The Question of the Greek New Testament

[Aractus]

Biblical scholars tell us  that none of the original manuscripts survive.  If the earliest documents we have were just copies of the original manuscripts that did not survive, biblical scholars would not call them pseudonymous. They would just call them copies.  There's no way to compare these later manuscripts to the originals. In fact, calling these Greek copies "original" raises the question of if there ever were any manuscripts before them. We are left with nothing more than conjecture and a fiat insistence on their authenticity.

Well that's true for any ancient work that isn't etched in stone. Your assertion that we only have conjecture is wrong - we have science. We have scholars who believe they have the original wording for the bulk of the New Testament text. Whether the number of the beast is 666 or 616 is one of the few where the original reading isn't clear. There are 5,800 Greek copies of the NT with an average length of 450 pages, which in total is over 2.6 million pages just in Greek. Even without one single manuscript you would still be able to reconstruct the entire new testament in its original Greek from the quotes that church bishops and priests wrote down and have survived. There are over 2,000 such manuscripts that have bits of the NT quoted in the original Greek. There's at least 10,000 hand written Latin manuscripts and an unknown number in other languages (some estimates say at least 30,000).

Josephus on the other hand, some of his works only exist in translations and not in the original language. Take Antiquities of the Jews as an example - the earliest copy that exists for this first century work is from the 5th or 6th century, it's incomplete, and it's in Latin. The manuscripts in Greek that are used to reconstruct the original text are from the 9th century and later. No single manuscript is complete.

Compare that to say this:



If you don't recognise it, it's Papyrus 75. It is one of the 102 surviving leaves from the codex (there are only 40 or so missing), and as you can see when the gospel according to Luke ends, the gospel according to John begins on the same page. This codex is from the late 2nd century or possibly early 3rd century.

So for Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus the earliest Greek manuscript is from the 9th or 10th century, but with Luke and John the earliest is from the late second or early third century.

Papyrus can't be expected to last for a long time, you know that. Most of the manuscripts from around that time have long-since turned to dust; that's why Biblical papyri are so rare and why most ancient manuscripts we have today, like codex vaticanus, are on parchment and not papyrus.

At the time of Jesus, Israel was under Roman occupation. You indicated in your first post that you do not distinguish between Roman and Greek. Although we use the term "Greco-Roman," they are not the same. Neither Paul nor Jesus nor Peter, James nor John was Greek.  The fact that the Bible ascribes European names to these men and the books they didn't write raises a world of suspicions.

Paul was a Roman citizen, he spoke Greek (and also Aramaic, and maybe Hebrew), he could read Greek and he could write Greek. Luke the physician we don't know an awful lot about, and that's true for a number of the early church figures. Some of them besides Paul could have also been Roman, but what's more important is the fact that some of them could read and write in Greek, and that's the one thing about Luke that we do know.

Furthermore Greek was a much more advanced language than Aramaic or Hebrew. Consequently it would have been immeasurably easier to learn it compared with Aramaic or Hebrew. Even today, most Old Testament Biblical scholars can read and translate Hebrew into English or another language, but hardly any of them would be able to take an English language sentence and rewrite it into Hebrew. Yet just about any decent NT scholar will be able to translate to Greek without any difficulty. Greek was a much easier language to write in, and there's simply no reason to think that literate people living under Roman occupation wouldn't be able to write in Greek.