The Early Prominence Of Luke's Gospel And Its Christmas Material

Trent Horn recently put out a video that largely reiterates some points he's made before about sola scriptura. In the process, he repeated the claim that none of the New Testament documents were "prominent" before Irenaeus wrote in the late second century. I want to respond to that claim with an example that's relevant to the current Christmas context. On the other issues brought up in his video, see my earlier responses to Trent here and here.

Go here to watch Trent citing Lee McDonald's remarks about the lack of prominence of the New Testament documents before Irenaeus. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is focus on the gospel of Luke as a counterexample. With Christmas coming up later in the week and the popularity among skeptics of denying that the earliest chapters of Luke's gospel were part of the original document, I want to discuss not only the early prominence of the gospel of Luke, but also the inclusion of our first two chapters and other Christmas material in the gospel. (For more about the Christmas material in Luke outside the earliest chapters, see this post.)

Gospel titles in only a small number of early manuscripts?

Some recent skeptical treatments of the authorship of the gospels that I've come across have raised the objection that only a small number of our gospel manuscripts from the earliest centuries include a gospel title (e.g., "The Gospel According To John"). I want to address some problems with that objection.

A Response To Bart Ehrman's Webinar Against The Virgin Birth

It aired at 2:00 P.M. Eastern time today. It consisted of three segments, two presentations that were a little over an hour each and one session of questions and answers that lasted a little under an hour. I saw all of it other than about the first seven minutes of the first presentation, which I missed due to technical problems. The video isn't available for replay yet, but should be later this week. I plan to watch those first seven minutes at that point, then post any further comments that are warranted. But given the small amount of time involved and the nature of the webinar as a whole, I doubt that I missed much in those first several minutes.

When I provide documentation of something said during the webinar, I'll refer to the section involved and the approximate minute within that section. I don't have a video to play back at this point to get more precise numbers. So, "(second presentation, 21:00)" refers to something at roughly 21 minutes into the second presentation, "(questions and answers, 3:00)" refers to something about 3 minutes into the segment with questions and answers, etc.

Joe Rogan's biblical illiteracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fownDeTsw0Y

How Do The Dead Sea Scroll Forgeries Impact Christianity?

Trusting the Bible

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a21fbb649fc2b2179ec1ac4/t/5e21b6e9599a244d6bc5820f/1579267817646/WTBC+-+SS+Study+Handouts+1.pdf

Why didn't God preserve the originals?

@RandalRauserQuestion for inerrantists: If God would assure that his revealed text would be without error, why wouldn't he ensure either that subsequent copies of that texts would be without error and/or that the original copies (autographa) of the texts would be preserved through all time?

Oh Gosh. Progressive theologian reheating Ehrman's stale objection to inerrancy. Pity the fried maggots when Rauser pops his rotten meat into the microwave. 

1. The question is ironic because, even though Rauser thinks the Bible teaches moral and factual falsehoods, he pretends to believe in Biblical inerrancy. He has an "appropriation" model of inspiration which drives a wedge between God's intentions and the intentions of the Bible writers. He treats the books of the Bible as a collection of error-ridden writings, but the collection is "inspired" and "inerrant" because it somehow serves God's overarching purpose. So Rauser's objection to inerrancy, which he camouflages as a question, contradicts his "cross my fingers behind my back" affirmation of inerrancy. 

2. It's a speculative question, so only speculative answers are available. A plausible reason God didn't preserve the originals is because they'd become trophies in the cult of relicts. Religious wars would be fought to keep or capture the originals. They'd be venerated with superstitious awe as talismans.

3. As for why inerrancy doesn't extend to copies, God made a kind of world where there's an interplay between natural and supernatural factors, miracle and providence. On the one hand, everything that happens is not a continuous series of miracles. On the other hand, everything that happens is not closed continuum. The physical world operates much like a machine. But natural processes can be circumvented by spiritual agency. 

If, on the one hand, if every event was a miracle, life would have no stability or predictability. Life would have no continuity. Human experience would be radically disjointed. There'd be no presumption that the same antecedent conditions yield the same outcome. Any kind of future could fork off from the same past–at any time, all the time. That would be literally nightmarish. Scenes abruptly and constantly changing. 

On the other hand, we're not trapped in a clockwork universe where prayer can't reach. The machinery has a manual override. Spiritual agents or agents with spiritual power can bypass physical cause and effect. God struck a balance between a closed system and chaos. 

4. Regarding the textual transmission of the Bible, God hasn't done more than is necessary. Inerrant copies are inessential to preserve the message. For one thing, biblical teaching is redundant. It doesn't teeter on a particular reading of a particular verse. 

In addition, most scribal errors are trivial, recognizable, and correctible. If natural ability will suffice, then supernatural empowerment is unnecessary. 

5. In theory, God could use direct, private revelation for every individual. But human beings are social creatures by divine design. The Christian faith has a corporate life in the fellowship of the church. Having a public revelation as a common a frame of reference unites Christians. Yes, there's a sense in which the Bible can be theologically divisive, but even then we disagree about the same thing. We share a common struggle. We debate each other. We're not cubicle people.

Did Matthew miscount?

There's often thought to be a simply computational error in Matthew's genealogy (Mt 1:17). It looks like Matthew miscounted the number of generations in v17. This is discussed in standard commentaries, which rehearse different explanations. 

I don't have a new, direct explanation to offer. I'd just say that I take a different approach to the issue. I take a step back.

1. We're so conversant with the Bible that it can gives us a false sense of familiarity. But we're not 1C Palestinian Jews, and Matthew wasn't written to us. There's an in-house quality to some of his reasoning which may simply be lost on a modern reader. We are far removed in time and space from the cultural code he shared with his target audience. Imagine my dipping into the rabbinic discussions in the Talmud. It's a strange world. 

We need to have realistic expectations. What's impressive is how much of the Bible we understand. But we need to have a sense of humility, and not act like it should all be transparent to a modern reader. There's no presumption that everything in Scripture ought to make sense to a modern reader, and if it doesn't make sense to us, it must be wrong. I expect to find puzzling passages in Scripture. 

2. The initial distribution of Matthew's Gospel must have been extremely limited. There were no Christian publishing houses back then. It's not like the first run was 1000 copies. It had to be hand-copied by private scribes. 

Presumably the first readers of Matthew's Gospel were members of his social circle. He knew them and they knew him. If his genealogy committed such a conspicuous blunder in elementary arithmetic, surely one or more of his readers could have taken him aside and said, "It just doesn't add up. That's an embarrassing mistake. You need to fix it!"

And with so few copies in circulation, it wouldn't be hard at that stage of the distribution process to edit. So why was the mistake allowed to remain and be recopied? If it's that's noticeable to a modern reader, surely it was just as noticeable to the first readers. 

Perhaps it wasn't corrected because the first readers didn't perceive it to be in error. It made sense to them because they understood the code. 

Was there a 2C recension of the NT?

Charles Hill (“‘In These Very Words’:  Methods and Standards of Literary Borrowing in the Second Century,” pp. 261-81) provides a valuable study showing that pagan and Christian authors followed a different set of conventions in citing texts than used by copyists of texts.  This is a point I’ve tried to make for a number of years, and I’m pleased now to see this well-supported presentation of it.  The major point is that (contra some claims), we can’t play off the loose citations of NT writings in early Christian authors against the evidence of our early manuscripts to make a case that the NT writings were in a chaotic state until some supposed “recension” in the late second century that produced all our extant manuscripts.  In fact, the earliest manuscripts remain our best evidence for the text of NT writings.

https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/the-early-text-of-the-new-testament-the-latest-scholarship/

Canon and copies

If one agrees, at least in principle, with David Trobisch’s and Porter’s views of the Pauline letter collection (they agree in some ways and disagree in other ways), Paul himself was involved in the collecting and gathering of his letters as a letter collection and that he may possibly have written multiple copies of his letters. Porter posits that Paul may have made a copy for the individual or group he addresses his letters to, and then made a copy (or copies?) for himself. I think there is a high likelihood—as well as opportunity, especially given the amount of time he spent in prison—that Paul (and/or his amanuensis) did just that. I think that when Paul tells Timothy to send the parchments (2 Tim 4:13), he’s referring to his own letter collection (up to that point, of course). 

https://domainthirtythree.com/2019/04/22/on-method-and-purpose-in-new-testament-textual-criticism/

Do all our MSS go back to a single error-ridden copy?

This is germane to Bart Ehrman's wildly unrealistic hypothetical (which he never documents, that I'm aware of) that all our extant Greek MSS might go back to a single error-ridden copy. 

Trobisch attempts to circumvent the major crux of the issue by positing that seeking the original text is not about the individual books or their MSS so much as about the canonical text. As he states, "The history of the NT is the history of an edition, a book that has been published and edited by a specific group of editors, at a specific place, and at a specific time." He places this edition in the late 2C. As a result, one is seeking not the original text, but rather the original canonical edition, from which the later MSS can be traced as derivative. As interesting as canonical development may be, this too is not a solution to the question of the original text, as it begs the question of the prehistory of any book before it was 'canonized' and instead concentrates on the ordering and features of MSS that indicate their later editing, Stanley Porter, How We Got the New Testament: Text, Transmission, Translation (Baker 2013), 28. 

The "Canonical" text

There's a reactionary movement afoot in some Reformed circles to reject the mainstream NT textual criticism and modern translations like the ESV in favor of the Textus Receptus (hereafter TR) and the KJV. Recently there was a Text and Canon Conference which promoted that position. I generally avoid live presentations. That's an inefficient way to process and reference information. I have read a few articles by Jeff Riddle, but I'm going to use two posts by Taylor DeSoto as representative samples of the rationale for this position:

https://youngtextlessreformed.com/2019/10/28/memoirs-of-an-esv-onlyist-reflecting-on-the-text-and-canon-conference/

https://youngtextlessreformed.com/2019/10/29/revisiting-the-fatal-flaw-argument-against-the-traditional-text/

1. At one level, the significance of this issue is easily overblown. The text of the NT has enormous multiple-attestation. Even if you opt for the Byzantine text, there's not much that can go wrong. 

2. At another level, it is a big issue. What's at stake is convincing Christians to believe their faith hinges on a particular text tradition like the Byzantine or the TR. That's the "canonical" text. This leaves them poised for a gratuitous crisis of faith if they develop doubts about the TR. In this case, their faith in the Bible becomes inseparable from faith in the TR and the KJV. That's apostasy waiting to happen. DeSoto is going down exactly the same road as Bart Ehrman. The same all-or-nothing mentality. The same false dichotomies. 

3. Because we have so many copies of the Greek NT, copies with many, mostly trivial variants, it's important although not strictly necessary to produce a critical edition of the NT. That's not unique to proponents of the eclectic text. Astute proponents of the Byzantine text also appreciate the need to produce a critical edition of the NT, using internal and external textual criteria. For instance: http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v06/Robinson2001.html

4. I myself subscribe to mainstream textual criticism and the eclectic text approach. I don't have a firm opinion about CBGM. Certainly we should take advantage of computers to digitize our MSS, then compare them. Stanley Porter is a critic of CBGM. 

I'd add that it isn't necessary to choose between CBGM and traditional textual criticism. You can compare the results of both, and the reasoning behind their choices. Metzger's textual commentary explains how traditional text critics made their choices. And there will be a textual commentary for the CBGM edition when that project is completed. 

5. Opting for the Byzantine tradition would be more defensible than opting for the T.R. That's not my own position,  but there's a respectable argument for that alternative. 

6. From what I can tell, all the Reformed proponents of the TR and the KJV are dabblers and dilettantes. They have no formal expertise in textual criticism. In fairness, they might say the same thing about me. But that proves my point. I admit that I'm an amateur when it comes to OT/NT criticism. And I don't object to amateurs having opinions about range of specialized issues. I don't think we should abode unconditional confidence in the judgment of experts. 

But it's because I'm an amateur that I don't need to get my information from another amateur. If I want an amateur opinion about textual criticism, I can just consult my own opinion! 

By the same token, I don't get my information about biology and physics from amateurs. Rather, I study what the professionals have to say. I might still dissent on philosophical or theological grounds. Or I might dissent if I think their discipline has become politicized, which skews their assessment.   

This also goes beyond formal training. Some scholars like Bruce Metzger, Peter Williams, and Emanuel Tov have an exceptional skill set and natural aptitude that many scholars lack. 

Reformed proponents of the TR might also say that since mainstream NT criticism is so compromised, it's a good thing that they lack formal training in that discipline. But that begs the question. 

7. A basic problem with canonizing the KJV is that most Christians aren't English-speakers, most Christians were never English-speakers, and within the foreseeable future, most Christians won't be English-speakers. So it's absurdly ethnocentric. 

8. Another problem is that we have a better understanding of Greek and Hebrew than the KJV translators. We have a wider sampling of ancient Hebrew than they had. And we have a wider sampling of ancient Greek than they had. For instance, Greek papyri give us access to non-literary Greek. That gives us access to Greek slang or Greek words with slang meanings. In addition, computers enable us to make exhaustive comparisons in vocabulary and grammatical constructions.  

9. It's true that earlier MSS aren't necessarily better than later MSS. Obviously an 8C MS isn't automatically better than a 9C MS. But when we're talking about the NT papyri, I do think there's a presumption that earlier is better because they are so chronologically close to the Urtext.  

10. Reformed TR proponents operate with an arbitrary notion of divine providence regarding the preservation of the text. They act like special providence singles out the TR rather than the Byzantine text or the NT papyri or the DDS or Codex Vaticanus. But why would providence only extend to the preservation of the text in the TR? 

Likewise, the reason OT textual critics sometimes prefer the LXX to the MT is because the LXX translators had an earlier text than the Massoretes. So they had a text that might well preserve the original reading in some cases where the MT lost it.  

11. I'm no expert (something I share in common with Reformed TR proponents), but it seems to be that appeal to the Majority text is a statistical fallacy. If more MSS were produced by a particular locality, and more of those survive, that just means our extant MSS oversample a local textual tradition. Their numerical preponderance in itself creates no presumption that it's more representative. Rather, that may simply be a geographical and historical accident. So the larger sample is an arbitrary sample. The fact that we have a larger sample of that textual tradition is random in the sense that it's a coincidence of geography and the ravages of time. The Majority text may well be unrepresentative because a local textual tradition is overrepresented. 

12. It's often said that despite all the textual variants, the true reading is contained somewhere in our "5000" extant Greek MSS. But that bare statement can be misleading. This isn't like finding a needle in a haystack. It's not like our MSS are riddled with indetectable mistakes. 

i) Words are parts of sentences. If a scribe uses the wrong word, that usually makes the sentence nonsense. And it's easy to spot which word is messing up the sentence. Moreover, it's usually easy to figure out what the right word was, even if you only have that MS to go by.

We do this all the time. Email and text messages frequently contained recognizable typos, but we can usually figure out the intended word. 

ii) But suppose we can't figure out what the original word was. So we consult other MS. The right word isn't indetectable. If another MSS has the same sentence, but with a different word, and the sentence makes sense, then that's probably the authentic reading. 

ii) Suppose I have two independent editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both editions contain typos. But they contain different typos. Suppose one edition contains a sentence with a typo, and I can't figure out the original word. So I consult the other edition, where the parallel sentence makes sense. So that probably preserves the original word. 

13. Opponents of the eclectic text allege that editors are "creating" the text. But that's deceptive. It doesn't mean they are inventing sentences. It just means they use more than one witness to the text. Since we know for a fact that scribes introduces changes into the text (usually inadvertently), we can't rely on a single MS as it stands. It's necessary to make corrections. And we do that by reference to other MSS. 

14. In general, biblical teaching is redundant. It doesn't hinge on one particular passage. Major doctrines are multiply-attested. The life of Christ is multiple-attested (four Gospels). 

15. The way Reformed TR advocates cling to the Long Ending of Mark is hypocritical. If they truly believe that's the original ending, then they ought to belong to charismatic, snake-handling churches. 

16. What does God require of us? To be faithful to the best text we have at our disposal. Surely he doesn't require us to be faithful to an unattainable word-perfect text. Even in the 1C, Christians copied originals. The originals were inerrant but the copies were not. 

New frontiers in textual criticism

There's a new strategy in NT textual criticism that's been gaining ground: the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). I doubt it's possible to fully grasp CBGM unless you practice it. Having read some expositions/explanations, here are my amateur impressions:

i) On the one hand it takes greater advantage of computer technology. Digitizing all our Greek NT MSS. And thanks to Dan Wallace going around the world photographing Gk MSS, we have more than ever.

Computers make it possible to do exhaustive comparison and contrast. 

ii) CBGM makes the claim that it can recover the readings of lost MSS. Tantalizing if true. 

iii) And that computer analysis has a way of getting behind MSS to expose genealogical relationships. Useful if true.

iv) On the other hand, computers can't think. You only have to use autocorrect to see that computers have no understanding!

So computers can't replace human judgment, human intelligence. As such, I still put a lot of stock in the intuitive judgment of very talented textual critics like the late Bruce Metzger. 

It's like gifted, experienced physicians who can just tell what's wrong with a patient, without doing any tests. 

Or it's like the difference between computer chess and human  chess players. These employ fundamentally different strategies,. I once read the comparison that humans have an analogue approach. 

I had some lingering questions about CBGM, so I wrote a leading exponent, who was kind enough to respond. Here's the exchange: 

You Christians changed the Bible!

https://glanier.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/a-clash-of-monotheisms-you-christians-changed-the-bible/

Do all our extant NT MSS go back to a single mid-2C exemplar?

I recently ran across this claim on Facebook:

It's pretty much accepted among mainstream scholarship that everything we have is derived from a single edition compiled around 150AD. Possibly by a single editor. I doubt that Ehrman contradicts that. Btw this scholarship is by David Trobisch. 

I own two of his monographs on the topic. But I decided to run the claim by Larry Hurtado. Here's how our exchange went:

I recall you saying that David Trobisch's theory about the formation of the NT canon hadn't caught on in mainstream scholarship because ancient NT MSS don't exhibit the uniformity in the order of books that he attributes to them. Is that correct?

Not entirely.  There are several reasons.  NT writings initially circulated physically as individual works. Even after the four gospels were considered by many a closed circle, they still were copied as individual codices.  No one thought of a NT in the second century except perhaps Marcion.

But, yes, we see different orders to NT writings once they began to be put together.  E.g., P45 has the gospels Matt, John, Luke, Mark.

Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism

https://www.amazon.com/Myths-Mistakes-Testament-Textual-Criticism/dp/0830852573

Did Matthew miscount?

Here's one explanation for an alleged numerical discrepancy in Matthew's genealogy:

https://defendinginerrancy.com/bible-solutions/Matthew_1.17.php

However, I'd like to discuss the issue from a different angle. Suppose someone says the obvious explanation is that Matthew made a computational error, and inerrantists are guilty of special pleading when they flail about for face-saving explanations. Let's play along with that alternative for argument's sake and consider how plausible it is.

i) Even from a naturalistic perspective, it's unlikely that Matthew miscounted. This isn't some off-the-cuff computation. Matthew's numerology is carefully worked out. So it would be surprising if Matthew miscounted. This isn't something he dashed off in haste.

ii) But suppose, for argument's sake, he did commit a computational blunder. Let's take it to the next level. What should we expect in that event?

Even if Matthew didn't catch his oversight, some of the initial readers of the first run of Matthew's Gospel would notice the error. We'd expect word to get back to Matthew regarding his embarrassing blunder. And it would make sense for Matthew to issue a corrected edition–if for no other reason than to spare himself the public embarrassment. It's not like the first run of his Gospel had a wide circulation. It had to be informally copied. It's not like modern publishing where there are, say, 5,000-10,000 initial printings, and if that runs out, the publisher issues another batch of printings.

No, I believe the process would be more like Matthew dictates his Gospel to a scribe, then Christians make private copies. The initial distribution is tiny. 

At most, this would result in two different manuscript traditions, where there were copies of the erroneous ur-text along with copies of the corrected edition. But on that scenario, I think it more likely that only a few copies of the erroneous ur-text would be made, so those are less likely to survive. What would survive is the manuscript tradition preserving the corrected edition, which wouldn't contain the apparent numerical blunder.

But that's not what we have. So I think it's implausible to impute a computational error to Matthew. If that happened, I'd expect there to be a different manuscript record. 

iii) Notice that I'm not proposing a solution to the crux. I'm doing something different. I'm pointing out that on closer scrutiny, the naturalistic explanation is implausible. We don't need to know what the right explanation is to eliminate the naturalistic explanation. 

Codex and canon

i) On occasion I've discussed how ancient Greek MSS are a neglected evidence for the NT canon. Here's some documentation in that regard:

https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2019/05/13/text-collections-and-an-emergent-nt-canon/

http://jbtc.org/v23/TC-2018-Dormandy.pdf

ii) Catholic apologists try to dilute this evidence by pointing out that a few MSS contain non-canonical books. But Dormandy explains how that's a misleading comparison. To begin with, it's a rare phenomenon. In addition, the noncanonical books are appended at the end, which differentiates them from the canonical books.

iii) Finally, the basic job of a scribe is to copy preexisting material. So these MSS provide evidence that books of the NT were already circulating in collections. It wasn't the scribe who combined these writings; rather, he copied multiple works onto the same MS because they were already grouped that way in the exemplar he transcribed. 

COMMON MUSLIM MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF CHRISTIANITY

Having looked at ways Christians sometimes misunderstand Islam, I shifted to talking about the three major misunderstandings that many Muslims have about Christians, and I think these are deeper and more significant.

I began by tackling the fact that many Muslims tend assume that all Westerners are Christian. That means Muslims often look at the things that are wrong in the West (e.g. sexual immorality, violence etc.) and think that those things are ‘Christian.’ So we disentangled that a little bit. At the same time, many Muslims fail to appreciate that for Christians, conversion is apersonal decision. You are not a Christian because you were born in a Christian country, or born to Christian parents; rather you have to have a personal point of deciding to follow Christ to be a Christian. So that gave me the opportunity to share what commitment to Christ looks like.

The second Muslim misunderstanding of Christianity is that they misunderstand the Bible. They frequently think that it has been corrupted and changed. However, I showed the Muslims in Edinburgh that that idea is not actually in the Qur’an (which strongly affirms the Bible in many verses)—rather  it is an idea that developed about 200 years later in Islam, arising  during the debates between Muslims and Christians in the 2nd century of Islam. In fact, if Muslims took their own Qur’an seriously, it would challenges them to take the Bible seriously. I also talked the audience through a lot of the recent critical work on the early manuscripts of the Qur’an, which reveal the many textual variants and scribal changes in the early text. Many Muslims assume they have a “perfect text” with no difficult textual issues—I gently deconstructed that assumption.

And third and finally, I spoke about how Muslims often misunderstand Jesus. Many Muslims think that Christians have taken a mere man and elevated him to a position of deity. I said that that actually fails to understand the words of Jesus himself: the reason that Christians believe what we do about Jesus because of his own words and actions. Many of Jesus’s words would have been blasphemous if he wasn’t God (such as forgiving sin, for example). All of Jesus’s claims about himself culminate in Jesus’s trial before Caiaphas the High Priest, where Jesus was outrightly accused of blasphemy and asked, “Are you the Son of God?” Rather than say, “no”, Jesus quoted Daniel chapter 7, about the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory, which is an incredible passage which claims divinity. When Caiaphas heard this, he tore his robe, and cried, “Blasphemy!” and sentenced Jesus to death. So, Jesus’s whole life and ministry was about this claim that he is more than a man, and of course the authorities knew what he was claiming and crucified him for it. Now if Jesus has stayed dead that would have been that, but he rose from the dead three days later, the divine vindication of the claims Jesus had made.

A LIVELY Q&A

It was an incredible privilege to be standing in front of an almost entirely Muslim audience, unpacking the scriptures and sharing about Jesus. After the talk, we launched straight into the Q&A and it was very friendly, but pretty lively! Many of the Muslim audience had never heard any of this stuff, more than one of them saying they’d never heard a Christian explain and defend what Christians believed.

Perhaps the topic that drew the most the questions were the critical issues on the Qur’an. Muslims are fond of pointing to textual variants in biblical manuscripts, but I simply pointed out that all ancient texts have variants in their manuscripts, including the Qur’an (I have 3,000 or more on my computer, easily accessible and browsable through the Qur’an Gateway software package). The question is not “does a text have variants?” but “has the scholarship been done to ensure we can trust the text we have today?” Christians have always been open and honest about our manuscripts and indeed it is Christians who have built the best tools for studying biblical manuscripts. By contrast, Muslims have tended to ignore or hide the issues in early Qur’an manuscripts, which is why we are only finally now seeing good computer databases of early Qur’an manuscript variants made available. When I put some of these textual variants up on PowerPoint slides in Edinburgh, there were at times almost audible gasps from the audience who had never seen these kind of problems in their earliest manuscripts.

https://www.solas-cpc.org/an-evening-with-edinburgh-university-islamic-society/

The witness of the manuscripts

There are different lines of evidence for the canon. External evidence includes Jewish testimony, the church fathers, the Muratorian canon. 

There's extensive internal evidence in terms of the intertextuality of the Bible. 

Also the fact that some books of the Bible naturally comprise literary units (e.g. Pentateuch, Psalter, Luke-Acts, Pauline Epistles, John/1-3 John).

However, I'd like to highlight a neglected line of evidence. That's the very fact that we have editions of Scripture, and we can trace that process back in time. The manuscripts are evidence.

For instance, Christian scribes don't just copy individual NT books, but groups of books, like the Gospels, or the Gospels and Acts, Pauline Epistles, or Pauline epistles plus Hebrews, or general epistles. Christian scribes transmit anthologies of NT documents. Take some of the Chester Beaty papyri. 

And that's interesting because, at the time, Christian scribes were operating independently of each other. There was no central agency coordinating their activities. So that's a historical, but decentralized witness to the NT canon. Not simply that Christian scribes copied NT books, but copied collections of NT books in larger and smaller units. 

Although the external evidence is a kind of tradition, it's not an official exercise of "the Church", but many individuals who independently bear witness to the canon.