Ancient books, archeological discoveries and faith
Our Christian faith is not a “blind leap into the dark”, but is the rational act of an educated, careful and scientific man
by Philip A. Gottschalk
When we lived in Vienna, I had the privilege of visiting the renown “Papyrussammeln”, i.e. the division housing the collection of papyri in the Albertine, i.e. the National Museum of Austria. Gene Whiting {then academic dean of the Evangelical Bible Institute [EBI], a pastoral training institute, located in Vienna, for Yugoslav students}, all of the then current students of EBI and myself visited this Museum together. We saw their permanent exhibition of various artifacts such as: the Egyptian Book of the Dead, various inscriptions in cuneiform scripts from the nations of the ancient Near East (in Akkadian and Sumerian) and Torah scrolls, i.e. the Jewish books of the Laws or the Five Books of Moses (or Pentateuch). Besides these, we were given the opportunity of seeing some of the oldest {extant, New Testament} papyri and parchments, i.e. the text if the New Testament written on leather.
Dean Whiting had visited the Papyrussammeln several times and was acquainted with the attendant there, so he requested that he prepare particular manuscripts written on papyri and parchment, so that we might look at them. The curator graciously labored for more than a week to acclimatize these manuscripts so that we could look at them and, in fact, even hold them in our hands (though they were in glass frames). These papyri and parchments are kept in a specially acclimatized room so that they will be preserved from decay due to humidity and heat. The process of acclimatization {to room temperature} lasts an entire week in order for the papyri to be exposed to ordinary air. I was very surprised that they allowed us at all to look at these valuable things, much less to touch them!
For me this day remains in my memory as a pleasant outing with the students and the actualization, i.e. the acquaintance of something that I had known only from books. These papyri were no longer only strange signs and numbers in the footnotes of my Greek New Testament, but real artifacts of the early church era. Many times I had explained to students of Apologetics the importance of these papyri and parchments for with their help we can prove the exactness of the transmission of the message of the New Testament. With this sort of “textual criticism”, i.e. literary science of determining and verifying the ancient text, we can confirm that our New Testament is the most well-preserved ancient text which exists.
Our Greek New Testament is far more reliable than any other old book, even more so that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Caesar’s Gallic Wars. In fact, we have more evidence that our Greek New Testament has been faithfully transmitted than we have for Shakespeare’s dramas. When we consider the age of our Greek New Testament in comparison with Shakespeare, then we can begin to value a little more highly the accuracy and reliability of the Biblical text. The distance in time between the events and the writing of the text, i.e. the copying of manuscripts, is so small that it does not allow for the development of legends and myths. Some scholars evaluate the accuracy of our New Testament Greek text as being between 95 and 99.9% accurate. Technically speaking, this is called the bibliographic examination of the text. (See Josh McDowell, More Than a Carpenter, pp. ).
The science which deals with the reconstruction of a certain text is called “lower” or textual criticism. The librarian showed us how these ancient texts are reconstructed. Scientists usually receive texts in tiny pieces of papyri or parchment, in a condition similar to the elements of a jigsaw puzzle. They do not know which part belongs to which other part. With the help of a computer and a graphic scanner they take pictures of these pieces, and then they “play” with these scanned pieces as one would with a jigsaw puzzle until they have established the correct position of every one of the pieces of papyrus.
In the same way, it is possible to discover “layers” of writing on the papyri and parchments. When the scribes made errors they would erase their mistakes, scraping them off, then they would use the same place again. The computer programs can uncover mistakes in the copying, or even cases when the scribes erased a whole papyrus in order to write another text on it. In the early church era scribes usually stood or sat in a circle around a reader who read the text aloud. In this way they made up to ten copies in the same time it would take to read it once and copy the whole text.
But, that is only the first part of the work. When scholars have composed these pieces into a coherent whole, then they have to decipher what in fact the text says. The ancient Greeks, Jews, Egyptians and other nations did not use our modern diacritical signs and interpunctuation. They did not even divide words one from another. This work is similar to the deciphering which was done during war time. Therefore, computers are of great help to modern scientists. The text on the screen of the computer can be put together and taken apart an infinite number of times without damaging the original valuable manuscripts.
After the establishing of the text of the writing, it is necessary to translate it into a modern language. Then the discovery is printed in some scholarly journal so that other scientists can use this new knowledge.
Let us return to our visit to the Papyrussammeln. The librarian prepared certain of the oldest texts of the Greek New Testament for us, so that we could look at them and try to decipher them without a computer! He prepared for us some papyri from the sixth and seventh centuries after Christ, which contain texts of the Gospels and from the Acts of the Apostles. I was surprised that we were allowed to look at these papyri, since ordinarily this is possible only for scholars who are specialists who deal with “lower”, i.e. textual, criticism of the Greek New Testament, and not for students of a beginning course of New Testament Greek language.
We tried in this old, hand method to figure out which papyrus was which part of the New Testament. We knew which parts of the New Testament we had before us, so using a concordance we attempted to figure out which part we had. First we had to recognize at least one word. This was not easy since, as I have already explained, thewholepagewaswrittenwithoutanybreaksbetweenthewords. When you realize that we were working in a foreign, and a dead language at that, you will begin a little to sympathize with us!
This first visit awakened in me a desire to see other papyri and parchments. While we were on a winter vacation in 1991-92 in Switzerland I finally was able to fulfill a dream of many years: I visited the famous Bodmer Library in Geneva (Cologny). A certain wealthy Swiss man had for many years collected ancient books and texts. In his later years he begun to collect also texts of the Greek New Testament, i.e. papyri and parchments, and Biblical texts in different languages such as Coptic, Syrian, etc. Among the various ancient books, I had the fortune to see also texts of the Greek New Testament: Acts of the Apostles 17:22-23 (p74 from VI or VII century); II Peter 1:1 ff. (P72 from II or IV c.), John 8:22-38 (p75 from III c.), Luke 10:8-20 (also p75) and John 15:13-19 (p66 from the beginning of the second century after Christ!). This last text is one of the most ancient parts of the Greek New Testament which is preserved until today. Some scholars believe that it was written about 100 years after the end of the writing of the New Testament, around 175 AD (Philip W. Comfort, Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations of the New Testament, p. 60). I also saw some of the first translations of the Bible in the Coptic and Syrian languages and an example of the first printed Bible, the famous Guttenberg Bible of 1454.
The Bodmer Library is famous around the world for its ancient and rare books and written artifacts. It was one of most impressing events of my life. It was the most lovely dream of a lover of the Bible and a bibliophile. However, in spite of this I had an unpleasant feeling: I had come from Yugoslavia to see these tiny, torn fragments of papyri. Was my faith really based on such insignificant evidence? What difference was there between these papyri and reliqia? Weren’t they really just evangelical relics, a Protestant version of the Shroud of Turin? (The Shroud of Turin is supposedly the shroud in which Jesus was buried, and is now a relic in Turin, Italy.)
I must say that in spite of my amazement at this library and the beauty of the place and the house, and in spite of the effort which Mr. Bodmer invested in his collection, this library was not devoted to Biblical texts. In fact in the guidebook these papyri and parchments were hardly mentioned. But on the other hand, the notes on Homer and the Baghavad Ghita were much fuller. When I saw all of the other “holy books”: the Ghita, the Vedas, the Koran, and others which were included in the beautiful exhibition which was prepared, while I was there I asked myself: “Is my faith the only true one? What about these other people? How is it that they came to all of these other ‘holy books?’”
I thought long and deeply until I came to some conclusions. First, my faith is not based on these evidences in the same way in which the faith of some people is based on relics or the Shroud of Turin. Not one conservative, evangelical scholar of the Greek New Testament who deals with “lower”, i.e. textual, criticism believes that these papyri or parchments are able to perform miracles. No one kisses them or seeks healing from them.
When experts researched the Shroud of Turin, in the end they were forced to admit that it was a good fake; a conclusion which was considered by some people as unfortunate. They used all of the computer skills and most modern technology in many fields: pathology, chemistry, nuclear magnetic resonance, etc.. They confirmed, as true scientists, that the shroud was a fake. On the other hand, any unbiased textual critic who researches the papyri and parchments, will come to the conclusion that the Greek New Testament is the most reliable, most well-transmitted ancient text in the world, without any exception!
Here there is nothing such as the story of the Koran which fell from heaven, nor such as the story of the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith supposedly translated from golden tablets (which are now lost!). The papyri and the parchments are proofs. Any person can look at them and examine them. Joseph Smith lied. A renown Egyptologist, Claus Bauer, from the University of Chicago has proven this. On the basis of the notebook of Joseph Smith which he kept while he “translated” the so-called Book of Abraham, this scholar showed that Joseph Smith did not at all know hieroglyphics. Smith thought up whole passages for only one hieroglyph. Instead of Smith’s long “translation”, frequently the translation required only one word for one hieroglyph. In the end, he showed that what was at issue was an ordinary “hypocephalous”, i.e. a cloth which was placed under the head of a mummy and which contained certain inscriptions. Even a Mormon scholar, Dee Jay Nelson, came to the same conclusion and as a result left the Mormon church! (Harry L. Ropp, The Mormon Papers: Are the Mormon Scriptures Reliable?, pp. 70-82).
Secondly, I understood again the huge difference between Christianity and the other religions. Although there are similarities, since man is in final analysis man and relates to his “god” as a man, Christianity, true Biblical Reformation Christianity is not a human invention. When the Baghavad-Ghita is read in entirety and in context of the Vedas, then many inconsistencies and unbelievable events and stories are seen. The god Krishna is depicted as the lord of love and the lover of the soul of his worshipper, but that same Krishna also appears as a tiger and devours his worshipper. In the wider teaching of Hinduism Krishna is only one incarnation of Brahman, the supreme god, as is Kali, the female incarnation, i.e. the goddess of death to whom even human sacrifices are offered! (John B. Noss, Man’s Religions, pp. 198-204 et passim).
Yes, these “holy books” have similar stories and occurrences as those which we have in the New Testament, but in the end the New Testament presentation appears pale and dry in comparison with these other books. Jesus’ miracles are not similar to the stories of these other books. In Jesus’ miracles there are no spectacles, his prayer is simple: “Father, I thank Thee that Thou hearest Me. I know that Thou always hearest Me, but I have said this on account of the people who are standing here that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me.” (John 11:41-42). There is no invention nor fantastic flights of imagination. Certain so-called Gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, are not included in the canon of the New Testament precisely because of such unbelievable events and historical inaccuracies. (Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, pp. 173-174: Colin Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind, pp. 5, 6 and Geoffrey Bromiley, “The Church Fathers and Holy Scripture” in Scripture and Truth, eds. D.A. Carson and J.D. Woodbridge, pp. 200-203).
Is it unbelievable that a man rose from the dead? Was Jesus resurrected? In so far as He was, for we do not know of anyone who has risen from the dead, we can read descriptions of eyewitnesses and verify whether these descriptions have been accurately and faithfully transmitted from the time of writing until now. There is no guessing, there in no “leap in the dark.” More than this, we can verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that that which is described, occurred just as it is described, in the same way in which we would confirm, let us say, the death of Julius Caesar.
Our Christian faith is not a “blind leap in the dark”, but the rational act of an educated, careful and scientific man. We do not desire that anyone believe without evidence. We are happy that we can have subjective experiences of the Risen Lord. We are joyful that we are so created as spiritual beings that we can have fellowship with our Creator, but we praise the same God who created us in His image: as rational beings. We love Him “with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind” (Luke 10:27).
@ Philip A. Gottschalk
Published in “The Christian Review”, No. 23-24, 1997, YU ISSN 0352-7174, pp. 12-14
