A possible personification of New Testament manuscript reliability*.
There’s info online you can Giggle regarding the reliability of New Testament manuscripts compared to similar documents of antiquity. Here’s a good summary, but I saw an image on Facebook (see note way below) that diagramed the comparisons.
It’s an interesting phenomenon to note, but in most cases it won’t do much to convince skeptics. There’s a good reason for this. If, say, historians found out that Aristotle’s Poetics
Similarly, if it was found out that an historian like Tacitus was really a composite of other writers, it may cast some doubt on what was written in The Histories
But the standards for the New Testament are different, because even if the manuscripts are reliable it doesn’t answer the question as to whether the New Testament events occurred. It proves, for example, that the copies agree with themselves but not that the recorded events described, specifically the supernatural events, had actually passed. Textual reliability is irrelevant if someone believes the supernatural is outright nonexistent. A skeptic would have to first have to believe that supernatural events, like the resurrection, are at least possible imprimus. The text doesn’t have a bearing on whether they are possible. They merely claim they occurred some time in the past.
The fact of manuscript reliability may have some effect on the skeptic if it removes a defeater for belief—as in, part of the disbelief is held in false information, particularly that New Testament documents are not reliable. But as far as “making believers” out of atheists, a lot more needs to occur, cognitively and a-cognitively, than an historical factoid.
*I originally had a diagram of New Testament manuscript reliability created by Mark Barry. I had emailed him about using the image but he had since taken it down because, in light of recent conversations, he needed to do more research before officially confirming the info in the diagram. He didn’t mention Bootsy Collins.
4 Comments
Just stumbled onto your blog today. Interesting thoughts, and quite capable of derailing my afternoon. Thanks for that.
But seriously, your title is true if you mean, “NT Manuscript Reliability Doesn’t Matter To Skeptics Who Deny That Supernatural Events Are Possible,” but I can see how that might be a bit long for a title. However, in talking with random people about that Bible, I have often heard questions about the reliability of the texts. Some guy beside me on a plane not long ago brought it up. How do we know we have everything, and that what we have hasn’t been tampered with.
These doubts have been fueled by a steady stream of expose-style attacks on the Bible in the media, as well as books like the DaVinci code. It’s easy for critics to throw these allegations out there because the typical person (Christian or skeptic) doesn’t know enough about the subject to answer them. That’s where I see the value in charts such as the one you mentioned by Mark Barry. Not so much to make believers out of atheists, but to show that what we have today is actually very well attested. As the attacks become more sophisticated, our understanding of textual transmission and criticism will have to increase as well. Thanks.
Hey Erid. Glad you got something out of this. Do you have a blog?
Your comment of about the title are correct. It does, but maybe not as much as some people would think. It helps if the skepticism is based on basic misinformation, like the belief that the manuscripts are unreliable, historically. In this was it’s just basic fact correction. It seems really basic but there are lot of shyster out there throwing a lot of made up history around, and it can get popular because it’s a little salacious and it confirms what a lot of people might want to believe.
So in this way, this clearing away of the brushes of disinformation can act as a defeater of disbelief, but disbelief (of all types…everyone disbelieves in some religious belief) tends to go deeper than that. People believe or do not believe because they simply just do. They sense the supernatural, or do not at all.
This talk about how we do it is mostly theoretical and hard to quantify; I don’t think we know what could be a defeater for our beliefs or not, and I don’t know how well other would know would be a defeater for ourselves. I also don’t know what the current scholarship is on epistemological self-assessment, or whatever it would be called, but it’s an interesting idea to entertain.
The point isn’t to show the truthfulness of the contents. It’s to show that, having so many copies, there is more to work with to get closer to (or be assured of) the authenticity of the texts.
Given that the documents are to be taken as authentic, the burden is then at least as much on the critic to prove the content isn’t true as it is on the believer that it is. At some point, we have to take some ancient historian’s work as true (or the evidences of archaeology). Why not accept the NT documents as authoritative history? A common atheistic response is that they can’t be trusted because they contain stories of the supernatural. But that’s to presuppose atheism. Until atheism is proved, the rejection of the NT because of the supernatural is no less a matter of simple prejudice than any opinion held by theists in favor of the documents.
Hi Rick. I think we’re in agreement. What I meant is that New Testament reliability argument is only good if people have “wrong knowledge” about the material nature of Biblical texts, which may be an impediment for belief. If you think a religion’s canon is the result of a telephone game you’re not likely to, say, investigate it much further.
However, it doesn’t matter in the more profound sense that most people presuppose atheism, like you said. The fact that they a priori exclude supernatural events means that New Testament textual reliability is basically a more accurate reporting events than they previously thought. All the arguments against supernatural events — drug haze, hypnosis, self-delusion, imagination, possible conspiracy — are still in their arsenal, unaffected.
When it comes to the supernatural, everyone presupposes their beliefs. It doesn’t come to us by logic or the senses but by another way. This applies to atheists as well, who make determinations on the nature of the supernatural world (“it doesn’t exist”) ***not*** based on Western epistemological methods.