Words. We use them every day without giving them a second thought. We speak. We talk. Sometimes we whisper. Maybe even shout. Words are central to our existence. It’s just part of being human.
What we may not realize, however, is that words are about more than the present. They are also the only way we know what happened in the ancient past. Yes, archaeology can provide broad guidance on historical matters. But the only way we can know what ancient people were like, what they did, and what they taught is because someone somewhere wrote about it.
Words, therefore, are the essential medium for all human history. Without words, one might say, there is no history.
For instance, if we want to know something about Titus’s attack on Jerusalem in AD 70, we largely rely on the words of Josephus in The Jewish War. If we want to know about the Roman emperors in the first half of the first century, we consult Tacitus’s words in his Annals. If we want to go back further and learn how Rome defeated the Gauls, we lean heavily on Julius Caesar’s words in his Gallic War.
But words don’t matter just for secular history. They matter—and matter even more—for Christian history. One of the distinctive features of Christianity in the ancient Roman world was the degree to which it emphasized how the Christian God had acted in history, particularly the history around Jesus of Nazareth.
Words and Christian History
Luke, the consummate historian, said he was keen to write about “the things that have been accomplished among us” (Luke 1:1). He wanted to tell not just about what happened but also about what God had done. And he was going to use words to do it.
One of the distinctive features of Christianity in the ancient Roman world was the degree to which it emphasized how the Christian God had acted in history.
As a whole, ancient Roman religions didn’t share this interest in history. Their primary interest was in ritual—sacrifices and offerings that would please the gods. They were concerned not so much about the past but about the present. They wanted to procure divine favor for their crops, families, or country.
Modern expressions of spirituality are strikingly similar. For many in our day, religion is about a spiritual experience in the present. One doesn’t need to engage God on the basis of some historical event. A person can just have a spiritual encounter in the here and now.
Early Christianity, however, was different (and even peculiar) in precisely this area. It wasn’t merely about a present spiritual encounter but was rooted fundamentally in the past. Paul presents Jesus’s resurrection as a nonnegotiable historical event that is determinative for the validity of the entire Christian religion.
“If Christ has not been raised,” Paul writes, “then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).
Words matter for Christians because they tell us about God’s past actions that are so central to our faith.
Words and Christian Scripture
But more can be said. Words mattered for early Christians also because they believed, at least in the case of Scripture, that those words came from God. The reason Christians cared about words is that God himself cared about words. The God of the Bible has always been a speaking God. As the author of Hebrews tells us, “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2).
So the earliest Christians were keen to record these words about (and from) Jesus. They were intent on writing them down and preserving them for future generations. For this reason, Christians were textually oriented. Their identity was wrapped around books—writing, reading, copying, and distributing them.
This, too, made Christians seem peculiar in the eyes of the Roman world. As noted above, Roman religions were typically concerned about ritual and ceremony. Books, therefore, were rarely used in religious settings. Christianity’s bookishness made it exceedingly strange. For Romans, Christianity seemed more like a philosophy than a religion.
If words—particularly scriptural words about Jesus—are so central to the Christian faith, then we’re faced with an important question: Do we actually have these words? Have the words of the New Testament been reliably transmitted to us?
The average Christian probably doesn’t think much about this question. Since most of us encounter the text of Scripture sitting on our shelves, neatly bound between two covers, we naturally assume that what we are reading now is what was written then.
But assumptions aren’t enough. If the Christian faith is all about words, then it matters whether we have reasons to think we possess those words. It’s not enough to just hope we have the words of the New Testament. We need to have good grounds for thinking we possess them.
So, do we? Do we have good grounds for thinking we can know the original words? I think we do.
Mind the Gap
Of course, if we had the original version of each New Testament book—known as the autographs—then this wouldn’t be a question. We’d have the text, and there would be nothing left to discuss.
It’s not enough to just hope we have the words of the New Testament. We need to have good grounds for thinking we possess them.
But we don’t have the autographs. And for books published nearly 2,000 years ago, we wouldn’t expect to have the autographs. It would be extremely unusual to possess the original version of any book from the first century.
In general, ancient manuscripts of any writings are hard to come by. They existed in a hostile environment constantly working against their survival. Manuscripts could be worn out by use, eaten by insects, rotted by moisture, stolen by thieves, burned by invading armies, or, most commonly, just lost or forgotten.
As a result, we know about virtually every ancient text through copies of that text. Or, most often, through copies of copies of copies (and so on).
It’s precisely here that people begin to have concerns. If our knowledge of the words of the New Testament comes through a chain of copying, how do I know that such a chain is reliable? What about changes made along the way?
There are many ways to answer those questions. But let’s focus on just one. To establish the text of ancient writing, we want as small a gap as possible between the date of publication of that writing and the date of our earliest copies. Our confidence in a text’s reliability improves considerably if we can get a glimpse of the text (or at least parts of it) at a time not too far removed from when it was published.
What’s a ‘Normal’ Gap?
Trying to narrow this gap between publication and our earliest copy isn’t just a concern of New Testament scholars. For any historical document, we would want to find a copy as close as we can to when that document was published.
So, what’s a “normal” gap for documents published in the first century (or thereabouts)? Well, there is no normal gap. Each document, and each situation, varies considerably. But we can at least return to the three documents mentioned above and ask about their gaps.
Let’s begin with Josephus’s Jewish War. It was published in the first century AD, and our earliest copy is dated to the tenth century, resulting in a 900-year gap (there is a fragmentary third-century manuscript, P. Vindob. G. 29810, but it’s mostly illegible). Turning to Tacitus’s Annals, it was published in the early second century AD, and our earliest copy is from the ninth century, creating a gap of about 700 years. Caesar’s Gallic War was written in the first century BC, and our earliest copy is from the ninth century, creating a gap of around 900 years.
While this is only a sampling, large gaps like this aren’t unusual in classical literature. Text critical scholar Eldon Epp observes that such gaps are “commonly hundreds—sometimes many hundreds—of years, and a thousand-year interval is not uncommon.”
New Testament Gap
When we turn to the New Testament writings—published largely in the second half of the first century—we quickly realize we’re dealing with a different situation. While most of our copies of the New Testament date to the Middle Ages, we do have a notable number that date to the early centuries.
In Larry Hurtado’s volume The Earliest Christian Artifacts, he estimates that we have more than 60 manuscripts dated to the second or third centuries. Most copies come from Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, Hebrews, and Revelation.
While many of these manuscripts are fragmentary, many are not. P66, dated circa AD 200, is a nearly complete copy of John’s Gospel. We even have the opening pages, including the title and the complete text of John’s prologue. Moreover, a number of these manuscripts could reasonably be dated into the second century, including P52, P64-67, P77, P90, P98, P103, and P104.
Of course, the data on New Testament manuscripts is always changing. A number of manuscripts have been added since Hurtado’s volume (including P137, an early copy of Mark). And it must be acknowledged that there have been recent challenges to the reliability of our dating methods. For more on these matters, see my chapter, “New Testament Manuscripts (Possibly) from the Second Century,” in the recent volume, A Handbook to Second-Century Christianity.
Even so, the big picture is still intact. When it comes to the New Testament, we have access to a substantial part of the text within a century or two of its publication. That is astonishingly early by anyone’s reckoning.
And when we look at the New Testament text in this early stage, we see that it has not substantively changed over the last 2,000 years. Any claim that the New Testament text has been massively and irreparably corrupted in its transmission doesn’t find support in these second- and third-century manuscripts.
Impossible Standard
Given this (remarkably) early textual evidence, one might think that radical skepticism over the New Testament text would dissipate. Objections to its value might still be made on other grounds (e.g., historical accuracy, apparent contradictions, pseudonymous authors), but surely the stability of the text is no longer one of them.
Any claim that the New Testament text has been massively and irreparably corrupted in its transmission doesn’t find support in these second- and third-century manuscripts.
But that isn’t the case. Now, skeptics of the text have argued that these massive changes must have taken place before the second century, in the earliest stages of textual transmission to which we don’t have access.
At this point, we might reasonably raise questions about whether such an approach isn’t guilty only of moving the goalposts but also of erecting an impossible standard for what counts as a “reliable” text. It means our textual evidence would have to involve essentially no gap between the autographs and our earliest copy to be considered stable. But this isn’t meaningfully different than just requiring the autographs themselves.
A person is free to demand such a thing before she considers a text trustworthy. But it’s a standard entirely foreign to the way historians typically operate. And it’s certainly a standard that would never be applied to texts from authors like Josephus, Tacitus, or Caesar.
But there’s an additional reason to reject the hyperskeptical approach to the New Testament text. If the text had been radically altered prior to the second century, then those alterations would still be visible within the manuscript tradition. It’s very unlikely that the text could’ve been radically changed and left no record of those changes in our extant manuscripts. To believe the text was radically different in this earlier time and that no evidence was left for that fact would be, in the words of scholar Frederik Wisse, “nothing short of a miracle.”
Word Become Flesh
From the beginning, Christianity has been a movement that cared very much about words. Not only because these words revealed essential historical moments on which Christianity was founded, but also because Christians came to believe that God himself spoke words (through his apostles) that needed to be preserved and passed down to future generations of the church.
Thankfully, we have good grounds for thinking these words have been transmitted, as a whole, with integrity and fidelity. In particular, the fact that we have manuscripts dated within a century or two of the original publication of these texts gives us access to (part of) the text that is stunningly early by any measurement—and notably earlier than most classical texts.
In this way, Christianity isn’t just a religion of the book but a religion of the word. As John reminds us in his prologue, “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14).
