![]() ![]() 88-89)įor more reflections on this, See Greg Bahnsen’s fine essay on “ The Inerrancy of the Autographa. Laird Harris, Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, rev. But even the approximate has tremendous value-if it has had a true standard behind it. These approximate measures derive their value from their being dependent on more accurate gauges. Yet we blithely use tape measures, rulers, scales, and similar measuring devices. Many of us perhaps never realized it existed. None of us has ever seen the platinum bar. As a matter of fact, this once happened to Britain’s standard yard! What difference would this make to us? Very little. Now, suppose that we should read in the newspapers that a clever criminal had run off with the platinum bar and melted it down for the precious metal. The master gauges themselves are checked against the standard United States yard marked on a platinum bar preserved in Washington. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek. Not satisfied, we send the pencil to Washington, where master gauges indicate a length of 6.5774 inches. Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Careful measurement with a steel scale under laboratory conditions reveals it to be 6.577 inches. Checking it with an engineer’s scale, we find it to be slightly more than 6.58 inches. A more carefully made office ruler indicates 6 9/16 inches. With a tape measure we measure it at 6 ½ inches. Suppose we wish to measure the length of a certain pencil. Laird Harris once offered an illustration to show that “the doctrine of verbal inspiration is worthwhile even though the originals have perished”: 5,700 (counting only Greek manuscripts) (+ more than 10,000 in Latin, + more than a million quotations from the church fathers, etc. Here’s a chart adapted from something Dr. The very best classical author in terms of extant copies is Homer: manuscripts of Homer number less than 2,400, compared to the NT manuscripts that are approximately ten times that amount. For the NT, we are waiting mere decades for surviving copies. Not only this, but the extant manuscripts of the average classical author are no earlier than 500 years after the time he wrote. ![]() We have more than 1,000 times the manuscript data for the NT than we do for the average Greco-Roman author. The average classical author’s literary remains number no more than twenty copies. On this latter point, Dan Wallace once explained to me that: In addition to the IMRaD format, original manuscripts submitted for publication should meet specific standards and rules of each journal. ![]() No other document of antiquity even comes close. Manuscript Preparation Guidelines for Original Articles General: Manuscripts should be written in Microsoft Word, using size 12 Arial font. Although the exact count is always changing, currently we possess more than 5,500 manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek alone. Providentially, when it comes to the quantity of manuscripts, the New Testament is in a class all its own. Preserving the original text across multiple manuscripts, however, could only happen if there were enough of these manuscripts to give us assurance that the original text was preserved (somewhere) in them. ![]()
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