The Right Stuff, Part 2
Obviously no one had word processors or photocopiers when the New Testament was written. How do we know we’ve got what the New Testament writers actually wrote? How do we know it’s historically accurate?

Experts look at two issues when they’re dealing with ancient writings:

1. How many manuscripts are there? The more you have, the easier it is to weed out copying errors and revisions and identify what the author really wrote.
2. How old are the manuscripts? If the gap between your manuscripts and the original is just a few years, you’re better off than if the original was written 1,000 years before your oldest manuscript.

Here’s some manuscript evidence supporting some of the world’s best-documented ancient books:

Caesar’s Gallic Wars is a critically important source for much of what we know about ancient Rome and Caesar himself. I bet you’ve never heard an argument about whether Gallic Wars is accurate, even though the earliest manuscript is separated from the original by 1,000 years and there are only 10 manuscripts. Historians are confident they have the right stuff.

The world’s second-best documented ancient book is Homer’s The Iliad. It was written about 900 B.C.; the oldest manuscript is dated about 500 B.C., separating it from the original by only 400 years, and we have 643 manuscripts.

That’s a lot. If historians are confident they have the real text of Gallic Wars, they’d stake their lives on The Iliad.

The best-documented ancient book of them all, though, is the New Testament. We have more than 24,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, and the oldest is conservatively dated at A.D. 125 — only 35 years after the original.

That, folks, is what you call being in a class by yourself.

Here Today, Here Tomorrow
Bottom line: You can trust your Bible.

If Dan Brown isn’t satisfied that the New Testament is historically accurate, then he needs to explain why he thinks anything is historically accurate — much less a handful of myths about Jesus that were rejected the day they were written.

That, frankly, is his problem. And he’s got a lot of company. People have attacked the Bible’s authority and accuracy since Day 1; their conspiracy theories and fake gospels are long forgotten, but the Bible is still here. After The Da Vinci Code has been forgotten, the Bible will still be here.