by Holly on Thu Sep 07, 2006 1:00 am
Hi Peacebloom,
I'm sorry for the slow reply. I have been very busy the past few days.
We know that the New Testament hasn't been corrupted because we can compare our modern New Testament to many ancient manuscripts. We have about 5,500 Greek manuscripts that contain all or part of the New Testament. These manuscripts are very close in date to the original New Testament manuscripts, which were completed between A.D. 50 to A.D. 90. The earliest fragments we have date from about A.D. 120. The earliest complete New Testament we have is from A.D. 325.
This is an abundance of very early manuscripts compared to other ancient writings. The average number of years from other ancient writings to the first surviving manuscript is 1,000. The most documented ancient writing is Homer's "Iliad," and we only have 643 surviving manuscripts. And we only 9 or 10 copies of Julius Caesar's "Gallic War."
Also, the process the scribes observed for copying manuscripts was very meticulous and precise. We are able to compare manuscripts and determine that New Testament we have is 99.5% the same as the originals. (The 0.5% differences don't address matters of doctrine, but are mostly "slips of the pen.")
Even if we didn't have any surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament we could reconstruct the entire New Testament, except for 11 verses, from quotations from the writings of the early church fathers, dated 150 to 200 years after Christ.
We also have strong manuscript evidence for the Old Testament from the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to 150 B.C. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, our earliest Old Testament manuscripts were from A.D. 900. We can compare the sets of manuscripts and see that they are almost identical. This shows how careful the scribes were in the copying process. The very minor differences, again, amount to "slips of the pen."
For more information, I recommend the "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics" by Norman L. Geisler. This is a great resource that has entries on many apologetics issues.