*** SHOW NOTES (not a transcript) ***

Lead:

A cool story illustrating why having a lot of New Testament manuscripts is powerful. And what people often get wrong.

Intro:

If you have ever heard someone say, “The Bible can’t be trusted because it’s been copied so many times” — or have ever wondered that yourself, today’s story should be illuminating.

That said, we’ve got a bit of reading to do, so welcome to our Christmas-in-September segment, otherwise just known as that part in Luke that’s the most quoted story in the Christmas season. Yesterday you’ll remember that Luke began with a clear purpose statement that he’s going to lay out a historical account based on eyewitnesses…a historical account that begins to argue that Jesus is who He says He is (the Son of God). Today our reading will continue to support that, including an interesting use of a genealogy.

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Bible Segment:

Passage: Luke 2-3
Translation: NIV (New International Version)
Verses: 90
Words: ~1924

All Our Minds Segment:

I was at our church’s men’s campout last month and heard one of the guys describe an exercise he did with a group of middle and high schoolers.

To start, he chose four kids to participate. He read to them a couple paragraphs of a CS Lewis book…one time. They were to copy down what they heard him say.

Then each of them did the same thing, reading what they said to another three or four kids who likewise wrote down what they heard.

Then everybody compared notes and attempted to recreate the original passage…which they had only heard orally.

In the halls of academia there is a discipline called “textual criticism.” It’s goal is to recreate what an author originally wrote. As you might imagine, have some advanced scholars that do this because the Bible, like anything else from Plato or Caesar or anyone else, has no surviving original manuscripts. And if you’ve listened to this program for any length of time, you’ll have heard me say that the cool thing about trusting our Bibles is that the number of manuscripts that we have of the Bible makes all the contenders look sick.

So what my teacher friend expected, of course, is exactly what happened. No one kid had a perfect copy. But when they compare copies, what they found was that even if one kid made a mistake in a sentence — and there were plenty of mistakes — you could recreate the original with astonishing accuracy.

There is a total mis-assumption when people talk about the Bible being copied. They assume it’s like the telephone game (some places call it Chinese whispers). One kid whispers “elephant” in the ear of another kid, and by the time it gets to the end of the line it comes out “fancy pants.” This fails to be a good analogy on two counts:

The teacher demonstrated a process is simultaneous, not linear. In the exercise more than one kid heard the original reading at the same time, which is what happened with Jesus and his disciples and the crowds.
The teacher’s game process shows that more copies is better — there’s more to compare. Sure, there are “errors” in each copy, but the more you have to compare, the better off you are.

The bottom line

Another day we’ll look at the numbers. But simply from the standpoint of historical documents, those we have of the NT makes others pale in comparison. And it’s those others that we base our knowledge of Roman and other histories on. If we have confidence learning about Caesar, we can have even more learning about Jesus!

Wisdom Segment:

Passage: Psalm 87
Translation: NIV (New International Version)
Verses: 7
Words: ~115

Love you!

-R

ForTheHope is a daily audio Bible + apologetics podcast and blog. We’ve got a passion for just keepin’ it real, having conversations like normal people, and living out the love of Jesus better every single day.

Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in digitally-extended communication and connection, an award-winning speaker, award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. Follow him on Twitter -- @RogerCourville and @JoinForTheHope – or his blog: www.forthehope.org.

Sources and resources:

If you use the affiliate links below, thank you! Your support of the ministry is appreciated!

John Warwick Montgomery, “Could the Gospel Writers Withstand the Scrutiny of a Lawyer?,” in The Apologetics Study Bible: Real Questions, Straight Answers, Stronger Faith, ed. Ted Cabal et al. (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007), 1511. Amazon affiliate link.

J. Warner Wallace. Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook 2017), Kindle, 41. Amazon affiliate link.

#893: Luke 2-3 | Manuscript copies | Psalm 87