Is the Original New Testament Lost? (Dr. Bart Ehrman)

[stromboli]

Back when I was transiting from Mormonism into xtianity, one of the things that sold me were the statements made by various xtian authors of the authenticity of the Bible, based on supposedly existant manuscripts and so on. Stupid me. I took that at face value. Finding out the truth is one of the things that really destroyed any belief I had, because xtian authors are deliberately misleading their readers with half truths and outright lies.

[PopeyesPappy]

Do we have the original manuscripts? Can we trust the copies passed down to us? How accurate is our New Testament today?

Watch Ehrman delivering a convincing case that what we have are copies of copies of copies, etc. with each generation of copies having their typo mistakes, insertions, extrapolations, omissions and in some cases, compilations. The earliest manuscript dates from the 2nd century, a scrap of paper no bigger than a credit card, and the earliest full manuscript from the 9th century. And that is a small segment of the difficulties in asserting the origin of the manuscripts and the validity of their contents.

You don't consider codex Vaticanus a complete manuscript? Codex Sinaiticus is nearly so and they both date to the 4th century.

[Colanth]

Do we have the original manuscripts? Can we trust the copies passed down to us? How accurate is our New Testament today?

Watch Ehrman delivering a convincing case that what we have are copies of copies of copies, etc. with each generation of copies having their typo mistakes, insertions, extrapolations, omissions and in some cases, compilations. The earliest manuscript dates from the 2nd century, a scrap of paper no bigger than a credit card, and the earliest full manuscript from the 9th century. And that is a small segment of the difficulties in asserting the origin of the manuscripts and the validity of their contents.

You don't consider codex Vaticanus a complete manuscript? Codex Sinaiticus is nearly so and they both date to the 4th century.

As Joe said, the earliest scrap we have (and it may be from a book that later became part of the Bible - there aren't enough words on it to be sure) dates to early 2nd century.  If the later codices are copies of earlier documents whose provenance is unknown, the later codices are worthless for determining what was in the originals - which we don't have.

Anyone could have written what we now have - in the second century - even if it has no similarity to what had been written in the mid-first century.  We'd still have what we now have, but it would bear as much resemblance to the originals as the Koran does to the Vedas.

'Complete' and 'original' have nothing to do with one another.  The argument is that we don't know what was in the originals, not that we don't have a complete early Bible.  We have no way of knowing whether the Bible (which, remember, didn't exist as a single work until 325 CE) has anything to do with the original documents written in the first century if, indeed, there was anything written in the first century about the religion we now call Christianity - which we also don't know.  (We know there were people who followed an anointed leader, and they were called Christians, but did they hold beliefs similar to those held by fourth century Christians?  Or were they just another sect of Judaism, one that died out in the first century?)