Had some recent discussions on here about this topic and I thought a post might reach farther than my response comments. It is true that the original letters that John wrote, we do not have. The gospel Matthew wrote with his own hand, no longer exists. None of the original manuscripts of the NT exist anymore. This is most likely because Matthew, the apostle, presided over a church and wrote his gospel account, which likely stayed in that church (something similar to the “chain bible” during the reformation period) in the 1st century. During the Roman persecutions of Nero or Diocletian, they went to this church and destroyed Matthew’s gospel to stop Christianity, most likely. We know that they burnt Christian documents and libraries during times of persecution, this is probably how the prized possession of the original NT was lost, through persecution.
The real question this brings up is, “how can we possibly know what those original documents said if we don’t have them?” Critics like to point out that some of our earliest manuscripts of passages in the NT come from the 4th century. For example, our oldest manuscripts of 2 Peter 1 are found in Codex sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and P72. All three manuscripts are written in the 300s. The question is, how can we know these manuscripts accurately reflect what Peter wrote in the year 60? How many times were the writings changed in that 240+ year period? To make matters worse, these 3 manuscripts contain textual variants (meaning, they have different things written in them). Which manuscript is correct? Or are all of them incorrect and we have lost the Bibles original message?
This is typically how the argument is presented, and many Christians shrink from it out of fear that the critics may be correct. This is a dishonest response to a valid criticism. Don’t fear, but have a response for everyone who asks you a reason for your faith. I would like to answer the question by giving a common analogy I use, then by following up with some added information to show how we can know what the original said even without having the original copies.
Analogy: a teacher writes a story. She presents the story in front of a class of 100 students. She tells the students to copy the story word for word. Once the students have completed their assignment, she then burns her original copy. Can we reconstruct her original words even without her original copy? The answer is yes. What are the odds that all 100 students have come up with a completely different story than the original? What are the odds that every student copied the exact same words incorrectly? What are the odds that the teacher herself wouldn’t notice and correct some of the errors? When we collect all 100 copies, we will notice that some students have spelling errors, some have grammatically altered the document, some have missed a line or repeated a line, some have added a word here and there. But of 100 copies, do we think that all 100 students added the same word in the same spot in every copy? Do we think that all 100 students just so happened to skip the exact same line in every copy and the line in the original is now lost? This is scientifically impossible. Even with errors (textual variants) among the copies, we can still reconstruct the original without having it.
When the original gospel of Matthew was written and presumably placed in his church, Christians came from far and wide and read from and heard this document. So they wrote copies to take back to their own churches. Hundreds of copies were made. Hundreds of copies of those copies were made. When we collect these copies, yes, we do see changes and differences and textual variants and corruptions. But this does not mean we cannot reconstruct the original. 99% of all textual variants do not matter. They don’t change the meaning of the text, even if they change the spelling, punctuation, word order, etc. Is it possible that a conceptual change entered into the text? No. With thousands of Christians who went to the church and read the manuscript, they would notice if another church had a copy of the same manuscript and yet it had different stories, different parables, and different foreign teachings. In fact, in the Bible, we find examples of people noticing these exact things. Paul warns against the teachings of the wolves, referring to gnostic and docetic corruptions. John himself speaks against these gnostics and gnostic documents that appeared in the 1st century pretending to be inspired (the gospel of Cerinthus).
To say that the original text was so corrupted is unreasonable.
1. In the 300 years between the writing of 2 Peter and our earliest copies, if massive conceptual changes were made in the text of scripture, the Christians in those years would have noticed, and these changes would have been spoken of. (Note that none of the textual variants among these manuscripts are necessarily theologically altering or conceptually corrupted)
2. We have copies of manuscripts in different languages. To change or add a particular conceptual change in the scripture, it would be impossible to add to several different languages copied so early in their manuscript families. We can see this in the Comma Johanneum. The corruption only ever appeared in the Latin manuscripts. When it was added, it was impossible for the person who corrupted it to go back and add the corruption to earlier manuscripts, and in the different languages, which is why we do not find it there.
3. The NT writers were still alive during the time many of these manuscripts were written. The more influential copies could have easily been corrected by the writers themselves, or their students.
4. We cannot suppose that because we only have 3 manuscripts surviving today, 1600 years later, that these are the only 3 manuscripts that existed. There were hundreds in existence when these were written which were consulted.
5. There’s a flawed assumption that once the original copy of 2 Peter was written and copies once that the original was burnt. So any errors in the first copy were repeated in the second copy, and the third, etc. Manuscripts are not a game of broken telephone which necessarily repeats the copy before it. It is more like a well of water which many people can come back to. The errors and mistakes of the first manuscript can be corrected properly by a later scribe, or by a scribe who compares it to the original.
6. The testimony of the early church writers cannot be ignored. While they battled over gnostic influence and theological doctrine, they would be very keen on significant theological changes to the text. When they quote verses, we often find that Tertullian in Africa agrees with Clement in Rome, or Irenaeus of France. We can use these early witnesses to compare and sometimes identify when and where a corruption formed (for example, see the corruption of John 1:18 stemming from manuscripts all originally in Alexandria Egypt)
7. We cannot forget or ignore the process of textual criticism to identify corruptions. It’s not as if we come to two manuscripts and find two different words and have no idea which is original. We can know what language Paul commonly uses and compare. We can use context. We find that scribes are more inclined to add than to take words away from a text. We find that scribes like to make similar passages match each other perfectly for the sake of harmony. We know that scribes often didn’t have spelling standards and sometimes spelled words in different ways. We know that a scribe is more likely to choose the easier reading than the harder reading when confronted with a variant. We have methods of determining the original text in many ways.
8. We do not just have 100 students coping the teachers text. We have over 5,000 manuscripts copying the teachers text just in Greek, and nearly 20,000 in various languages (Latin, coptic, Gothic, etc). We have such a wide explosion of so many manuscripts from so many places it is not possible for them all to have the same controlled corruptions to give us a completely different book conceptually than what was originally written. This was not just a historical book that people wished to preserve, but a book which was recognized as inspired from the moment it was written and considered beneficial for us, and great care was used in preserving it. We cannot assume it suffered massive changes and no one happened to notice, and somehow all of our manuscripts today cannot point us back to the original.
Thank you.