Getting Jesus Right: How Muslims Get Jesus and Islam Wrong. James A Beverley
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 written within a century or two of the time when the original Gospel manuscripts were written and had begun to circulate. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that, but for our purposes it should be sufficient.
When Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) produced the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, he had at his disposal only seven manuscripts, not one complete, and none older than the twelfth century.1 As he published new editions over the next 20 years he acquired several more manuscripts. His work of comparison and collation laid the groundwork for the discipline now known as textual criticism.
Today we have approximately 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, representing some 2.6 million pages of text. Most of these manuscripts are medieval, but several are much older. We now have Codex Vaticanus, which dates to AD 330–340 and preserves most of the Old Testament (in Greek) and the New Testament. We have Codex Sinaiticus (housed in the British Museum), which dates to the same period and also preserves most of the two Testaments (though several pages at the beginning of this codex are lost). Scholars suspect that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are two of the fifty copies of Scripture that Emperor Constantine (AD 272–337) commissioned. We also have Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Beza and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, all of which date to the fifth century. We also have several more fifth- and sixth-century codices, often containing only parts of the New Testament. One of these is the very significant Codex Washington, which contains the four Gospels.
We also have a number of papyri, many of which are older, sometimes much older, than the codices that have been mentioned. The oldest of these ranges in date from the late second century to the late third century. They provide us with most of the text of the Gospels and virtually all of the text of Paul’s letters, as well as fragments, sometimes large fragments, of the other New Testament writings. To date we have some 127 Greek New Testament papyri. More will be said about these papyri.
We have many “miniscules”—manuscripts written in smaller, longhand style. Most of these date to the ninth century or later. Among them, manuscript 33, known as the “queen of the miniscules,” is a gem, for it is carefully copied and based on old text of good quality.
We also have approximately 10,000 Latin translations of the New Testament. Again, most of these date to the medieval period, but some are earlier. We also have several thousand lectionaries, in Greek and in Latin, in which passages of Scripture are quoted. We also have countless tens of thousands of quotations of Scripture in the writings of the Church Fathers. From these alone we could reconstruct almost the entire New Testament. We also have thousands of manuscripts in Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac and other languages from the Byzantine and Medieval periods.2
The value of this vast inventory of manuscripts is that scholars are able to compare the readings, so that in cases where there are variant readings or obvious mistakes in the text, it is possible to determine what the original reading was. Although there is some disagreement, textual critics believe that the text of the New Testament was quite stable in its first two centuries (for which, admittedly, we have only small samples of evidence)