On the other hand, if it can be shown that the New Testament documents are authentic, written by the traditional authors, then the evidence for the truth of Christianity is overwhelming. This is because the writings, when examined carefully, give indisputable evidence of sincerity and accuracy of such high degree that there can remain no reasonable doubt that all the deeds and words of Christ and the Apostles, as recorded therein, really and truly happened.
This inference is not dependent upon the question of whether or not the documents are divinely inspired and verbally infallible. Although we do believe in the fact and importance of plenary verbal inspiration, the genuineness of the person and work of Christ can be established entirely apart from that assumption, provided only that the New Testament documents are accepted as valid and authentic historical writings, of the same sort as other historical documents.
Therefore, it is important to establish, first of all, the general historicity and reliability of the New Testament writings. Once this is done, then the genuineness of the portrait of Christ found in these writings can be established. When He is acknowledged as true God and only Savior, then He himself becomes sufficient authority and proof of all other doctrines.
Authenticity of the Documents
The witness of almost two thousand years of the Christian era, with its tremendous impact upon the history of the world, is itself proof that something of unique power and importance took place to get it started. Effects must have adequate causes.
Whatever men think of the New Testament, there is no doubt at all that this remarkable history of Christianity is intricately related to it. The ultimate explanation of Christian origins can only be understood when the origins of the New Testament are likewise understood. No one now living, of course, nor anyone living in many generations, has actually seen Christ or the Apostles, so that our knowledge of them now must come entirely or largely from the written records of their activities. The same, of course, is true with respect to any other men or events in ancient history.
It is at this point that the tremendous strength of the evidences for Christianity begins to be realized. The written records of Christian origins are in this respect available in far greater variety and antiquity than are those of any other personages or happenings in the whole history of the world prior to the invention of printing! No one, for example, ever doubts for an instant that a man named Julius Caesar once ruled as emperor of Rome. But the manuscript evidence for the New Testament events is incomparably superior to that for the existence of Caesar.
Before the invention of the printing press, books had to be copied by hand. Those that were in much use wore out quickly and required frequent re-copying. The manuscript copies of the New Testament or portions thereof that have actually been preserved to the present day are amazingly numerous. Some of these are on papyrus fragments that were copied before the middle of the second century. Altogether there are probably available today over 5,000 handwritten manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in Greek and at least 15,000 more in other languages. Nothing remotely comparable to this abundance exists for any other ancient writing.
One of the greatest New Testament scholars of our generation was Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, director of the British Museum. Though not himself a believer in the infallibility of the inspiration and transmission of the Scriptures, Kenyon said after an extensive review of the manuscript evidence:
It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.[1]
Although there are many individual differences found in the New Testament text as preserved in these 20,000 manuscripts, the very number of them provides a powerful means of checking and tracing the origin of the variant readings and thus of ascertaining the original text. Furthermore, the discrepancies, whether caused by careless copying or by deliberate alterations, are in almost all cases quite trivial,[2] affecting no important fact or doctrine. In particular, the person and work of Jesus Christ as represented are not changed in any respect by the variant readings. Not only do we have such a tremendous accumulation of manuscripts of the New Testament itself, but also we have several times as many manuscripts of writings from early Christian writers containing quotations from the New Testament Scriptures. Certain of these men, known as the Apostolic Fathers, wrote originally during the period A.D. 90 to 160 and exhibited a remarkable grasp of the New Testament. Scholars agree that if all manuscripts of the New Testament had been lost, it would have been possible to reconstruct it altogether from quotations in the writings of these and other early Christians.
Since these church fathers in many cases lived in the years immediately following those of the Apostles themselves, in some cases even overlapping their times and in fact some papyrus fragments of the New Testament itself, notably in the Gospel of John, are dated from about A.D. 150, there can be no doubt whatever that the New Testament as we have it today is essentially identical with that possessed by Christians at the close of the first century.
Kenyon has said in another place: "The interval, then, between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established."[3]
This being so, it hardly seems likely that there could have been any significant change in the writings during the relatively short interval between their original composition by the Apostles and their general distribution among the churches by the close of the first century. Any significant alterations would certainly have been quickly discovered and corrected. Men who had known and heard the Apostles were still living in considerable numbers at that time. In fact, John the Apostle himself lived through the end of the first century.
Even if we were to allow the possibility, for the sake of argument, that considerable changes could have taken place in the written records in the last half of the first century, there is still no way in which such changes could have been of sufficient magnitude to transform the person of Christ himself. The Roman world of the first century was a world of scholarship and skepticism, not of ignorance and gullibility, a world of abundant transportation and communication, not of isolation. The contention of religious "liberals" that the great truths of the character and work of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament, were nothing but the gradual accretion of myths and traditions with no basis in fact is naive at best.
If we can believe anything at all that has been preserved for us from ancient history by the writings of men of those days, we are more than justified in believing that our New Testament was originally written in essentially its present form by the traditional authors. The world's foremost biblical archaeologist, William F. Albright, has said: "In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and eighties of the first century A.D."[4]
Indirect Confirmations
The general authenticity of the events reported in the New Testament has been amply verified by close examination of the internal consistencies of the writings and also by external researches in the history and archaeology of the time. The books of the New Testament individually make claims concerning their own authorship and it is absurd for modern skeptics to presume to deny these claims merely on the basis of their own anti-supernaturalistic presuppositions. The Apostle Paul, for instance, always begins his epistles with his own name, clearly claiming authorship, and each epistle contains great numbers of incidental allusions which support such claims. One of the great classic works on Christian evidences (William Paley's Horae Paulinae) consisted of an extensive volume of compilations of such undesigned coincidences which proved Paul to be the author of all the epistles bearing his name.
Similar studies on the internal evidences in each book likewise confirm that Peter was the author of his epistles,