This is the oldest fragment of the Gospel of John chapt. 18. Jesus, our Lord before Pilot.
Glory be His name!
The latest Greek NT manuscript fragment piece (of Mark's Gospel) was discovered wrapped in an Egyptian mummy burial mask and can be dated back to the 80's (50 years after Christ).
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The argument for Jesus' divinity and the skeptics contention that His divinity only came afterwards in time, is ridiculous simply because the concept of Messiah was of the essence of God. John's Gospel demonstrates this when the Jews were wanting to stone The Lord for as they put it, "Trying to make yourself to be God". So, there's no question that the understanding of Christ as "Kurios" was not just divine but also, that of God to merit worship. Also, NEVER throughout the whole NT does Jesus REFUSE others worshiping Him.
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Dan Wallace pretty much did snag Ehrman on that point when he can't argue for what the NT says by looking at what he hasn't proven yet. He can claim that there's something that might look diff. in earlier texts by saying "we can't know what is in the earlier texts" but he's just being subjective. Subjective scholars don't make good scholars. Besides, Wallace contends that this is part of a duel said of Ehrman where he admits to others that 'what we have is pretty much what was written earlier (in the original writings), yet on his books, he exclaims, "We don't know what the originals look like"!
So far, from what can be suspected about this man first, calling himself a "former" Christian (which is unbiblical) and then progressively becoming more and more a Christ hater - one can determine that he's headed deeper and deeper into darkness w/in his personal life. B/c you cannot attack the Word of Truth and think it's "just business"... you're dealing with The Word of God! Perhaps the Spirit of God is dealing w/ him and this man does not want to be judged by his person for doing what he's doing - knowing fully well to the world, that this man is getting paid HUGE money by the fleecing of God's flock. W/out a doubt, one of the biggest abominations The Lord Himself mentioned when He walked the earth was condemning those who would "offend any of those little ones from believing" in The Lord. Oh man... without a doubt, Ehrman is headed for some serious wrath. You can only watch in fear and trembling for this man b/c the curse of God is heavy upon him. Lord have mercy.
-For Ehrman to say, "We don't have the originals" is to contend that the will of God was for us to have the originals. So when the prophesy was being spread by word of mouth (as we see in Judaism), are we to say that we NEED to hear the original audio from the first prophet's mouth who spoke those words?? NO! This is not how God intended for us to get His Word down to us. God has used the copying method to bring to us only a snippet of His revelation to us. As it's written, "The hidden things are of God and the revealed things are for us and our children so that we can what's written w/in the law", and down to the following generations.
What we know NOW, we know that despite approximately 400k variants w/in the collection of scripture that only 1% of that troubles the understanding of the message w/in Christianity in our modern day AND of that 1%, there is NOTHING that contradicts any of our important doctrines w/in the faith. If that's not scrutiny, I don't know what it is.
We might have a gap of perhaps 800 years (from Christ's days to the first full codex copies of the NT) and based on the variants that we have regarding what we do have, we can expect that there will be even far less meaningful/viable variants w/ anything w/in those 800 years span between the original writers and our complete manuscripts.
There is more volume and information to take from the NT than from any other manuscripts found in ancient antiquity. So if we can't know or have faith w/in the NT, we truly can't rely on any other information coming from Greek, Latin or Roman history. And yet we have continued to build our civilization and societies on the mathematics, philosophy, the legal and societal ethics found w/in ancient antiquity, etc.
If we can't know what the NT authors said then we truly can't know what anyone has said or thought in ancient history b/c we have over 1000 times more detail and information on the NT than for anything in ancient antiquity. ********
*** This is what brought us out of the dark ages b/c we could look back and what all those authors wrote about their civilizations, and we learned from them, etc. And we for SURE didn't have any original writings there either!
To reject writings found from ancient antiquity b/c they're not originals is to reject everything we know now b/c of them, and head back into the dark ages. (Dr. Dan Wallace)
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William Lane Craig:
Greek NT words: 138k greek words in the NT
about 1400 are uncertain today. 99% are established to be certain today. of the 1% that is uncertain none affect any of the doctrines w/in Christianity.
Examples of the uncertainty:
1- "We write this so that YOUR joy will be made full" / "We write this so that OUR joy will be made full".
2- 1 Thessalonians 2:7: "We became gentle among you.." vs.
"We became little children among you... ".
*Many are either nonsense variants or "movable Nue" variants (as in English 'A and An' w/in a grammatical sentence, etc.).
*note: To have approx. 40k variants w/in 30k manuscripts is VERY FAVORABLE**
**Note: The way the study of manuscripts are understood, it is more than favorable to have the abundant number of manuscripts of ANY ancient documents today**.
TODAY we have 5,752 NT manuscripts ****
Nothing can be compared to that in order to sort out HISTORY.
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*** ALSO, We have over a million quotations and commentaries of Church fathers of the NT which are themselves a source to what they've read and understood to be written of the Word of God and understanding of doctrine, early church history, etc.
**No Christian doctrines are affected by the differences (variants): Deity of Christ; Virgin birth; Resurrection of Christ, etc., etc.
P52 discovered in 1934: (Housed in England)
(palm size) Written on both sides. Believed to be written on a codex (book)
John 18:31-33 one each side John 18:37-38
** Finding this manuscript basically proved the dating of John's gospel wasn't any earlier than AD160 to AD170 as once thought.
This discovery brought John's Gospel back to the 1rst century.
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Birth of Christ:
Using these methods, most scholars assume a date of birth between 6 and 4 BC, that Jesus' preaching began around AD 27-29 and lasted one to three years. They calculate the death of Jesus as having taken place between AD 30 and 36.
-Codex Sinaticus AD350
-Codex Vaticanus AD325-350
-Chester Beatty papyrus (fragmants): AD180-200
-Bodmer Papyrus AD180-200
-Rylands Papyrus P52: AD125-130 *(note: if John wrote before AD70 then the diff. btwn his original and this fragment is about 60 years, If he wrote about 80-85 AD then the span is only about 50 years or less.)
-Magdalen Papyri Pre AD70
-7Q5: 50BC-AD50 (fragment of Mark) Part of the dead sea scroll.
