Is the New Testament real history?
24,663
copies of the New Testament have been found.
193
copies of Sophocles have been found.
Sophocles is the next most copied manuscript from that era.
Knowing History
Say you wanted to know your family's history for the last 500 years, you could go back in time using three methods:
Written Testimonies
(Letters,
Manuscripts)
Oral Stories
(Passed down by word of mouth)
Physical Evidence (Photos, artefacts)
New Testament History
If you want to know New Testament history, you could try to use the same three methods but actually you'd have to rely mostly on written testimonies. Oral testimony is unreliable when the events happened 2000 years ago and archeology confirms the stories but does not tell the whole story.
The New Testament stories were written on 3 different materials:
Papyrus
made from reeds
Parchment
from animal skins
Clay
made from dirt
The written testimonies were copied by scribes so they could be read by many people (no printers, no photo-copiers).
The original papyrus, parchment and clay have mostly disintegrated and disappeared, but we still have thousands of copies of the text of the original manuscripts.
For the New Testament, we have 24633 copies of manuscripts.
Having many manuscript copies for a piece of history thrills historians because they can reconstruct the original text more closely. Every time another copy is found, the document's authenticity is confirmed.
The graph on the right is a comparison of the number of copies of the New Testament to the number of copies for documents written around the same time.
A scribe at work making a copy of a manuscript
The Bibliographical Test
Other writings of antiquity have far, far less manuscript copies than 24,663. The text with the second most manuscripts (Sophocles) has only193 copies. This is called the bibliographical test and the New Testament passes it well.
The Time Gap Test
When checking whether a written testimony is true, you can look at the time gap between the events being described and the manuscripts telling us the stories. A smaller time gap equals greater reliability. For the New Testament, the gap is about 50 years. This is the time between Jesus' death and resurrection and the earliest manuscripts that tell his story. 50 years may sound like a long time to you but compared to other manuscripts, it's really not a long time.
The manuscript with the next smallest gap is by Pliny the younger (750 years). Pliny wrote hundreds of letters of great historical value about Ancient Rome. He lived from 61 – 113 AD.
Graph: 50 years for New Testament as opposed to 750 years for Phiny and more for others:
How Historians Date Manuscripts
The following techniques are used:
-
Material (clay, papyrus, parchment)
-
Letters – size and form changes through history
-
Punctuation – varies through history
-
How the text is divided and ornamentation
-
Ink type
Conclusion
Using the tens of thousands of manuscript copies of the New Testament, historians are able to get back to the original text to within 99.5% accuracy. Using the biographical test and the time-gap test, the New Testament is an absolutely historical account of what happened. Many other factors point to the fact that the New Testament is true, authentic and accurate. These are reliable testimonies of what took place 2000 years ago. (see New Testament page).
Sources
The Poached Egg Apologetics: https://www.thepoachedegg.net/
Josh Mc Dowell: https://www.josh.org/resources/apologetics/