teaching. Byrskog shows that within the Gospel of Mark, the first of the three Synoptic Gospels to be published, is evidence of the pedagogical practices of the time, by which a master’s teaching was carefully preserved and accurately taught, and not free-wheeling invention of tradition, as at one time imagined by some critics.18
Building on the work of Byrskog and others, Richard Bauckham, long-time Bishop Wardlaw Professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, has made a compelling case for the presence of extensive and accurate eyewitness testimony in all four New Testament Gospels19 and that this eyewitness tradition remained available until the time when the Gospels were composed.20
One of the important indications of an ancient document’s veracity is something historians call verisimilitude.21 That is, do the contents of the document match with what we know of the place, people and period described in the document? Do the contents of the document cohere with what is known through other written sources and through archaeological finds? Do the contents of the document give evidence of acquaintance with the topography and geography of the region that forms the backdrop to the story? Does the author of the document exhibit knowledge of the culture and customs of the people described? Historians ask these questions and others like them of a document they think may contain historical information.22 If the document lacks verisimilitude, historians will make little or no use of it.
The New Testament Gospels and Acts exhibit a great deal of verisimilitude.23 They speak of real people (e.g., Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Annas, Caiaphas, Herod Agrippa I and II, Felix, Festus) and real events (e.g., death of John the Baptist, death of Agrippa I). They speak of real places (e.g., villages, cities, roads, lakes, mountains, political boundaries) that are clarified and corroborated by other historical sources and by archaeology. They speak of real customs (e.g., Passover, purity, Sabbath, divorce law), institutions (e.g., synagogue, temple), offices/officers (e.g., priests, tax collectors, Roman governors, Roman centurions) and beliefs (e.g., the beliefs of Pharisees and Sadducees; interpretation of Scripture). Jesus’ engagement with his contemporaries, both supporters and opponents, reflects an understanding of Scripture and theology we now know, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related literature, was current in pre-70 Jewish Palestine.
The first-century New Testament Gospels and Acts exhibit the kind of verisimilitude we should expect of writings written within a generation of their principal figure, that is, writings significantly informed by eyewitness tradition. We find linguistic verisimilitude, and by this we mean Hebrew and Aramaic traces in what are otherwise Greek writings. We find geographic and topographical verisimilitude, cultural and archaeological verisimilitude, and religious, economic and social verisimilitude.
The verisimilitude of the New Testament Gospels and Acts is such that historians and archaeologists regularly make use of them. We can illustrate this claim by directing readers to a recently published book entitled Jesus and Archaeology,24 a book that grew out of a conference in Israel that included the usual learned papers but also included onsite visits and examinations of archaeological excavations. The volume includes 31 essays. One-third of the contributors are Jewish, and about one-third are trained archaeologists. The remaining are historians and biblical scholars. If one turns to the index in the back of the book one will find more than one thousand references to the New Testament Gospels and Acts. This simply would not happen if the New Testament Gospels did not contain accurate and informative information.
In contrast to the verisimilitude of the New Testament Gospels and Acts stand the apocryphal Gospels and Gospel-like writings of the second century, such as the Gnostic Gospels and Syria’s Gospel of Thomas. These writings do not exhibit verisimilitude, at least not verisimilitude with early first-century Jewish Palestine. On the basis of Gospel of Thomas alone, would we know that Jesus was Jewish? Would we have any sense of his message? Any sense of his travels, of his itinerary? Would we know anything of Jesus’ death? Would we have any sense of life in first-century Jewish Palestine? The answer to all of these questions is no.
We may raise the same questions with respect to the Qur’an and other early Islamic traditions. The historian will find in these writings even less verisimilitude than he will find in the second-century Gospel of Thomas. Despite its great length, if everything we could know about Jesus was limited to the Qur’an, we would know very, very little about this significant figure. For this reason, archaeologists and historians make no more use of the Qur’an in doing research into the history and culture of first-century Jewish Palestine than they make use of the apocryphal Gospels from the second century and later.
Summary
Historians and archaeologists make use of the New Testament Gospels and book of Acts because they exhibit verisimilitude, a verisimilitude that is often confirmed through the discovery of new data. Further, historians believe they can recover a realistic and reliable portrait of Jesus from the New Testament Gospels because many of the events and sayings they record are found in two or more early, independent sources. Historians by and large trust the Gospels because they were written early enough to overlap with the lifetime of eyewitnesses—the people who knew Jesus and his original followers.
In the next chapter, we look at the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels and ask if they have been copied faithfully and accurately. After all, if the copies of the Gospels were poorly executed and if scribes made major changes, omitting stories and sayings and adding new stories and sayings, the copies might not say what the originals said. This important question must be addressed if we are to have full confidence in the Gospels as reliable witnesses of the historical Jesus.
Chapter 2—Are the Manuscripts of the New Testament Gospels Reliable?
Jesus and the Copyists
In the previous chapter, we found we have good reason to believe that the New Testament Gospels were written early enough to access living eyewitnesses and they were written in order to convey accurate information as well as the early Church’s beliefs about the significance and achievement of Jesus. It was argued that we may have confidence in the New Testament Gospels because they exhibit the kind of verisimilitude—realism and confirmable information—that historians look for in doing their research and archaeologists look for in order to know where to dig and how to interpret what they find. This important feature is lacking in the Qur’an and other early Islamic traditions about Jesus. The Qur’an simply does not provide us with reliable, confirmable data with respect to the time and place of Jesus.
Most may agree with our assessment to this point. They may have confidence with respect to the Gospels as written and first circulated in the first century. But we no longer have the originals. What we have are later copies, copies produced in the second and third centuries and beyond. We must ask if these later copies were accurate and true to the originals. Or were their contents changed? Were new stories and new sayings added, things that Jesus never did and never said?
These are fair questions, and they should be addressed. In this chapter we examine the manuscript evidence of the New Testament—the age, quantity and quality of the copies of the New Testament—and then we compare it to the age, quantity and quality of manuscripts of other books from antiquity with which historians and textual critics normally work and in which they usually have confidence.
Are the NT Manuscripts Reliable?
Even if one concludes that the New Testament Gospels, written in the first century and written in times when many of Jesus’ original followers and eyewitnesses were still living, accurately recorded the things that Jesus said and did, one may still wonder if the later copies of these copies were faithful to the originals. This question can be answered if we have enough manuscripts, from different times and places, and at least a reasonable sample
