What if the Bible was Perfectly Copied for the last 2000 Years?
Being a Bible college graduate myself, I've read a number of books on how we can trust what our Bibles say. All the books have essentially the same answer:
We can trust what the New Testament says is true because:
1. There are MORE New Testament manuscripts than any other document from the ancient world (around 5,500 near complete manuscripts which is a lot compared to other ancient documents).
2. There are EARLIER New Testament manuscripts than any other ancient document (scholars range them between 25 and 200 years of when the events they record supposedly happened).
3. There are BETTER New Testament manuscripts than any other ancient document (in other words, scholars are fairly certain that much of what is in modern New Testaments is what was originally written in the first century).
Without going into the fine detail that the above arguments deserve, let's just assume all three of those statements are true. What does that really prove? Does it prove we should trust that what the Bible says is the Gospel truth? (no pun intended here).I used to believe that.
For #1, it shows we've got a lot of manuscripts. But what if it's a lie? Then we have a lot of copies of a lie. In other words, the number of copies of the Bible we have has little to nothing to do with whether I should trust that what it says is true.
For #2, it shows people wrote those things down as early as 30 years after the events happened. It's assumed that since someone wrote it down within three decades of the event, it had to be accurate. But why? People can make things up 2 seconds after an event as easy as 100 years afterwards. It was even easier back then in a world without mass media or other modern tools that would limit one's ability to make up stories. Bill Curry, a contributor here at DC, has written an excellent evaluation on
how legends can in fact arise within the lifetime of an eyewitness.
As far as #3 goes, it shows that what it says today is fairly close to what it said back then. But historians are also fairly confident that the stories we have about Caesar being a god are what was originally written by the author, but no one seriously considers that to be evidence that he really was a god.
Now, I understand those three points are often used to make a cumulative case, but in this case, three bad arguments put together don't make good evidence for anything. I also understand that Christians use other areas of evidence to show why it's "trustworthy" (such as archaeology), but I'm talking about the three claims above that are routinely used by Christians.
There's absolutely no reason why the above three claims, even if they're true, should cause someone to believe that Jesus got people drunk at a wedding instead of just hydrated, or that graves opened up and dead people started preaching the word, or that all of a sudden a room of people could speak perfectly in another language.
So what if the Bible was copied perfectly for the last 2000 years? Would it follow then that we can trust what it says is what really happened? I don't think so.
The bottom line is that these apologists and evangelists are confusing the reliability of the TEXT with the reliability of the MESSAGE. That, I think is a crucial distinction that needs to be made.
Whether the manuscripts are early, late, a lot, a few, xeroxed, or hand copied by a second grader, is not the point. The point is to show that the stuff really happened in history -- and I'm afraid you just can't do that with the New Testament or any other ancient document with the above three claims.