Okay, lots to talk about here in this particular lesson, the reliability of the biblical texts, the biblical manuscripts. It's a very, very important question to ask ourselves, because if you remember in the last lecture, we were talking about biblical inspiration and inerrancy. What we said was that the original manuscripts, which by the way, a manuscript means written by hand. Okay, so these manuscripts which are also known as the autographs.
That makes a lot of sense actually, right? Because they're written by the hand, the autograph almost by the original authors. These original manuscripts, AKA autographs, only the final form, the original final form, are the inspired and the errands. Okay, copies are not.
So, so that means you could have various mistakes from scribes, copyists, you know, translation errors, you know, these types of things. It's only the original document in its final form that's inspired. All right, God breathed as we discussed, and it's an errand, okay, it's without error because it is God breathed and God cannot deceive or be deceived, right? So, this is a very important segue into this question here, because we do not have, as we admitted in the last lecture, it's true, we do not have any of the original copies or documents, you should call them, the manuscripts of any Old Testament book or New Testament book.
We only have copies of these documents. And that's just simply a historical reality, because when they're written on papyrus or animal skins, they're just gonna deteriorate over time. The harsh elements, they're being used and abused, you know, in various communities, red and re-red and re-red and shared, passing from person to person, and you know, very much treated with great reverence. And it's just gonna fall apart really, really easily.
And that's just what happens, you know, where Rust and Moth destroyed, you know, this is where I trust and Moth destroyed, he just says, so they're just gonna pass away from, you know, the elements are from overuse. And so we don't have the original, so the big elephant in the room is many non-Christians, you know, will like to point out. It's like, look, how faithful are the copies that we have today? You have your Bible in your hand.
How faithful are these copies that we have our Bibles from? Are they reliable? How faithful to the originals, are they? Are they reliable?
Are they accurate? Are they just copies upon copies upon copies upon copies? And therefore they become corrupted over time. So, you know, all the copies that we have over all the years of the early church, and the Greek and the Hebrew and the original languages, and we've lost so many copies and so many of the copies that we have are really, you know, late.
Are they false? Are they unreliable? You know, this is the big elephant in the room, because you can talk all the live long day about how the Bible's inspired. But if it's only the original documents, it's inspired and therefore, inerrant, then holy moly, like, what about these copies?
And does that mean that the Bibles we have are just, again, copies of copies of copies and they're just, they're not reliable, okay? This is a really, really important question. So, what we're gonna look at then in this very introductory lecture here is just the reliability of the biblical text of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. There's almost been a lot of time on the Gospels, because that's really in many respects where the rubber meets the road, because, you know, here comes Jesus, this long-weighted Messiah, the Hebrew people were waiting for, the Jews were waiting for, and he claims to be God, he claims to be the creator of the whole world in all very Jewish ways, of course.
And he demands really our loving obedience to him. And so, he claims that there's only, he's the only way to heaven and all this stuff. And so, a lot of people are attacking the Gospels as unreliable, down in the tubes, the reliability of those texts. We have to address that topic as well.
Okay, so, first what I'd like to do, looking at the notes here, is looking just at the witness and evidence of the textual reliability first of ancient non-biblical literature. Like, what is the state of reliability in the whole academic world of non-biblical texts, okay? So, from the Greco-Roman world here, you know, we have some dozen, a couple of dozen copies of major Greco-Roman works that we're all familiar with. I mean, if you've gone to college, you've probably read these works, you know.
But if you look at the evidence here, there's a couple of really interesting things that point out immediately, okay? First, that there, the copies that we have are many hundreds of years, roughly 1,000 years, later than the original document was penned, or at least when the author lived, okay? So, for example, these are just some simple quick examples, okay, not getting too much of the weeds here. We've got seven copies of Plato, who was from the fourth century BC.
The copies that we have come a thousand years after the fact. So, the time gap is really huge, and the copies are very few, okay? Same thing with Aristotle, only five copies, and the earliest that we have is 1,400 years after his life. That's a long span of time, everybody, okay?
And then Caesar's Gallic Wars, we only have like nine to 10 copies of those. A thousand years later, we got the copies. Thucydides, Thucydides is a famous historian, right? We have eight copies of him, and those come 1,300 years after his life, okay?
Now, this is really incredible. The time gap is huge, the copies are few, from all these major, and again, it's just a small sampling here, these major authors play Aristotle's Caesar Thucydides. The best that we have here is Homer's Iliad. We have 643 manuscripts, that's a lot.
You know, some multiple hundreds of copies, and but still, those copies come 1,500 years after it was originally penned. Okay, so large time gap, very few copies, except for maybe Homer's Iliad, that's really incredible, that we have 643. And the fact of the matter is, when you go to these universities or scholarly academic circles, nobody disputes the textual reliability of these texts. You know, knowing disputes, the historicity of the Gallic Wars or Thucydides history, yeah, there might be some debatives to what is, in a little bit more exaggerated, the type of literary genre, really, is that they're talking about, but when you're getting into like Roman history, stuff, knowing disputes this, you know they're talking about different emperors, and what they did, and their rise and their fall, and their successes and their failures, knowing disputes the historicity of these events from the texts, okay?
But even though they only have a handful of texts, okay? So that's kind of the standard right now, in the scholarly world for ancient non-biblical literature. Few copies, huge time gap, but really, nobody disputes it all that much, okay? Now when you look at the new Testament documents, it is a whole new world, my friends.
It's crazy, we have 5,000, approximately, 6,000, but 5,800 manuscripts of various links, some are short, some are complete, that are only written some, yeah, they're only copied some decades later than the original authors, the originals were authored, okay? That is incredible, could you imagine 6,000, approximately 6,000 copies, all right? That are only many decades, or maybe a couple hundred years tops, okay? Then the originals were authored.
The accuracy and the reliability is off the charts, this is insane, incredible, okay? Now we have a couple of examples here in your notes, the earliest fragment is very small, it's called the John Ryland's fragment, that's only five versus from John chapter 18, and that was approximately from 125 AD. Now if you're going to date John's gospel into the late first century, so the 80s or the 90s, you're only talking like three decades apart, if you're gonna date John to before the destruction of the temple and the 70s, then you're still got like five decades, all right? Not hundreds of years, okay?
Or at least over a thousand plus years, like some of these other ancient, biblical literature. The most, the absolute complete text by comparison of the new Testament come to us in these three codices, by the way, a codex is just basically another word for a book during the early period of Christianity, the book was invented, so before there's these scrolls, right, and it's really hard to find your place and save space and all this stuff, so the book was invented in the early period of the church right around the time of Christ, and so now you've got these various codexs, our books that were compiled, and we have three ancient, complete copies of the Bible as a whole, so New Testament and the Old Testament, so the oldest one is the Sinai codex, it was found on Mount Sinai, and that was roughly 350 AD, it's the oldest complete copy of the Bible that we have, it's in Greek, all of these are in Greek, there's the Vatican codex, if you guess where that's, where that's stored, safe and secure in the Vatican, that is another ancient Greek Bible from the late 300s, and then you also have the Alexandrian codex, Alexandria as in Northern Egypt, it's dating from the 400s, okay, so roughly here, 300 years are a little bit plus, a little bit more than that, since the time of Christ, we have complete Bibles here, and we're focusing in zeroing in on the New Testament right now, so when you're looking at the complete New Testament, that's only 300 years after the life of Christ, okay, it's insane, like this is not 1,000 or 1,500 years later, when you can kind of compare the documents, you have almost 6,000 documents, all right, 6,000 copies, that are within the span of decades to a couple hundred years, all right, so this is crazy because discolors won't really spend much time at all disputing the historicity and the reliability of the texts for the Greco-Roman works, but then they're gonna spend all, it's a double standard, it's crazy, they're gonna spend all this time talking about how the New Testament is unreliable, all right, because we don't have the original copies and blobby blah, and that's such a double standard. We've got such incredible witness from these manuscripts, the differences are minor, right, they're just minor linguistic and grammatical variants, are there nothing major at all, like you're not gonna compare the copies, and you discover this one copy here of the Gospel of John says that Jesus took off with Mary Magdalene to France and got married, you know what I mean, like it doesn't happen, there's just minor, super minor grammatical spelling errors, and things like that, and so what you do with all these copies is we have 100% certainty, 100% reliability, that the New Testament that we have in Greek is accurate reflection of the original copy. Absolutely, like there's no debate about this really, if you just look at the evidence, okay, so that is the New Testament, it's just incredible, it's very beautiful to see that.
Now admittedly for the Old Testament, it is a bit more complicated, okay.