better than these things that you already accept.
Trent Horn:
So now what I want to do is go through the numbers and show how they differ between the ancient biblical sources, the manuscripts we have for the New Testament and the manuscripts we have for Homer, Tacitus, Plato, things like that. But then this is important to get the numbers right by the way because, one, they change all the time. I’m going to use rough approximations because manuscripts are discovered all the time. Because like I said, 99% of ancient documents haven’t survived or they’re waiting for us to find them so they could be out there. So these numbers are going to be rough. But some people also use numbers that are grossly out of date, so you got to be careful.
Trent Horn:
So when it comes to the New Testament, I would say there are approximately 6,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts, approximately 6,000 and approximately 15,000 New Testament manuscripts in Latin, Coptic, Syriac and these other languages. About, I would say about 50 of them can be dated to within 250 and 300 years of the original. Our first full-length copy, our first complete copy of the New Testament, we found in the fourth century, about 300 years after Christ’s death, 250 years after the originals were written.
Trent Horn:
So even though we have, so while I made, and this will come up in the videos from Prophet of Zod and Viced Rhino, that we have thousands of manuscripts. Only a fraction of them though come from the first few centuries. But that is still much better than these other ancient non-biblical works. So let’s compare them. Let’s talk about Homer, the Greek poet Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey that was originally written in the eighth century before Christ, so 800 years before Jesus was born. There’s a few fragments of the Iliad that can be dated within 500 years of that time, maybe from before the time of Christ, a few fragments that are about 500 years after the fact.
Trent Horn:
The first complete copy of the Iliad comes from a manuscript called Venetus A and it’s dated to the 10th century. It’s a medieval manuscript. The first complete copy we have of the Iliad is from 1,800 years after it was originally written. The first complete copy we have of the Bible, as I said, is about 250 years after it was originally written.
Trent Horn:
The first fragment of Homer’s Odyssey was found on clay tablets in Greece. They’ve been dated to the third century after Christ. So it’s about a thousand years after the original composition. The histories of Herodotus; Herodotus is called the Father of History. The oldest fragment we have of Herodotus’ history is about 500 years later. The works of Tacitus; Tacitus is one of our most important sources for the history of ancient Rome. He wrote a work called the Annals of Roman History. He even talks about Jesus in one of the later books being crucified under Pontius Pilate.
Trent Horn:
But here’s the thing. All we have is one manuscript. We have one manuscript for books one through six of the Annals, and another manuscript for books 11 through 16 and the other surviving portions of the Annals. They were written, copied in the year 850, the mid 11th century. So the Annals of Tacitus has come from a single medieval manuscript. The dialogues of Plato, so Plato’s dialogues, the Meno, Euthyphro, we have maybe 200 to 250 manuscripts or manuscript fragments.
Trent Horn:
By manuscript, this comes… Prophet of Zod makes this point in his video and it’s a good point. By manuscript, I don’t mean the complete copy. I mean, a copy of some portion. It may be the entire work, but in most cases it’s a part of it. It could be a large part of it, or it might only be a few sentences of the work. So when it comes to Plato’s dialogue, we have these manuscripts. Usually, they are fragmentary portions, 200 to 250 manuscripts compared to the New Testament where, as I said just in Greek, we have 6,000.
Trent Horn:
Now if you space them out even you look at, well, just the first few centuries after Plato over the first few centuries after Jesus, we have far more papyri and manuscript portions from the first few centuries after Jesus than we do for Plato. In fact, the earliest fragment we have of Plato is Papyrus 2993 and that’s been dated to about a hundred years after Plato died. We have hardly anything in the first few centuries. We certainly have more from the New Testament.
Trent Horn:
The first complete copy of Plato’s dialogues, remember the first complete copy of the New Testament can be found 250 years later in a document called Codex Sinaiticus. It was discovered I think at St. Catherine’s monastery, at a monastery at the foot to the base of Mount Sinai, remember where Moses got the 10 Commandments or around that area. It was discovered there. It was part of rubbish and trash that was being used for heat and so it was rescued from being burnt because people didn’t know how valuable this was. It turned out to be the oldest complete copy of the New Testament 250 years after the fact. The oldest complete copy of Plato is the Clarke manuscript dated to the year 895 that places it about 1,500 years after the time of Plato.
Trent Horn:
So the biblical scholar, FF Bruce, this is how he summarizes it, “There is nobody of ancient literature in the world, which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.” But also what’s great about the New Testament is we don’t just have manuscripts to figure out what was originally said. There were Christians who were writing commentaries and epistles of their own on the biblical texts and they quote from it. Since they quote from it, that gives us a way to see, all right, well, even if we didn’t have the manuscript they quoted from, many times we have the manuscript of a church father who did quote an ancient manuscript of the Bible.
Trent Horn:
So this is what Bart Ehrman says in a more academic work that he does on the New Testament where he’s not as grand in his claims, it isn’t as popular works. This is what he says on the church fathers, “So extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” So we have a bunch, a wealth of evidence that the New Testament was reliably preserved. If we believe that ancient non-biblical works were preserved, then you should believe that about the New Testament.
Trent Horn:
All right, now I’m going to look at some of the arguments that Viced Rhino and Prophet of Zod make, and then I’ll offer some of my thoughts.
Trent Horn:
I just ran a script on my computer that copied on the origin of species 30,000 times. So there are now more copies of that book on my hard drive alone than there are manuscripts for the New Testament. All this is within the first two centuries after the original was published, which completely blows the New Testament’s eight fragments of manuscripts out of the water. Does that make origin of the species more reliable? I mean, it is more reliable than the Bible, but that’s because of the information it contains, not because of many copies of it exist.
Trent Horn:
This misunderstands the argument in two ways. First, it’s not just the sheer number of copies. If one person makes 20,000 copies either on a computer or really fast writing, that’s really just one copy. That’s not helpful. The thousands of manuscripts that we have are evidence of many different textual traditions. So that because we have all these different traditions, we can cross reference them. If we’re not sure what is said in one manuscript, we go to a copy that was made maybe a century later in another part of the world and then we can compare it and get back at the original. When we have all of these different ones, we can make that comparison.
Trent Horn:
Number two, the number of manuscripts is not proof that what was originally written is true. It’s a step in the argument. It just shows that what was originally written has been preserved to the present day. So that’s an important step. Then once we have that step proven, then we ask the question, well, what evidence is there that what was originally written is true? Then we apply separate arguments for that part of proving the Bible.
Video:
When they stated there are 6,000 Greek manuscripts dating back to 120 years after Christ’s death, they gave the impression that thousands of reliable and relevant documents have been on the scene since shortly after the time of Christ. But this is very clearly not the case.
Trent Horn:
This is a fair point, and I apologize if I’ve ever casually put it in this way because it can be misleading. That’s why in my book, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties, I have an appendix where I talk about textual criticism, has the Bible been reliably preserved. In that book, I talk about how we have approximately 5,500 manuscripts, 15,000 other languages. But I also note in the very next sentence that 50 of the Greek manuscripts can be dated within 250 years of the original copies.
Trent Horn:
So you’re right. We can’t say that there are 20,000 manuscripts that were written within 120 years. Certainly not, but the number of manuscripts both complete manuscripts and portions of manuscripts that we have at the various stages of development within one century, two centuries, three centuries is far better than any other ancient non-biblical work.
Video:
Here’s the oldest manuscript we have, a nine-centimeter long fragment from the Book of John that is dated to the first half of the second century.
Video:
Just look at this thing. Do you think it does anything whatsoever to verify stories in the Bible? I kind of doubt it.
Trent Horn:
The fragment they’re referring to is called P52 or the Rylands Papyri. It’s at John Rylands Research Library in Manchester, England. It’s John 18:31-33, and it is important because it’s been dated to the year 125 AD. There were scholars who argue that the gospel of John was written in the mid to late second century and that papyri shows that they were wrong. It moves the gospel of John away from the second century and more solidly into a late first century composition. So if you get it closer back to the original, that’s better evidence for its authenticity. So even these small fragments do help to promote the case for the authenticity of the New Testament.
Video:
In the second century, they’re eight, and what counts as a manuscript is any little tiny scrap of paper that is handwritten.
Video:
We have literally nothing until the second century over which time we have a whopping eight manuscript fragments.
Trent Horn:
It’s not the case that all of these second century manuscripts are just these tiny little fragments. Daniel Wallace, who is a Greek New Testament scholar, one of the best, he says of these manuscripts. He ranges them 10 to as many as 13 that have ranges for their composition that would include the second century. When you look at these manuscripts, you see some of them are very substantive. You have Papyrus 66, though it’s usually called P66. They say P instead of papyrus. P66 is nearly the complete copy of the gospel of John. P75 has most of Luke, three-quarters of the gospel of John. A little bit of dating, sorry, a little bit of controversy on the dating of P75, one scholar puts it in the fourth century, but most other scholars have arranged that would include the second century.
Trent Horn:
Another document within the second century range as a manuscript is P46. It includes the last eight chapters of Romans, all of Hebrews, nearly all of 1 and 2 Corinthians, all of Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians and two chapters of 1 Thessalonians. So these, even though we only have, let’s say 8 to 12 manuscript copies from the second century, they’re not all fragments. Some of them are very substantial and as I said before, far better than any other ancient non-biblical work.
Video:
But in the earliest years of the church, copies of gospels or epistles were made and passed around on a rather haphazard basis by amateur followers who did not think of the materialist scripture.
Video:
Likely there were not many copies of the various books of the New Testament floating around in the first century as most of those books were not considered to be scripture by anyone. They were just letters for the most part.
Trent Horn:
There is no reason to believe that these assertions are true. First, when it comes to the scribe, it’s true that professional scribes came into more popularity later on in the early middle ages. But Bart Ehrman in his book, Whose Word Is It, writing on the use of scribes including non-professional scribes, he says, “Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world, were particularly scrupulous even in these early centuries,” that would be before the fourth century, “and that there in Alexandria a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings was preserved decade after decade by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes.”
Trent Horn:
Also this idea that they didn’t think that this was scripture, I don’t accept that at all. I think the evidence is heavily against that, that when even in the earliest church when this was copied, both the people who are copying it and the people who wrote it believe this was extremely important. This was sacred. This was scripture. Now it wasn’t part of an official universal cannon, but they understood its importance. Why should we think that they knew that it was scripture?
Trent Horn:
Well, first, let’s take the Book of Revelation. It claims to be a revelation of heaven given to John. The gospels are an intent to write about someone in salvation history who is even greater than Moses himself. This is not just some purely secular work. This is writing about the Son of God become man, so it makes sense to see this as scripture. In fact, early on people recognize that. In 1 Timothy 5:17-18, this is what Paul writes. He says, “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the scripture says,” and then it quotes the Old Testament, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain and the laborer deserves his wages,” which is a quote from Luke 10:7. So here, Paul is saying that Luke when he’s writing here that this is scripture. He recognizes that.
Trent Horn:
Also, another clue that both the authors of scripture knew they’re writing scripture and their audiences received it as such, is that these were not mere letters. So in these videos, there’s an insinuation that the letters that Paul was writing, for example, “Oh, these are just letters. Hey, how you doing? Checking on everybody,” these are just personal letters.
Trent Horn:
Take Philemon, which is Paul’s shortest letter. It’s only about 335 words in Greek. It’s about a personal matter related to an escaped slave, Onesimus. But even that, that is three times longer than the average letter in the ancient Greco-Roman world, the ancient Roman world. The average letter was about between 80 and 100 words long, very short. Paul’s letter to Philemon is three times longer than that.
Trent Horn:
Now compare Philemon then to something like Romans, which is 16 chapters, a very dense theological material, this is not just a personal letter. There is an idea that something being written here is substantial and very, very important and because of that it was very, very expensive. Paul hired secretaries to help him to write it.
Trent Horn:
Randolph Richards in his book, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing, he says that to write the Letter to the Romans if you adjust for inflation would have costed Paul $2,000 in today’s money to get parchment, to pay the secretaries. So he spent like two grand writing this letter. These letters are not personal, one-off things that are just casual. This is something very, very important that is being written. Other people came to recognize that it is scripture.
Trent Horn:
St. Peter talks about Paul’s graphe. The writings in 2 Peter 3:16 are difficult to understand. That word graphe is used throughout the rest of the New Testament to refer to the Old Testament, to refer to sacred scripture. So there’s abundant evidence that the writings in the New Testament both when they were written and when they were immediately received were received as something that was sacred, holy that we would say is scripture.
Trent Horn:
So I think that I’ve answered the arguments from these two gentlemen. Happy to engage that more at a future time, maybe to go more deeper into textual criticism. Right now I’ll leave you with a writing from Cassiodorus. He’s a sixth century monk, lived at the same time as Saint Benedict. I just love this quote about scribes and the work that they do that we would not have, Christianity. We would not have, I mean, we would have it maybe in a very different form, but it would not be like what we have today without the diligent work of scribes, preserving these biblical manuscripts.
Trent Horn:
This is what he writes, “What happy application, what praiseworthy industry, to preach unto men by means of the hand, to untie the tongue by means of the fingers, to bring quiet salvation to mortals and to fight the devil’s insidious wiles with pen and ink.”
Trent Horn:
I love it. I like to think that I fight the devil’s insidious wiles with a computer and a camera. So if you want to help me to fight the devil’s insidious wiles, to do that please like this video. Subscribe to our channel and definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com, so. Hey, thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very pleasant day.
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