The Text of the New Testament and the Words of Jesus

Today's quote from Robert Funk's book Honest to Jesus helps us understand one of the obstacles biblical scholars face in trying to determine the actual words of Jesus:

The original manuscripts of the books of the New Testament have disappeared. The earliest fragment of any part of the New Testament is a scrap from a papyrus codex of the Gospel of John. It has been variously dated from 125 to 160 C.E., roughly one hundred years after the death of Jesus. More substantial pieces of papyrus manuscripts have survived from the end of the second century, but the earliest surviving copies of complete gospels come from the third century. And we have no copies of the complete Christian Bible that can be dated earlier than the fourth century. To put the situation in a nutshell, we can say that, in all probability, only a very few ever read the original of one of Paul's letters or one of the gospels--copies were made almost immediately as the letters and gospels were circulated among congregations; meanwhile, the originals wore out or were lost.

To add to the problem, no two copies of any of the books of the New Testament are exactly alike, since they were all handmade. It has been estimated that there are over seventy thousand meaningful variants in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament itself. That mountain of variants has been reduced to a manageable number by modern critical editions that sort, evaluate, and choose among the myriad of possibilities. The critical editions of the Greek New Testament used by scholars are in fact the creations of textual critics and editors. They are not identical with any surviving ancient manuscript. They are a composite of many variant versions.

Settling on an accurate text of the New Testament is one challenge in trying to figure out the words of Jesus. As we will see in a later post, distinguishing between what Jesus said and what might have been added by Mark (or the other gospels) or the oral tradition that preceded the writing of the gospels is another.