CAN WE TRUST THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT?

Of first importance, the Bible itself claims that we can trust it and that God had guaranteed to preserve His Words:

•                Psalm 119:89 Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens.

•                Isaiah 40:8 The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

•                Matthew 24:35 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

•                1 Peter 1:23, 25 since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God…but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

Jesus had taught that nothing will fall away from the Word of God:

•                Matthew 5:18 “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

How then do we square this teaching - “not a dot passing from the law” – with the fact that there are many thousands of textual variants, although many of them are simply misspellings? I’m not sure, but here are some possibilities. Clearly, Jesus was talking about the OT and not the NT? Perhaps instead, He was referring to the factor that none of the teachings would “pass from the law,” despite the variations is the spelling?

This tends to be the case with the NT manuscripts. From the many thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts and their variants, modern scholars have attempted to reconstruct what they believe had been the original reading. The two reconstructed texts (Nestle-Aland and UBS) agree in regards to every “jot and tittle.” This is a great testimony to the degree of certainty among both conservatives and liberals regarding the original New Testament writings.

Consequently, various NT scholars have affirmed their confidence in the NT textual reconstructions:

•                “On the contrary, it [scholarship] has built it [my faith]. I’ve asked questions all my life, I’ve dug into the text, I’ve studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed…very well placed.” (Dan Wallace, NT textual scholar)

•                “The modern NT is 99.5% free from textual discrepancies, with no major Christian doctrines in doubt.” (Deceased Princeton NT scholar, Bruce Metzger)

Leading NT critic and agnostic, Bart Ehrman, who has pointed out the numerous textual variants among the almost 6,000 ancient Greek NT manuscripts and fragments, had been asked:

•                “Bruce Metzger [the leading textual credit of his day] your mentor in textual criticism to whom this book [Misquoting Jesus] is dedicated, has said that there is nothing in these variants of Scripture that challenges any essential Christian beliefs…Why do you believe these core tenants of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?”

The skeptical Ehrman had surprisingly answered:

•                “Even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a formally committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement…The position I argue for in Misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by the textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” (Misquoting Jesus, 252)

Despite all of his militant skepticism, even Ehrman agrees with Metzger that “the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by the textual variants.” That’s Good News!