Recently I stumble across a brilliant Subsplash article by AC Rosenthal. I thought the whole article was fantastic and I impore you to read it if you assumed the Bible is not trustworthy as a historical source, or, if you have never explore this important issue. And it is important. Do we have access to Jesus’ words and the teaching of his disciples or not?
The link to his article is below.
Here I share a key paragraph that shows we can have confidence that we reading what was written thousands of years ago in the New Testament of the Bible.
‘The New Testament text was not preserved by an authority. It was preserved by chaos.
Within a few generations the documents had scattered across the whole Mediterranean — Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic — into the hands of communities that didn’t all like each other, couldn’t all reach each other, and had no central office issuing approved editions. Thousands of copies got made by thousands of hands in dozens of places with no coordination whatsoever. And that turns out to be the strongest possible guarantee of integrity, for a reason that’s almost counterintuitive: nobody could have changed it even if they’d wanted to. To alter the New Testament, you’d have had to simultaneously corrupt thousands of independent copies already dispersed across three continents, in multiple languages, held by rival factions, with no way to recall them. It’s not that no one tried to fudge a line here or there. It’s that the fudges are detectable — precisely because you can lay thousands of independent witnesses side by side and see exactly where one scribe’s hand slipped. The variants aren’t a scandal. They’re the audit trail. The very messiness that skeptics point to is the thing that makes the text checkable.'
AC Rosenthal
The articles title is: The Most Falsifiable Holy Book in the World
https://acrosenthal.substack.com/p/the-most-falsifiable-holy-book-in