Justified True Belief

#1 The New Testament is the telephone game. It got copied so much we cannot recover the original. + The NT is not one chain of copies, it is a massive web: roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus 10,000+ Latin manuscripts, plus thousands more in other ancient languages. With witnesses spread across geography and time, textual criticism can compare families of manuscripts and often identify where and when scribal changes entered.

#2 There are 400,000 variants, so we do not know what the New Testament really says. + The variant count sounds huge because the manuscript count is huge, and most variants are minor (spelling, word order, obvious copying slips). Importantly, no major Christian doctrine depends on a single disputed text, because the core claims are taught across multiple, independent passages.

#3 We do not have the originals, so we have no access to what the originals said. + We almost never have the originals for ancient works, so historians reconstruct from copies using standard methods. For the NT we also have early papyri (often dated to the 100s and 200s), so the gap is not centuries of darkness with no evidence.

#4 The Bible today is a translation of a translation of a translation. + Modern translations are produced from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, not from English Bibles passed down through multiple layers. When translators face significant textual questions, reputable versions usually footnote them so readers can see what is disputed and why.

#5 Nicaea voted on which books belong in the Bible. + Nicaea (AD 325) was primarily about Christology (the Arian controversy) and produced the Nicene Creed, not an official canon list. Canon lists and discussions are found elsewhere, for example Athanasius’ list in AD 367, and later regional synods like Hippo 393 and Carthage 397/419, reflecting a recognition process already underway.

#6 Constantine invented Christianity and rewrote the Bible to fit his politics. + Christian beliefs and texts existed long before Constantine, including Paul’s letters from the AD 50s, and churches across the Mediterranean were already copying and circulating texts. One emperor could not rewrite a manuscript tradition that was already geographically distributed, and we can still compare textual families that predate Constantine.

#7 The Gospels were written centuries later by the Church, not by eyewitnesses or close eyewitness sources. + The Gospels are typically dated within the first century, not centuries later, and there are strong reasons to see them as grounded in eyewitness testimony and early sources. For example, many argue Luke-Acts reads like pre-AD 70 history (Acts ends with Paul alive and never mentions the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as a past event), and the Gospels contain numerous undesigned coincidences, incidental details in one account that unintentionally explain details in another, which is a classic mark of independent eyewitness-based reporting rather than late legendary fabrication.

#8 The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the Old Testament was massively changed. + The Dead Sea Scrolls include biblical manuscripts more than 1,000 years older than many previously known complete Hebrew copies, and they show substantial continuity with the later Masoretic Text. A concrete example is the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ), which is very close to later Isaiah manuscripts, with many differences being spelling and minor wording rather than a different religion.

#9 Modern translations delete verses to change doctrine. + Modern translations usually bracket or footnote these passages because earlier and stronger manuscript evidence often lacks them. Also, even in these well-known cases (Mark 16:9–20, John 7:53–8:11, 1 John 5:7), no major Christian doctrine rises or falls on the disputed wording, since those doctrines are taught across multiple undisputed texts.

#10 Christianity is circular: the Bible is true because it says so. + The core Christian claim is not “the Bible is true because it says so,” but that Christianity is supported by public historical claims, especially the resurrection, argued as an inference to the best explanation from early sources, multiple attestation, and the rise of the church in the face of costs. If the resurrection is best explained as a real event, then Jesus’ authority and teaching gain credibility, and that gives non-circular warrant for taking the Bible’s message seriously rather than treating it as a self-referential claim.