Answers
"I believe the New Testament has been corrupted over the centuries."
The New Testament was originally written in Greek. The earliest Greek
New Testament manuscripts discovered date to 100-150 AD, or about a
century after Christ, and the number of ancient Greek manuscripts or
fragments of the New Testament discovered so far exceeds 5600.
Two things can be said about this. First, what we know about the history of
the Roman Empire is based largely on
The Annals of the Roman
Empire, written by the Roman historian Tacitus in 116 AD.
There are only 2 manuscripts in the world of that in the original
language. One of the two manuscripts dates from the 9th century and the other from the 11th
century. Therefore, the details of the
history of the Roman Empire stand on two manuscripts written about 1000
years after the original, while the New Testament stands on 5600+ Greek New
Testament manuscripts that date from about 100 years after the originals. In other
words, there is far stronger written evidence for the New Testament than for the
history of the Roman Empire.
Second, these 5600+ New Testament manuscripts in the original
Greek were discovered over a vast geographic area that stretches from the
Middle East to Ethiopia, Spain, Ireland and Germany. So what?
Imagine a kindergarten
class playing whisper telephone. The teacher whispers, "Bobby
pushed Laura on the swings" to two children, and they each
whisper to two other children, and so on. If after ten generations, the
child at
one corner of the room reports, "Bobby kissed Laura by the swings"
while a child at another corner reports, "Bobby hit Laura near the swings",
the class won’t know what the teacher originally had whispered. But if
children at distant corners repeat the same sentence, the original
words
can be deduced without having been heard by all. What's the point?
The original New Testament manuscripts most likely disintegrated
long ago from after passing from hand to hand to be read and copied. But
almost all (95-99%) of the 5600+ Greek New Testament manuscripts discovered say in effect,
"Bobby pushed Laura on the swings." So the original words can be
deduced from those 5600+ Greek New Testament manuscripts.*
* Described are the "Textus Receptus" Greek New
Testament manuscripts. We
recommend
English Bibles that are translations of this original Greek manuscripts.
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