After my post yesterday Why I’m Not Sold on Modern Biblical Scholarship/Criticism ourCOG posted this interesting treatment on the New Testament manuscripts, their variants and the significance (or lack thereof) of those variants.
There’s no question that the Bible–Old and New Testaments–is the best attested book to come out of classical antiquity, a point I made in my book with Leonard Albert Lay Apologetics: How to Know and Show the Bible is True. That speaks to the continuity issue: every manuscript the article mentioned before the Textus Receptus comes out Roman Empire Christianity, mostly from the Eastern part of the Empire.
What many modern Biblical critics have done is to question the origins, authorship and compilation of the books of the Bible. Concentrating on the New Testament, that means the whole business of source criticism (“Q” and the like) and the authorship/integrity of many of the epistles. (They’ve even suggested that the book of Hebrews, whose Pauline authorship is manifestly doubtful, was written by a girl, which has resulted in many complementarians hitting the floor before they could grab the smelling salts.) This manifested itself in the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the “Jesus Seminar” of more recent years.
It would have taken far more effort to construct a fraud than to put together the truth of the New Testament.
Positive Infinity 