 Someone recently asked me about some points made in a lecture on YouTube by a prominent evangelical pastor named John MacArthur, who is also a well-known author in fundamentalist/evangelical camps. Let it be known: MacArthur is not a scholar. He does not have a PhD and his theological training is from fundamentalist institutions such as Bob Jones University. So, it absolutely amazes me that people continue to buy this guy's books and invite him onto reputable news programs like CNN to learn from him. His agenda is purely apologetic and he is a militant opponent of anything that goes against the Bible (e.g., evolution, homosexuality, etc.).
The lecture here is on the ending of Mark, and the question to me concerned the part where MacArthur is talking about the numbers of extant manuscripts of the NT over against those of classical literature. Now, I could only listen to a few minutes of this so I don't know everything that MacArthur says in the lecture (nor would I really want to). In any case, he is trying to show that we have far more manuscripts of the NT than classical texts. So here are a few excerpts from the lecture, which you can view on the YouTube video beginning at 19:45: "The writings of the early church fathers also confirm the accuracy of the gospels. There are over 19,000 quotations from the gospels in the writings of the fathers. So whether you’re reading a Greek manuscript, a Syriac Bible, or whether you’re looking at a Latin Vulgate or whether you’re reading a quote from a church father, it is crystal clear that they all had the same thing. They would be reading essentially in their language what you’re reading today in yours because yours is drawn from those ancient manuscripts. Now let me give you something to compare with all of that. The second most common ancient document in the manuscript world is Homer’s Iliad. Remember that when you went to college and you had to read that epic poem called the Iliad by Homer? Next to the New Testament, there are more copies of Homer's Iliad than any other piece of literature. Oh, by the way, there are 643 of them. 643? Small change, compared to 25,000. And oh, by the way, the oldest one is from the 13th century A.D. and Homer wrote in the 8th century B.C. We don’t have anything even close to when Homer wrote. Who knows whether Homer ever said any of that? Some of you may have heard of Herodotus the Greek historian. He wrote history. In fact, Herodotus could be the father of historians…He wrote in the 5th century before Christ and we have 8 manuscripts of Herodotus’ Histories and the earliest is 1,300 years after he wrote. No one bothered to protect those [classical texts]. Nobody bothered to preserve those. But boy did they work hard to protect the word of the living God. They knew what they had. With so many accurate manuscripts you can know with no hesitation that the Bible you hold in your hand is a true English translation of the original autographs, as they’re called, preserved accurately." McArthur thinks every ancient New Testament manuscript in every ancient language preserves the exact same text ("they all had the same thing"), which is also the same text we have in modern English versions. Wow. Just a few points. A check this morning in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) brought up 1,549 manuscripts of Homer's Iliad—far more than 643. The first one in that list (P.Köln Gr. 3 125) dates to 2nd-1st century B.C.E.—about 15 centuries earlier than what MacArthur claims is the date of the earliest copy of the Iliad! I myself have published a 3rd century C.E. papyrus of the Iliad. Another check in the LDAB brought up 53 manuscripts of Herodotus (not 8) and the second one in that list (P.Duke 756) dates to 2nd-1st century B.C.E., about 11 centuries earlier than what MacArthur claims is the date of the earliest copy of Herodotus! MacArthur's facts are flat out wrong, his analysis of the evidence is flawed, and his presentation of the evidence is extremely manipulative. If MacArthur is an example of Christian teaching then Houston, we have a problem. Of course this is not even the biggest problem with MacArthur, but I do not have the time, energy, or desire to open that can of worms.
14 Comments
J.J.
1/19/2014 04:38:09 pm
If you google "new testament manuscripts homer herodotus 643," you find those misleading stats all over the internet. I'm not sure where they originated. I thought it might have been F. F. Bruce's book, The NT Documents: Are they Reliable?... but I just checked and that's not quite the same stats that Bruce reports (first published in 1943). That's still no excuse though. Internet scholarship is not acceptable.
Peter M Head
1/19/2014 11:43:42 pm
I agree that this sort of ill-informed nonsense from pastors is regrettable. The source of the information here (FWIW) is J. McDowell, New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, p. 38 (which is itself a rather curious compendium). 1/19/2014 11:54:57 pm
Thanks, J.J. and Peter! And thanks for locating the source of the numbers, Peter. Wow! McDowell? Geesh...
Elijah Hixson
1/20/2014 01:01:09 am
Thank you for posting this, Brice. I encounter these erroneous numbers quite a bit, so I appreciate you for taking the time to offer a correction. A couple of years ago, Clay Jones wrote a short article ("The Bibliographical Test Updated," in Christian Research Journal 35, no. 3 [2012], 32-37) that dealt with this very issue and offered some updates to those manuscript counts, but I've been unable to find online access to it.
Stephen
1/20/2014 07:52:14 am
Peter Head beat me to it...I was going to guess that these stats come from Josh McDowell's book, which has been an Evangelical-Fundamentalist staple for years. It is amazing to me how much it has shaped and continues to shape various Evangelical-Fundamentalist apologetics discourses.
Stephen J.
1/21/2014 01:27:11 am
You might be interested to know that McDowell even says that the numbers in his book are now wrong. I heard him say this myself last month at a conference attended by many big apologists. He was onstage with a scholar who is making a lot of the new discoveries of ancient manuscripts (classical as well as biblical). McDowell pointed people to a link found on his website for better numbers which I’ll post below. The numbers (for classical works) on his website are larger than the ones posted above. Those of us in attendance will be emailed updates every 6 months for the new numbers. The scholar with him stated that the numbers change constantly and every month the numbers change. So they recommended avoiding using precise numbers in comparing the numbers but use a minimum number that doesn’t suggest a fixed amount such as “the Iliad has at least 1,500 manuscripts now” or something along those lines. 1/21/2014 02:02:07 am
The problem here is not so much about getting the numbers wrong (although that is certainly a problem) as it is about how these Christian apologists use the numbers. The evidence surely suggests something about survival and perhaps preservation, but it is often used to buttress beliefs in inerrancy, inspiration, divine preservation of scripture, and to subordinate classical literature.
Stephen J.
1/21/2014 04:00:57 am
I understand your point but mine was in reference to McDowell as a source for the numbers. However, if someone claims that the NT is inspired because of its manuscript count then that is absurd. I'm not aware of major apologists who make that argument. The point they are trying to make is simply there is evidence for its reliability of transmission."An embarrassment of riches" as Dr. Dan Wallace would say. I'm sure there are a number of other people who overstate the case based on manuscript evidence as MacArthur did, at least from the bit of his talk you heard. 1/21/2014 04:04:32 am
Thanks for your comments, Stephen J. Dan Wallace also has made these kinds of comparisons, but Dan is also a careful scholar whom I admire. 2/6/2014 10:33:00 pm
Thank you for this great post Brice. I can't agree with you more about the sloppy treatment of facts by Christian apologists, especially when it comes to New Testament manuscripts and textual criticism. Dan Wallace made an address at an ETS meeting a few years ago, which was later published as a journal article in JETS that addressed this very thing. One of biggest problems in Christian apologetics is that apologists use other apologists as their source rather than consulting scholarship and real experts in the field. I am in my last semester of an MDiv at Luther Rice University which is an evangelical apologetics focused school. I have been frustrated more than a few times by the general ignorance, and frankly, disinterest of my fellow students in researching or discussing relevant scholarship on New Testament textual criticism, the canon of the New Testament, etc. It is this very frustration that has fueled my desire to pursue a Phd in New Testament studies focusing on these subjects. 4/21/2015 06:04:17 pm
Here is a link for the Bibliographical Test Updated article.
Chris Cho
8/18/2018 06:57:40 pm
"A check this morning in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) brought up 1,549 manuscripts of Homer's Iliad—far more than 643. The first one in that list (P.Köln Gr. 3 125) dates to 2nd-1st century B.C.E.—about 15 centuries earlier than what MacArthur claims is the date of the earliest copy of the Iliad!"
Dr. Steven M. Moutoux
8/21/2018 04:35:09 pm
I agree with Chris Cho. You cannot look at when a book was written and compare it to what manuscripts have been found since the book was written; and then conclude that the book or the author is flawed! That is lazy scholarship! What you need to do is put everything in its time frame. When the claim that there are 25,000 complete Greek New Testaments and another 25,000 complete Greek New Testaments in a devotional format; the evidence is overwhelming from a volume standpoint. As well as 300,000 pieces of the Old Testament prior to 100 BC. These numbers put every other writing to shame. If you believe that Homer's Illiad is true and written by him, then the evidence is overwhelming that the Bible is true and you should sit up and take notice! Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
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