DaVinci Code: The Truth Behind the Fiction - Part 4

A few days ago I said:

"In my next blog, I'll begin to respond to Brown's fictional claims about the unreliability of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). We'll look together at both the reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus life and why we can have such confidence in these accounts."

We are spending out time together looking only at the reliability of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) rather than the entire Bible for a few reasons:
1. Time. There are many, many books written on this subject and many scholars have devoted their entire professional lives studying and defending the veracity of each and every book in the Bible. We don't need to look that deeply into the subject to get a clear understanding of why we can have great confidence in the testimony of the Bible.
2. The DaVinci Code. The book makes false claims about the Bible as a whole, but much of the novel casts doubt on the reliability of what the Gospels say specifically about the life, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

So, we will focus on the four books in the Bible that deal with the life of Christ and with this plan we will hopefully kill two birds with one stone - defend the perfection and reliability of Scripture and defend the reality of Christ's divinity.

Brown writes, "The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book." (p. 231)

Is there truth in the statement above? Yes, a measure. First, the Bible partially a product of man in that God used men to pen the words on parchment. Yet, it is not only a product of man. It is a cooperative effort between God and man. I'll get to more on this in a moment. The other truth is that the Bible "did not fall magically form the clouds." This is true, but the claim that the Bible "has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions" is patently false. Yes, the Bible has been "translated" into some two thousand languages, but these translations have been created for the benefit of all who desire to read its truth and have been translated from early documents of the utmost reliability.

Let's deal with the issue of "translations, additions, and revisions" first. The original works, or "autographs," of each of the sixty six books have been lost to time. They were likely worn out by use, burned, destroyed, or time simply eroded their readability. After all, we're talking about several millennia! Yet, scribes of biblical times were trained to copy every "jot and title" precisely so that others could read the text in different regions of the known world. But, did they make mistakes? Yes. these errors were very slight and even the most pessimistic scholars generally agree that these slight errors in copying do nothing to change the meaning of the text. (We'll look at this more closely later).

Some then ask, since we don't have the original manuscripts and some errors were made, although minor, in copying the text, can we have confidence that the Bible we have today reads anything like the original manuscripts?

My quick and confident answer is "yes." Here are a few reasons for this:

1. We have well over 2000 manuscripts of the gospels alone - 2000! Some of these documents are in Greek, others in Latin. In terms of material from a scholarly perspective, two thousand manuscripts is a goldmine. Just a quick note for those of you who are wondering about the number of manuscripts we have of all the different parts of the Bible - 24,633 known copies (including fragments) of the New Testament, over 1700 copies of the Old testament (including fragments). The document with the next highest number of copies is Homer's Iliad with 643.

2. Not only do we have an unprecedented wealth of manuscripts of the Gospels, the copies we have are very old - meaning that we have very early copies. Some of our earliest fragments of the Gospels are from the second century A.D. We have complete copies of several of the Gospels from the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. You might be saying to yourself right now, "That doesn't seem very early at all. In fact, two hundred years is a long time!" You'd be right in relation to our human lifespans but you'd be wrong in relation to manuscripts of early documents. For example, the gap for Homer is 500 years, Caesar's Gallic Wars is 900-1000 years, and Herodotus The Histories is 1300 years form the writing of the original document to the first copy that we have today. The Gospels as well as the Bible in totality is truly in a class by itself from this perspective!

3. The scribes were actually remarkably reliable. Even, though the scribes were not flawless, we have such a large number of documents to work from that scholars are able to identify most of these minor errors by comparing the thousands of documents available.

4. Textual criticism, where experts seek to identify the earliest form of a given text, offers us great confidence in the Bible in its current form. The plethora of textual critics from different theological backgrounds and perspectives are in remarkable agreement on the vast majority of Scripture as it stands today. Textual critics still have differing opinions about the meaning of some fifty variations that have been found in the Bible as a whole. Scholar Philip Schaff, in response to these fifty variations states that no variation altered "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching."

What all of this tells us is that we can have great confidence that when we read our Bible today there is an extremely high degree of probability that we are getting the words of the original authors.

Next time, we'll look at the other assertion made by Brown's fictional character that, "The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God." We"ll find out how it is that God cooperated with man to bring the Gospels (and the rest of the Bible) into existence.

Until then...

Carpe Deum! (Seize God!)
Todd Phillips