Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1174 Alongside the Chester Beatty papyri, the other great treasure of early New Testament manuscripts is the collection known as the Bodmer papyri. These too carry us back to the early centuries of the church and provide some of the finest and fullest evidence we have for the text of the Gospels. For anyone…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1171 When people ask how we can be sure the New Testament has been handed down faithfully, the answer rests in large part on the manuscripts that survive. Among the most important of these are the Chester Beatty papyri, a collection that gave scholars some of their earliest direct windows into the text of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01173 Few questions in biblical studies generate more heat in certain Christian circles than the debate between the Textus Receptus and the modern critical Greek New Testament. Some regard this as an arcane academic dispute that ordinary believers need not trouble themselves with. It is anything but. The text of the Greek New Testament…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01176 For anyone who wants to understand how modern Bible translations are produced, or why a translation like the ESV sometimes differs from the King James Bible at particular points, the answer almost always involves the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. This is the standard scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament in widespread academic…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1077 We do not possess the original manuscripts of any New Testament book. What we have are copies of copies. For some people, this raises an unsettling question: how do we know that the text we read today accurately reflects what the apostles actually wrote? Has the message been corrupted through centuries of hand-copying?…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1106 If God inspired the Scriptures, did He also promise to preserve them perfectly? Can we be confident that what we have today accurately represents what the original authors wrote? What exactly did God promise about preservation, and what can we realistically expect? The Doctrine of Preservation The doctrine of preservation holds that God…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1051 When you start digging into biblical manuscripts, you’ll eventually come across something called the Samaritan Pentateuch. It sounds exotic and perhaps a bit intimidating, but understanding what it is and how it relates to our Old Testament is actually quite straightforward once you get your bearings. The question is this: if the Samaritans…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1046 When we open our Old Testament, we are reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts. But which Hebrew manuscripts? And what about the Greek translation that Jesus and the apostles so often quoted? This question sits at the heart of how we received our Bible and which text we should trust as authoritative….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1048 If you open your Bible to the end of Mark’s Gospel, you will likely find a note indicating that Mark 16:9-20 does not appear in the earliest manuscripts. Some Bibles place these verses in brackets; others include them with a footnote. This raises an obvious question: are these verses part of Scripture or…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1110 When we pick up our English Bibles, we trust that the words we read faithfully represent what the apostles and prophets originally wrote. But behind every translation lies a fundamental question: which Greek manuscripts should translators rely upon? The Majority Text theory offers one answer to this question, and it has shaped how…