Daniel B. Wallace Destroys Bart Erhman

Daniel B. Wallace, textual criticism scholar, said "The church fathers wrote commentaries on the New Testament, and they did not have the gift of brevity. Today, approximately 1 million quotations of the church fathers have been recorded. The patristic quotations going back to the second century and in some cases the first century would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament" (wrote Bart Erhman and Bruce M. Metzger).

"Far more important than the number is the date of the manuscripts. How many manuscripts do we have in the first century after the completion of the New Testament? How many in the second and the third? We have at least 1 manuscipt fragment from the 1st century, 18 manuscripts from the 2nd century, all fragmentary, 64 from the 3rd, and 48 from the 4th. That's a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New Testament."

These numbers keep improving as new manuscripts are being found. No other document in antiquity comes even close in terms of numbers or nearness to their events. "The average classical Greek writer has less than 20 copies of his work still in existence, and they would always come more than three centuries later. Stack them all up together and they are about 4 feet high."

"Differences in the text are less than 1% meaningful and viable (good chance of being authentic)."

Bart Erhman wrote, "Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament" (Misquoting Jesus).

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"The skeptics repeatedly note that the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts come from at least 800 years after the completion of the NT. What they don't tell you is these later manuscripts only add 2% of material to the text. They only picks up 2% more for the next 14 centuries. Imagine a stockbroker advising you to invest in a stock that grows only 2% every millennium and a half."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg-dJ...feature=g-hist