OT OT OT
Yes, it does seem that there is an accurate record of the books that became the New Testament, from texts dated 125-300 AD.
Now, let's look at the numbers presented:
Work...........When Written...Earliest Copy...Time Span....No. of copies
New Testament..A.D. 40-100....A.D. 125........25 yrs.....24,000
First major error source:
If the various books of the NT were first written down in 40-100 AD, this was 10-70 years after Christ died. Is it reasonable to think that the writers could remember, word-for-word, exactly what was said, after that long?
Second major error source
Not only is it unlikely that their memory was perfect, but it is also likely that they had a different ideology, which strongly influenced what they wrote. They were writing to convince, not writing history. And, Christ's community was a very different thing from Paul's Church. Christ was a Jewish reformer; Paul actually founded the new religion. Paul went to non-Jews, adding their culture and ideas to the rapidly growing Church. Christ's opposition was the established Jewish heirarchy. Paul's Church was in opposition to a diverse group of religions from Greece, Rome, Persia, Egypt. Paul was confronting, and in some cases accomodating, ideas Jesus never dealt with. Which had to affect what was written down, 10-70 years after Christ's death.
You could get the impression, from reading what you posted, that an entire copy of the New Testament is accurately dated from 125 AD. That is not so. The only thing dated to 125 AD is the "John Rylands fragment". And it consists of only 5 partial verses of the Gospel of John. But new discoveries are regularly being made, and old discoveries re-dated.
You could also get the impression, from the article you posted, that the King James Version (KJV) relies on those texts from 125-200 AD. That isn't so. The KJV was published in 1611, and the earliest NT texts available then, were copies dating from 1000 AD. Even the New KJV, published in 1982, uses only the same texts used in the original KJV, ignoring all the texts discovered since 1611. Of all the most popular Bibles, the KJV is the one with the most errors.
Saying that "Most scholars I respect recommend the King James over all other versions", shows the author's lack of objectivity. Versions that have come out in the last 50 years have the best claim to historical accuracy. The very oldest texts so far found, are the Dead Sea Scrolls (uncovered beginning in 1947, still haven't been fully published). He also has a website called, "Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups".
Third major source of error
Just as Paul's Church was very different from Christ's band of followers, the Church went through another metamorphosis, when it became the official State Religion of the Roman Empire. Before then, the Church had been communist, pacifist, and democratic. After, it became an instrument of power for the State, and largely abandoned the ideals of the first 3 centuries. This, of course, required big changes in ideology. There were, beginning in the early 4th Century, a series of conferences, in which it was decided which books would be included in the New Testament, and which would be labelled as heresy. Every effort was made, to find and burn every copy of the heresies. So, even if everything in the New Testament is accurate, there is a major selection error here. It was the Emperor Constantine (not yet fully converted to Christianity, and still showing a lot of sympathy for Mithraism and other religions), who presided at the first of these, the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. We don't find books like The Epistle of Barnabas, or The Gospel of Peter, in our Bible, because, centuries after Christ, a Roman Emperor decided to leave them out.
Athanasius was the first person to name in 367 AD the 27 books of the New Testament accepted by most Christian groups today... gbgm-umc.org
interesting sites:
...recently accepted identification of two new papyri of the New Testament found with the Dead Sea Scrolls in Cave 7 has provided two new very early papyri of the New Testament. christianseparatist.org
Old Testament
How do we know the Bible has been kept in tact for over 2,000 years of copying? Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls our earliest Hebrew copy of the Old Testament was the Masoretic text dating around 800 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls date around the time of Jesus copied by the Qumran community, a Jewish sect living around the Dead Sea. We also have the Septuagint which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament dating in the second century B.C. When we compare these texts which have an 800-1000 years gap between them we are amazed that 95% of the texts are identical with only minor variations and a few discrepancies.
New Testament
In considering the New Testament we have tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament in part or in whole dating from the second century A.D. to the late fifteenth century when the printing press was invented. These manuscripts have been found in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, making collusion unlikely. The oldest manuscript, the John Rylands manuscript has been dated to 125 A.D. and was found in Egypt, some distance from where the New Testament was originally composed Asia Minor). Many early Christian papyri were discovered in 1935, which have been dated to 150 A.D., and include the four gospels. The Papyrus Bodmer II, discovered in 1956, has been dated to 200 A.D. and contains 14 chapters and portions of the last seven chapters of the gospel of John. The Chester Beatty biblical papyri, discovered in 1931, has been dated to 200-250 A.D. and contains the Gospels, Acts, Paul's Epistles, and Revelation.
godandscience.org
Probably the earliest NT papyrus, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, but just part of one word:
...leading papyrologists in the world agree that 7Q5 is a fragment of Mark 6:52-53 and that it should be dated somewhere between 50-68 AD
christianseparatist.org
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