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We saw in the prior entitled "Marcion And 'The Gospel Of The Lord" Or "The Gospel Of Luke": What Came First? that what traditional Christian Fathers and what other Christians writers influenced by these early Church Fathers (Tertullian/Epiphanius) have said regarding Marcion is totally incorrect. Rather than discrediting Marcion for deleting much of what he did not want to use from a supposedly existing early copy of the Gospel of Luke we found conclusive evidence indicating just the opposite; rather than Marcion deleting portions of the Gospel of Luke we found that a later writer of the Gospel of Luke invented and added to the earlier Marcion "Gospel Of The Lord" in an effort to refute the earliest beliefs concerning "the Christ" as held by the earliest Christians. We saw that scholars can teach us that a total 122 verses are found the the later Gospel of Luke which are not in Marcion's earliest "gospel." To this we found 23 extra verses in the 4th chapter of Luke were are not in the corresponding accounts in Marcion's gospel; totaling 145 verses, or more than three average chapters have been added later to the earliest gospel gathered by Marcion. If we then add the first three chapters of Luke, which are entirely missing the earlier gospel of Marcion the result is that more than six chapters, or more than one-fourth of the entire Gospel of Luke has been added to the earlier existing gospel of Marcion in attempts to undo the earliest understanding of "the Christ."
Rather than Marcion selecting and deleting parts of an existing gospel from the pen of Luke it was rather the writer of the Gospel of Luke which wrote an elongated version of a prior gospel record after Marcion's collection of his "Gospel of the Lord." We saw the evidence that suggests strongly that the Gospel of Luke was later written from an existing copy of gospel fragments of Marcion's First New Testament Gospel.
Above we basically talked about the comparison of manuscripts. Let us look clearly into the subject of early New Testament manuscripts so that our readers fully understand just what we are talking about.
Church tradition assures us that there exists a large number of early New Testament manuscripts (mss). For the sake of consistency, we'll define "early" as 325 A.D., which is the date used in the quotation below. If this large number of manuscripts existed, it would not prove that the current received text of the New Testament contains the authentic words and teachings of Jesus. However, what we're mainly concerned with here is the outright dishonest claims regarding the number of early New Testament manuscripts. The propaganda of the self-proclaimed followers of Jesus reads as follows.
Josh McDowell assures us in Evidence That Demands A Verdict (vol..1, 1972 pgs.40-48; and Ostling, Time, January 23, 1995, pg.57) that we have in our possession over 24,000 New Testament manuscripts. Mr. Mcdowell instructs us that we have in our possession 5,300 known New Testament Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin Vulgates, and 9,300 other early versions (MSS), giving us more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence. These, we are told, were mostly written before 325 A.D.
In order to refute this outrageous claim (there's not one-tenth of the number mentioned!), further down in this document I provide a few quotations from The Jesus Legend, by, by G. A. Wells, which itself quotes other Biblical scholars that reveal the truth instead of inaccurate tradition.
This can be verified by spending a little time browsing the Internet at the Table of Greek Manuscripts page which contains a listing of all known early New Testament manuscripts and fragments. It is important to note "fragment," since many of the "manuscripts" are just that- small fragments. The footnotes to The Jesus Legend mention some manuscripts by their papyrus identifiers (i.e. p52. p90, p45, and p75) and it is necessary to understand that these correspond to the manuscript numbers "ms. nr." listed on the Table of Greek Manuscripts page. Thus by using this on-line reference, you can personally verify the truth of the claim of Christian propaganda. Not surprisingly, their claims are wholly false and deceptive.
It is interesting to see that a non-Christian scholar, G. A. Wells, tells us the truth by saying that: "of all the synoptic manuscripts which can be dated to the fourth century or earlier, only two (P45and P75, both of the third century) contain more than a chapter."
This can be verified by spending a little time at the Table of Greek Manuscripts page.
Answer for yourself: Did he just tell us that of all these numerous New Testament manuscript fragments that there are ONLY 2 of these that are as long as one chapter in length? He sure did!!!
It's true -ALL of the other pre-fourth century manuscripts contain only a few verses!!! However, don't forget that Christian author and apologist for the Christian faith cited above (Josh McDowell) claimed "24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament" which "were mostly written before 325 A.D"!!!
Like many other Christian apologists, Jochen Katz simply spreads this false claim when he says: "And I believe that with the basis of many thousands of manuscripts for comparison we can be very confident that the text is today faithfully restored and the researchers in textual criticism assert that the actual literal text is restored to 99.8% leaving only a very few uncertainties." We need to ask right now a very important question.
Answer for yourself: How old are these "thousands of manuscripts" and how much of the New Testament they contain? Whether ignorance or deception is behind this statement, it's worthless none the less.
Another example of the complete deception of Christian writers accepting prior Church Tradition without ever investigating it for themselves is the statement by the Christian author that "Until two years ago, the oldest assumed manuscript which we possessed was the St. John papyrus (P52)". Unfortunately for him, we all now know what "P52" means! We can simply go to the Table of Greek Manuscripts and see how much of the New Testament that this "manuscript" contains.
Answer for yourself: How much?
Exactly five verses of the "Gospel of John" (18:31-33,37-38)!!! However, the author was using it as an example of a "New Testament Manuscript" - never bothering to mention how small a "portion" it really is. A reader who didn't know any better could go away thinking that this St. John papyrus - and the others referred to - are complete New Testament "manuscripts". Need I say more?
Suffice it to say that the overwhelming majority of manuscripts that this dishonest author refers to have no bearing on proving the textual veracity of everything in the current New Testament. All of these manuscripts - regardless of how early - date back to the time when there were already doctrinal and "Christological" debates within the early Church.
Answer for yourself: Did we see in the prior article, "Marcion And 'The Gospel Of The Lord' Or 'The Gospel Of Luke': What Came First?" such a Christological debate and difference of opinion that resulted in Rome rewriting the First New Testament and giving the world a new beliefs about Jesus as "the Christ" which was not held by the earliest Christians and followers of Jesus? WE SURE DID!
The facts are that we do not possess the Greek New Testament as it first existed in the days of Marcion; we sadly only have Rome's falsification of it. What we have is a mass of manuscripts, of which only about three hundred date from before A.D. 800. A mere thirty-four of these are older than A.D. 400, of which only four were at any time complete. All these differ, and all at one time or another had authority as the known text.
Ehrman's recent and thorough discussion of the New Testament text in The Orthodox Corruption Of Scripture leads him to conclude that, during the earliest period of its transmission, that the New Testament "was in a state of flux" and "came to be more or less standardized in some regions by the fourth century, and subject to fairly rigid control (by comparison) only in the Byzantine period" (Corruption, p. 28). He adds in a note that this is the view of a wide range of scholars. This is one of the best books you can read to introduce you to the unreliability of the New Testament due to the theological adulteration of it by Rome.
If you read Ehrman, you will find concerning the New Testament that "the text was regularly adjusted in such areas as the birth of Jesus, the agony in the garden, the institution of the Eucharist, Jesus's death, his cry of dereliction, resurrection and ascension. . . . And these adjustments were made NOT by those who were labelled as heretics, but by the 'proto-orthodox', to use Ehrman's term". Again, "Ehrman vividly shows how scribes have preserved or created within the manuscripts they were copying reflections of early Christological debates that helped to shape mainstream Christianity" (Novum Testamentum, 36 [1994], pp. 405-06). In other words the New Testament was changed by Rome repeatedly in chronological succession as their Church Councils hammered out the Roman understanding of "the Christ" over the centuries.
Answer for yourself: Have I not been teaching this fact for years in hopes of alerting and warning Christians of the idolatry on page after page of our New Testaments? No wonder the Jews cannot believe in our Christian Jew named Jesus whom passes off as a Jewish Messiah!!!!!!!!!!
It is
time to look at Judaism for the truth about the Messiah and the Jesus of
the First Century.
This dishonesty with the New Testament texts and manuscripts is exactly what we saw in the previous article where the writer of the Gospel of Luke took the foundation of Marcion's Gospel of the Lord and turned the "allegorical" Christ into a "literal" human Christ and applied it exclusively to the Jesus of the First Century. This is Roman Creational Christology and the evolution of it as decided for you and me Roman Catholicism. In this evolutionary process we find, in Ehrman and others, the movement away from a "allegorical Christ" as held by the earliest Christians to one which is given flesh to the exclusion of "the Christ" being within everyone created in the image of God. That means all of us. Succeeding Roman Church Councils debated these issues and the manuscripts as you have seen were altered correspondingly to reflect such later decisions. We end up with a lie and never know it. We cry tears over what we read about Jesus in the New Testament never realizing it is often no more truthful than Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.
It is time to look at Judaism for the truth about the Messiah and the Jesus of the First Century.