The
Historical Reliability of the New Testament
by Craig L. Blomberg
by Craig L. Blomberg
I recently made it through this book of 725 pages.
I suppose it at least briefly dealt with
about every criticism of the New Testament.
I doubt few would want to read it,
but it could be a resource for answers
to questions about apparent inconsistencies
of a given text.
There is a subject index and a Scripture index.
Skeptics will never be satisfied,
for every answer has an argument against it.
I will give Scripture the benefit of the doubt.
Some quotes from the book...
“Growing up in a preInternet, pre-desktop-publishing world,
I never dreamed that if I ever got to write
real-live, peer-reviewed published books,
some of the perspectives I would have to rebut
would be those introduced in fictitious novels
or by self-published authors.
No one had conceived of the notion of a blog,
much less imagined that some people would think
that reading it was necessarily a means
of gaining accurate information.
Today, however, thanks to all these developments,
countless people around the world,
including some university professors,
believe that Constantine's calling
for the Council of Nicea in AD 325
led to the establishment of the canon of the New Testament.
That was a piece of fiction Dan Brown made up
in The Da Vinci Code and duped millions into believing.
The Council of Nicea was actually a gathering
of Christian bishops to debate Trinitarian doctrine;
its outgrowth, the Nicene Creed, is still recited regularly
in Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic,
and more liturgically minded Protestant churches,
enunciating what the vast majority of all Christians
through the centuries have believed
about the roles of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Constantine did commission Eusebius
to produce fifty new copies of the New Testament
to be distributed around the empire,
but that had nothing to do with any discussion
about which books should be included.
Eusebius, in fact, had already come to agree
with the twenty-seven that have remained
a part of the canon.
The councils that formally ratified these twenty-seven
were held in North Africa at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397)
at the end of the fourth century.
But Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria,
in 367 in his Easter-time encyclical
already compiled the same list of twenty-seven books,
officially endorsing them as uniquely worthy
of inclusion in the New Testament.”
“Despite frequent claims to the contrary,
the books of the New Testament
were copied with extraordinary care.
Because of the sheer volume of manuscripts,
both in Greek and in various other ancient languages
into which the Scriptures were translated,
there are an enormous number of textual variants.
But the vast majority of these are extremely minor,
and the size of the manuscript tradition
also makes it possible to determine
beyond any reasonable doubt
what the original reading would have been
in upwards of 99 percent of the text of the New Testament.
Where there still is uncertainty,
we can at least know that the original text
is represented by one of the variant readings
of a given passage.
We do not have to worry that some new discovery
could overthrow the testimony
of so many thousands of manuscripts
and their consistent usage
throughout the history of the church.
Certainly no theological doctrine
or ethical practice of the Christian faith
relies solely or even primarily
on any textually disputed passage or passages.”
