As an atheist I enjoyed testing the belief of my Christian friends and family by asking them if they knew where their Bible comes from (often they didn’t), and then asking them how they could possibly believe in such a “book”.
For example, it’s a known fact that not one single original New Testament manuscript has survived: there are some early manuscript scraps and quotes in other writings, but the first complete copies of single New Testament books appear around 200 AD, and the earliest complete copy of the New Testament (the Codex Sinaiticus) dates to the 4th century!
So I would ask them:
How can you possibly believe that any books of the New Testament represent the writings of someone who was actually there as a witness to the events they have written about – especially the life, death and resurrection of Jesus – and not just made up several hundred years later by dark age scammers!
How can we know that Jesus existed at all!?
I mean, how can we know that Jesus existed at all!
This strategy amused me for a long time, until I spoke to someone who knew more than I did.
She quoted the two leading NON-Christian Bible historians – Maurice Casey (formerly of Nottingham University) and Bart Ehrman (University of North Carolina) – who, based on the evidence staring everyone in the face, have NO DOUBT about both the validity of the New Testament texts, AND the existence of the Jesus of Nazareth that the Bible authors were writing about.
How can this be???
Well, for starters, imagine this:
- having several hundred handwritten copies of a document
- that no one alive has seen,
- coming from completely different places around Europe and the Middle East,
- copied from other documents
- by completely different people
- over a period of about 300 hundred years …
… and the only notable differences are in less than 1% of the text?
Short of holding the original documents in your hand (and even then how would you know), literally NOTHING could offer better proof that:
To the honest mind this is absolutely incredible, especially when you realise that these differences make no difference at all to anything that matters!
So in fact, one of the facts that I was using to question the validity of the ancient source documents, is really proof (scientifically!) of both the existence and the content OF THE ORIGINALS!
Bart Ehrman – who as a leading scholar was a New Testament critic! – admits that: “In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple-slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelt words, blunders of one sort of another” [1].
As an atheist, when I first realised what this meant, it was mind blowing for me, causing significant cognitive dissonance and even outright denial!
Because it meant that my previous assumptions about the historical validity of the New Testament writings had to be completely wrong. In fact, the only reason why non-Christian academic historians reluctantly admit to the validity of the New Testament writings is because they are forced to: because no reasonable, informed and educated person could get away with thinking otherwise.
Inevitably, this led me to start wondering:
If the writings actually were written by people who either knew Jesus or who knew people who knew Jesus …
… what about the truth of what the authors actually wrote?
If you’re interested in reading about the most controversial event in all of history, which is either the greatest hoax of all time OR the most incredible event in all of history, then read an account of it evidently written by a man who was both a physician and who had a scientific mind before anyone knew what that was: CLICK HERE.
This man also wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else [3].
He and his companions were willing to be tortured and killed – and most of them were – for what they were sharing with people, even when they easily could have avoided that by backing down.