Transcription
Hello everyone. I have a real privilege today. We're going to be talking about the text of the New Testament, and we have a special guest, Dr. Dan Wallace.
Professor Dan Wallace is the senior research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He's written, edited, or contributed to more than three dozen books and published articles in New Testament studies, including *Novum Testamentum*, *Biblica*, *Westminster Theological Journal*, *Bulletin of Biblical Review*, *The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society*, and several other peer-reviewed journals, including *New Testament Studies* and *Novum Testamentum*. Those are top-shelf journals, so he's no lightweight.
Of course, he teaches first-year Greek, intermediate Greek, advanced Greek grammar, exegesis, textual criticism, advanced textual criticism, and several other courses. He has been a consultant for and remains involved with several English Bible translations. He's written a book titled *The Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament*, which is a standard intermediate Greek grammar and has been translated into more than half a dozen languages.
I can say, Dan, on my 40th birthday, 19 years ago, this was my primary present; my wife got me that book. I wanted your advanced Greek grammar or Greek grammar beyond the basics, a large book. I've got this also in software, but what a great book! I wanted to mention that as well—a great doorstop!
It doesn't look like you've used it.
Well, I have used it some, but I've used it mainly within the Bible software that I have. It's in Logos, and it wasn't in Bible Works. I also used the Greek grammar from the professor that I had, from whom I learned Greek, which was F.F. Bruce's final doctoral student, Ron Sauer, who teaches at Moody Bible Institute. He didn't publish it, but he put together a Greek grammar, and I've used that over the years as well.
So, Dan is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature. He's a member of the Institute for Biblical Research, the American Society of Papyrologists, and the Evangelical Theological Society, of which he was president in 2016. He’s also a member of the prestigious Society of New Testament Studies, perhaps the most elite society for New Testament scholars in the world.
He's the executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, which is an institute whose initial purpose was to preserve digital photographs of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts. In this process, CSNTM staff have discovered more than 90 new New Testament manuscripts.
I've known Dan, Professor Wallace here, for—I don't know how long it’s been. I know it's been probably 15 or more years. Personally, he's a man of great integrity. He's really challenged me and set just a fantastic model of what a great scholar is, what they look like, and an honest scholar.
Dan, I remember, and thanks for joining me for this, when I was doing my doctoral research and I was looking at 2 Corinthians 4:16 through 5:8 and Paul's view of the afterlife there, I remember calling you and saying, “You know, you're really great at exegesis, and I am exegeting this text and looking at commentaries, and I'm really struggling with some of this. This is a very difficult text about what Paul thought about, you know, the nature of an afterlife. Did we have a body or not? Because there are different ways of interpreting this, and I'm arriving at some conclusions with which I'm not comfortable.”
You said, “Mike, you've got to go with the evidence, even if it makes you uncomfortable.” I appreciated that. It was hard; I kept doing it. I adopted a view that I was uncomfortable with until a couple of years later I found some more on the topic that really clarified some of the tension areas I still had, even with the uncomfortable view, tension with the text and how to interpret it.
But I won't forget that; you've been fantastic, and I appreciate that.
Well, Mike, you've been a great friend all these years, and I have seen you grow and mature as a scholar. You're doing some first-rate work, and I love what you're doing. I'm just delighted to be on this program with you. But, you know, you and I go back a long way.
It's been fun because we live not in exactly the same world, but we're next-door neighbors, pretty much. Every once in a while, you start mowing part of my lawn and get it fixed, and I trim part of yours and screw up! I don't know what that analogy means, but anyway, I appreciate it.
Well, let me ask you some questions, and we get into it.
So, the first question is, you know, what got you interested in textual criticism? This might take the whole time!
Well, we can't do that!
No, I know that. I was 16 years old when I made a radical commitment to Jesus Christ. At that time, I grew up in Southern California, in Newport Beach, California. I loved to go body surfing, and I played football in high school. I started picking up hitchhikers on Coast Highway, which hugs the coast from Mexico to Canada. I'd pick them up, and I'd give them New Testaments, Today's English Version, and share the Gospel with them. I would buy these New Testaments from a real estate agent in the area who had a huge billboard over his independent real estate office that said, “Jesus Saves.” I thought this guy must be a Christian.
Well, I would get these Bibles, Today's English Version paperback, for 50 cents a piece, something like that, if I bought a whole box load from him at a time. So, I would go about every three to four weeks, share with the hitchhikers, come back, and keep doing that.
When I talked to him, he said, “Well, now look at this verse; it shows clearly that Jesus is not God,” and “Look at this verse.” He kept trying to prove to me that Jesus was, in fact, not divine. Now, this man was not a Jehovah's Witness, but he was an Arian, and it’s an unusual thing to find Aryans that actually... Anyway, he was independent of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and it really challenged me. I thought, if I'm going to devote my life to Jesus Christ, I want to make sure He's really worth it.
So, I went off to college and began to study Greek when I was still a teenager. I minored in Greek in college, majored in New Testament, taking I think 14 more classes in my THM program, then majored in New Testament in my PhD, post-doctoral work in this area. But that was the initial reason: I wanted to know, can I really trust what the New Testament says about Jesus? Is He really worth giving my life to? So, I wanted to get into the text, both initially by way of grammar, but then at Biola University, I studied under Harry Sturz, who was a bona fide, really decent textual critic, and he got me into wrestling with the issues about what the original text actually said.
So that’s how I got into this, and it's held my interest ever since.
The Greek New Testament is based on the best manuscripts for which translators use. How do scholars like yourself put together this critical Greek New Testament? What’s the process?
No Greek New Testament that's published is based on just one Greek manuscript. We have, going all the way back to Erasmus’ Greek New Testament of 1516, he looked at eight or nine manuscripts. It's difficult to tell exactly how many he used, but at least eight manuscripts that he used to put together his text, most of which didn't cover more than, say, the Gospels, and he had one manuscript for the Apocalypse. But he is reconstructing what he thinks the original text is based on the manuscripts that he had access to.
When you've only got one manuscript for a particular book, you don't have a choice of saying, “I'm going to prefer this reading over that one.” You've got to go with whatever that manuscript says. Since that time, scholars have continued to use multiple manuscripts, and as the fund of knowledge has increased, we've used a whole lot more than we had previously.
So, it’s scholarship that since 1831 has tried to look at the oldest manuscripts and reconstruct the text based on those. In 1831, a scholar put together for the first time a Greek New Testament that was not based on essentially the Textus Receptus, which is what Erasmus' text was called 100 years later. It was based on the earliest manuscripts, and he tried to reproduce the text from about the fourth century.
Depending on what a scholar views as what are the most important manuscripts, they're not necessarily the earliest, but what they're saying is these are the manuscripts that are the most important—that's what they're going to use as the basis for their text.
So, Dan, there are four major critical Greek New Testaments today. You have the Nestle-Aland 28, there's the UBS, which is the same text as the NA28; it just has a different textual apparatus. Then there's the Society of Biblical Literature, the SBL Greek New Testament, edited by Michael Holmes, and then there's the new Tyndale House Greek New Testament.
Tell us the difference between these four and if there are some others.
Those really are the standard critical texts available today. There were some other editions done that are, as far as I know, no longer in print. But the Nestle 28 and UBS, both done by the German Bible Society and United Bible Societies, the text is exactly the same. You are correct that the apparatus is what is different.
The UBS text has far fewer variants listed than the Nestle does. The Nestle has about eight times as many variants as UBS, but the UBS text rates the variants with an A, B, C, D rating, or at least an A, B, C rating in terms of the certainty of the editors as to the authenticity of that reading. The Nestle text doesn't give any kind of a rating system, so they can list a whole lot more textual problems without giving a rating.
The UBS gives a whole lot more evidence for the textual problems that they list, with a rating on top of that. The UBS text also has English subtitles throughout, which the Nestle text lacks. For many years, the UBS text alone came with a dictionary if you wanted to get it that way, but now the dictionary can be in the UBS or the Nestle text.
So same editors, basically the same text, but the apparatus is essentially the biggest difference. As far as the SBL Greek New Testament, that was commissioned by... hang on, I just want to say something about that UBS one versus the Nestle-Aland. My first Greek New Testament when I was learning was the UBS one, and I felt I got comfortable with that one because I could look and it said A, B, C, D.
But then later, I remember when Larry Hurtado's book came out, *Lord Jesus Christ*, the real big one, from I think that was also 2003. They had a panel discussion on that at SBL, and I can remember right before it started, a couple of the panelists were talking, and one of the guys had a Nestle-Aland, I guess it was the 27th then.
There was, "Yeah, this is the real Greek New Testament," you know, and I'm guessing they were putting down the UBS one. Do most scholars use the NA28 over the UBS? Do they look down on the UBS one?
Well, it depends on how you define a scholar. If it's a person who's just working in the New Testament, they may use UBS or Nestle, but if they’re somebody who wants to look at the textual apparatus, the Nestle is the best Greek New Testament handbook we have out there. It's a pocket-sized Greek New Testament that gives us the data.
It doesn't give us anywhere near all the textual variants that are there; it’s a small fraction of them, but it does give the more important ones. The UBS text narrows that down even further, and they claim that the variants that they list are important for translation, but there are also several they have that are irrelevant for translation, but they tend to be the most important textual variants where there’s some dispute.
It's not that they haven't been completely consistent, but that's what the UBS text does. So I think it's valuable to have both. It's valuable to get these editors' opinions. They did not want to have a rating system at first, but it was Eugene Nida who really argued, from United Bible Society’s American Bible Society, “You have to have a rating system,” and this went back to the early 1700s where this was the kind of a system that was actually used.
So it's nice to have that again. The SBL Greek New Testament, produced by Michael Holmes for the Society of Biblical Literature, I think was especially done so that those scholars and students who did not have the funds to purchase a physical Greek New Testament could have access to one. This is an online version; you can also buy it physically, but Mike Holmes is absolutely a first-rate textual critic, and even though it’s a solo job, he compared his Greek New Testament with previous editions, but he still made his own decisions, although it reflects often what the previous editions have suggested.
This is how the Nestle texts were produced: through the first 25 editions from 1898 to 1963, the Nestle texts were based on strictly a majority of three basic editions. When two out of three agree, that’s what they printed as the edition; it wasn't until Nestle 26, in 1979, that they actually started to make their own decisions independent of previous editions.
The Tyndale House is one that is done at Tyndale House, Cambridge. It's a Christian study house where you can live and study. They’ve got a magnificent library of biblical studies that even a scholar such as C.F.D. Moule would often visit there rather than any of the other Cambridge colleges because of that library—it was such a great library and still is. I spent a couple of sabbaticals or parts of them living there. The Tyndale House is really a terrific place, and some of the best textual critics in the world today are their fellows at Cambridge University, and they are at Tyndale House.
So, Dirk Jongkind, and Peter Head, who was there, now he's at Oxford, and Pete Williams are among those who have done just some outstanding work at Tyndale.
Now, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament has a couple of features that are different from all these others. It, like Mike Holmes' SBL, is independently produced; it's not in line with a tradition like the Nestle or the UBS, but it's done based on—for every book of the New Testament except the Apocalypse—they have to have at least one fifth-century manuscript or older as the basis for what they print in the text.
What the Tyndale House Greek text can claim is that their Greek text existed in the fifth century or earlier; you can't claim that with the UBS or Nestle necessarily because there are times where they base their reading—the reading that they adopt—on late manuscripts. They do so on the basis of very strong and compelling internal evidence, but they’re doing it that way.
A feature that I really do like about the Tyndale House—there's a lot that I like about it, although it's by no means my preferred text—but one of the features I like about it is that it uses the ancient paragraphing systems. The way it paragraphs the text is the same way that you have the part of Raphai in Codex Alexandrinus or Sinaiticus, something like that. They have to find the division of the text found in an ancient manuscript rather than a modern editorial decision, and you’ll find discrepancies between what the Nestle text does in paragraphing and what the Tyndale does.
As one example, the Tyndale House at Ephesians 5:22 starts a new paragraph: “Wives, be submissive to your husbands as to the Lord.” The Nestle text starts a new paragraph at 5:21, where you have the participle “being submissive to one another in the fear of Christ,” I think is the wording. So they take verse 21 with the following what's called house tables that are talking about husbands and wives, fathers and children, slaves and masters, and they're saying that governs the whole thought from 22 through 6:9, but it's unlikely to do that for a number of reasons that I explain in my grammar.
The Tyndale House, they just said, “Let’s see what the ancient manuscripts have,” and I looked at several of them; I didn't look at all of them, but I looked at several, and sure enough, I couldn't find manuscripts that started a new paragraph at Ephesians 5:21. I think that becomes a significant interpretive feature of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. There are some problems with it, but you know, we’re talking about a lot of things today, so we’ll leave with that, but I think it’s a good text to use for comparative purposes, like these others are.
You know, when I was in grad school back in the early to mid-80s taking a course on textual criticism, we used Metzger’s *Text of the New Testament* book as our textbook, and I think he was saying there were about 5,300 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament at that time. I know that's increased; you found some new ones. I'd heard the number was 58,000, 1440-some, but then I talked to you about a year ago or so, and you said, “Well, some of those have been counted twice by accident.”
So, we're in August of 2020 as we’re talking right now: approximately how many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are there right now?
Well, I could say officially there are over 5,900; that's the official count. But the official count is not the actual count. There are a number of differences. One of the problems we’ve had is that when a new manuscript gets discovered, it is tabulated by Munster, the institute in Munster that gives a new cataloging number.
In the past, sometimes they have not done their job as carefully as they could have, in large measure because they didn’t have good images of other manuscripts. They might have, like, P-67, papyrus number 67, which was later discovered to be a part of papyrus 64. So now that is called one manuscript, P64 plus P67, but it has two different numbers.
So we have today 140 official papyri, but the actual papyri is, I think, somewhere around 125 because there are some that... it's at least lower than 140. Now, some of the other issues you’ve got are, you've got one magiscale manuscript that I think has eight or nine different portions throughout the world that are actually part of one. This goes in the opposite direction, too; there used to be a listing of the manuscripts where they would be called obscrift. That is, this Codex D, obscrift would be a copy that they know is of Codex D done several centuries later.
Well, they've dropped the obscrift nomenclature, and now they’ve given that manuscript its own number, so that actually increases the number of manuscripts rather than decreases them. But then you've got a lot of other issues, such as manuscripts that have gone missing, manuscripts that have been destroyed, and manuscripts that used to be counted but are no longer counted. There’s a lot of different ways to look at this.
The best conclusion I can make right now is that we have extant today about 5,500 Greek New Testament manuscripts. We can't be more precise than that without trying to go through all the data, and even with that, there’s one of my colleagues at CSNTM who recently discovered four or five different portions of the same lectionary that actually belong to one lectionary rather than having different catalog numbers, and this is an article he’s going to get published. But at this present state, we don’t know that until that stuff gets out there. 5,500 is a good rough estimate; it’s better to go with rough estimates than exact numbers unless you’re trying to give the official number. I give both when I give lectures.
Now, the King James Version, when it came out in 1611, was based on a Greek text put together by Erasmus; is that correct?
It goes through some generations of differences, but yes, largely it is Erasmus’ text. So, the Greek text on which the King James Version is based—how many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament did it use at that point?
Erasmus, in 1516, used, as far as we know, at least eight Greek New Testament manuscripts. Then Stephanus came along later and looked at some others; he also looked at the Complutensian Polyglot. Theodore Beza came along. It was Beza’s text that was essentially the one behind the King James, but it largely goes back to Erasmus.
For example, the last six verses in the Book of Revelation—Erasmus did not have that last leaf of Revelation, so he only had one manuscript for the Apocalypse, and he had to back-translate from a Latin codex into Greek to make that final leaf so he could get this Greek New Testament published.
He created at least 17, as many as 20 textual variants from his made-up Greek, where he had no Greek witnesses that are still in the Greek text that is called the Textus Receptus that stands behind the King James Version. So they didn't change it with reference to better witnesses; they went with the TR. There are readings there that are found only there and no other places that are significant readings.
So you’re saying that the King James Version that is read today—that is based, in part, like in Revelation, on a Greek text that never existed?
That's correct, yes, for the last six verses of Revelation. There are other places where they basis it on the Latin text, and at one place in 1 John 5:7 and 8, Erasmus in his first edition published what he found in the Greek manuscript he had. Later, there was a response to him or a reaction to him saying, “You have dropped the Trinitarian formula known as the Comma Johanneum,” which says, “There are three who bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.”
Erasmus didn't have that in his first edition; he got hammered on that. By the time he did his third edition in 1522, he had come across a transcription of a manuscript that we now know was produced in 1520 by a scribe named Roy at Oxford that created the Comma in a Greek manuscript. Somehow this came across Erasmus' desk in Basel, so Erasmus puts it in to save face, even though he had no Greek witnesses to stand behind it, and that is still in the King James to this day.
Since that time, there have been nine Greek New Testament manuscripts that have been discovered that have this either in the text or as a marginal note, but the oldest of these Greek manuscripts is 11th century, and yet that marginal note is 14th, 15th century, something like that.
So if it's in the 11th century Greek text—was it in a marginal note in the Greek text?
Yes.
Ah, now, okay. So the King James Version today, I just want to be clear: the King James... or is there a difference between the Greek text used for the King James and the New King James?
No, there is not.
Okay, so it's surprising. So that Greek text for the King James and New King James is based on essentially 8 Greek manuscripts?
Yes.
And what's the oldest of those?
Well, you do have one that goes back, I believe, to the 11th century, and that was a manuscript that Erasmus didn't feel was as worthy as the others, so he used it less than the other manuscripts. He didn't have a good understanding of paleography, of course; who did in the 16th century? He couldn’t figure out how to date these manuscripts, so some of the later manuscripts he considered to be earlier and vice versa.
He also had a friend at the Vatican, where he would ask him about Codex Vaticanus, a manuscript which most scholars would regard as probably our most important Greek New Testament manuscript today, and it’s from the fourth century. He would inquire from this friend at the Vatican about this reading or that reading just to find out what Vaticanus had, but that's not what he followed—he followed really inferior manuscripts to produce the King James Bible, ultimately.
He didn't do that, and the oldest of which, the oldest of those eight, essentially eight Greek manuscripts used to produce that critical Greek New Testament upon which the KJV is based... the oldest was 11th century, I believe.
That's correct, about a thousand years after the autograph.
Well, I’ll write an article on this, and I can’t remember the dates on this. That’s why you write—so you can remember it by looking at what you wrote!
I understand that.
Hey, so how does our present critical Greek New Testament compare with other ancient literature? Bruce Metzger called it something like “an embarrassment of riches,” which is a phrase I have adopted and used many times since. That is, we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to New Testament manuscripts compared to other ancient literature.
The New Testament far and away has earlier and more manuscripts than anything else from the Greco-Roman world. When I say far and away more, it’s stunning how great the difference is. The average Greek or Latin author has less than 15 copies of their original work still in existence today.
Now, look—and I’m talking about in all languages, whether it was translated into other languages or not. The Greek New Testament has, in terms of those copies in all languages, well over a thousand times more copies than the average Greco-Roman author. Now, when you look at somebody as well-known as Homer, the most popular of the ancient Greek writers, he gets an 800-year head start on the New Testament. He is far and away the most popular ancient writing we have apart from the New Testament.
We have, last count, was less than 2,000 copies. So you've got, for the Greek New Testament, we have about 5,500 copies, but then when you count the versions—and I'm doing this across the board with all these; I’m comparing apples with apples—we have about 10,000 in Latin. We’re not exactly sure—we have several thousand in Syriac and Coptic. These are our three earliest and most important versions.
We have other versions all together. Among the versions and the Greek New Testament, we have, I think conservatively, at least 20,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament.
Now, are these complete copies of the New Testament?
No, of course not; neither do we have that many complete copies of other ancient Greco-Roman literature. So we’re still doing a straight comparison, but the average Greek New Testament manuscript is over 400 pages long, and we have manuscripts that go back to the second century, within just decades of the completion of the New Testament.
You compare that to Greco-Roman literature—we have virtually nothing that comes close to that. In fact, the average Greco-Roman author is waiting half a millennium at least before we get any copies of his writings; for the New Testament, we're waiting half a century.
It’s a huge difference!
That's amazing! You know, I’ve got a book here, the title of its *Text and Transmission*, edited by Reynolds L.D. Reynolds and published by Oxford University Press. This book is 400 dollars if you want to buy it from Oxford. But it was—there's roughly 100 Latin authors from the Greco-Roman period, and it talks about the major manuscripts that are involved to put together a critical Latin text of these authors.
It says there are approximately, you know, there are lots of manuscripts, but there are only approximately 1,700 that are used to construct the critical Latin texts when all of these authors are considered. And some of them are really good! You know, most of them are between the—almost all of them are between the 9th and 15th centuries.
So just for example, you’ve got Suetonius, who is regarded as the greatest Roman biographer; Plutarch, considered the greatest of all ancient biographers. If you just want to look at the Roman—you would say, you know, bracket Plutarch—you're looking at Suetonius, and for Suetonius, the lives of the Caesars, the 12 Caesars, there are over 200 manuscripts that we have, but they are all derived from a single manuscript that's dated to the 9th century.
Then you've got Tacitus, one of the greatest Roman historians. He wrote the Annals; he wrote some other things; he wrote the Histories. In the Annals, books 1 through 6 are based on a single manuscript that's dated around the year 850, the mid-9th century, or about 750 years after the original.
And then you've got books 7 through 10 that are missing, and then you've got books 11 through 16 and the Histories—they're based on a single manuscript that is dated to the mid-11th century, or about 950 years, 930 years later.
Now, Cicero’s speeches are based pretty much on one—well, there are only a few manuscripts, but the earliest is late first century B.C., early, the first half of the first century.
So I mean we’re only looking there between 10 and 100 years after Cicero actually wrote.
Really?
Yeah, so that’s really good, but that's the exception to the rule. And I think for Plutarch, at least for the nine lives or biographies he wrote that I spent a lot of time with, there are only about 50 manuscripts, and you’ve got one that’s written within a century of the autographs—a fragment! But by far, most of them are 9th to 15th centuries, so it’s really interesting to compare these things and hear you say it.
So that's an interesting book, and I will get that one to you.
That's the awesome stats you just gave there, Mike, and that’s—you get that with the Greek manuscripts too. We’re waiting so long. One of the things that’s interesting here is that for the vast majority, I believe, of our Greco-Roman authors, not only do we have very few manuscripts that are late, but we can usually trace them to one or two copies and then trace out the family tree from there.
You can't do that with the Greek New Testament manuscripts, and that’s because we have so many copies that have been lost. We can—don’t have that kind of evidence, except for just a handful of manuscripts; that's the rule for these others. For the New Testament, it's the exception.
So these manuscripts come through a variety of routes; it's not just like one stream of copying that was done at a certain site for centuries. Ultimately, monasteries were the ones who kept the classics alive, but it was through a variety of channels and massive copying, without controls, ultimately is the best way to ensure that we can get back to the original, believe it or not.
What's our oldest Greek manuscript of the New Testament?
Typically, P52 has been dated as the oldest fragment of the New Testament. There’s some pushback on that date now. It was discovered in 1934. It’s a small fragment, about the size of a credit card, of John chapter 18, verses 31 to 33 on one side, and you flip it over, it’s verses 37 and 38.
Well, that very fact tells us this was written on a codex to begin with, not a scroll. A codex is a book like our modern books, bound on one side with pages cut on the others and that flips—flipping pages; it's a codex. Our modern book form invented in the first century A.D.
P52 is our earliest example of a codex to this date, I believe. And in a codex, you’d write on both the front and the back side, while as a papyrus roll, you’d write just on the inside of the scroll.
Now, there are a number of other manuscripts that have also been dated to the second century, but P52 still stands probably as the oldest. We can certainly say we have manuscripts from the second century. Do we have any copies from the first half of the second century?
That's much more debatable, and of course, the problem you've got is none of these early manuscripts has a date written in it. We don’t get dates written by scribes; it’s, you know, what’s called a colophon until centuries later when they say, “I wrote this on Friday, November 3rd, you know, this year” or something like that.
So how many would you say that we can have a fair amount of confidence were written in the second century?
The numbers there are as high as 12 to 15 now, with the recent publication of some manuscripts. But let’s take for example this Codex, I think it’s a papyrus 139—maybe it’s 137, I forgot. It’s this new fragment of Mark’s Gospel that was originally considered to be first century, and I got caught in the gullibility of this whole thing, making an announcement about it in 2012 based on a good chain of evidence from certain authorities that it was a first-century fragment.
It has been demonstrated most likely to be either late second or early third.
Okay, so does that mean it’s definitely second?
No, it's late second or early third; gotcha. Or likely late second.
But that we don’t have that kind of proof; it's very difficult to date these things exactly, these early papyri. But that means we have as many as 12, even as many as 15 that are from the second century or are right on the cusp between 200 and 300.
Wow! Is that the only one that could be early third century rather than second? Cusp at 200 is what I meant, because in the 100s, that's the second century; 200s is third.
So of those possible 15, 9 to 15, how many of them may be early third century?
I think probably half or more; I haven't done a—you know, it's just counting like that. But again, these are extraordinarily difficult to date.
But here’s the thing that is significant: if people are looking just at the New Testament, they can say, “We’re waiting decades—perhaps well over a century—before we get any copies.”
Well, let’s compare that to other ancient Greco-Roman literature, yeah! And if you’re prepared to say, “How can I trust that the copies we have go back to the original New Testament when we don’t have copies for some time?”
Then we might as well throw away the Renaissance, because it was based on these copies that we got out of the Dark Ages, essentially. These copies that were done hundreds and hundreds of years later, sometimes a millennium or more later—the earliest copies! So we might as well go back into the Dark Ages.
Let’s be in the Middle Ages and have serfs and fiefdoms and this kind of thing—forget about modern medicine and all the rest of the science and mathematics and everything that came out of that, because it’s all a myth!
The interesting thing is when you look at these other Greco-Roman authors, the scholars who work in them don’t say my earliest copy of this author of hereditary is from the 12th century of any size—I give up! That can’t possibly go back to the original!
They don’t say that! They say, “Sure, there’s going to be problems with it, but most of it really does go back to that original text!”
So if these ancient Latin texts—and of course, that's not counting ancient Greek texts like Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch and Cassius Dio and those—if we just look at this Latin text and we say, “Okay, there’s nearly 100 Latin authors of antiquity,” and there's approximately, even though there are a lot more manuscripts, there's 1,700 approximate really important ones upon which the critical Latin text is based... what about the New Testament?
All right, so you’ve got about 5,500 Greek manuscripts you said. Of course, there's other languages—Coptic, Syriac, and some others—but about 5,500 Greek manuscripts.
How many of those, in comparison, are used to put together or form the basis of our critical Greek texts of the New Testament?
One way to measure this would be to look at the Nestle-Aland apparatus and their appendix, where they list all the manuscripts that they utilized and cite in that apparatus as something significant to them for reconstructing the wording of the autographs.
And it's at least 500 manuscripts. I don’t know how many it is altogether, but at least 500 were consulted in some significant ways. For example, just at one library in the world, at the National Library in St. Petersburg, Russia, they have, I believe, 43 Greek New Testament manuscripts at that library that were consulted for the Nestle 28 edition—not just that we know of, but were actually consulted and cited as helping us to recover the wording of the original.
That's one library! Now, admittedly, it’s a large library with quite a few manuscripts—over 200—but we have 253 different libraries throughout the world that have Greek New Testament manuscripts. So I’d say 500 is probably a conservative estimate for the Greek manuscripts that were consulted to produce the Nestle texts.