Mi nombre es Mattew. Soy orador y autor del Ministerio Josh McDowell. Después de ver este video, no dudes en dejar un comentario aquí o a través de mis canales sociales, que se enumeran a continuación. Me encantaría saber de ti y ser una pequeña parte en tu lucha con estas preguntas importantes acerca de Jesús. ¡También te invito a subscribe to my channel.
Are the Gospels Reliable?
The books of the Bible were written thousands of years ago on material that typically only lasted for a couple of hundred years. So the original writings of the gospels are long gone. Instead, we have copies of copies of copies of the original writings. These copies are called manuscripts, and they are all different from each other in subtle ways because people make mistakes in the process of copying manuscripts.
In order to reconstruct what the original would have said, it helps to have as many copies as possible so that we can cross-check them with one another. We also look for the age of these manuscripts. Manuscripts that date closer to the time of the original writing have less time to become corrupted by mistakes or changes.
In both of these questions, the New Testament does far better than any other ancient document in history. If we take the New Testament, which is the writings about Jesus and content from his disciples, we have around five thousand eight hundred manuscripts in the original language, and almost 23-hundred of them include text of the Gospels.
Para poner esto en perspectiva, la mayoría de los escritos históricos antiguos de gran prestigio tienen alrededor de un par de cientos de manuscritos. Las Tetralogías de Platón tienen alrededor de 237. Las obras de Sófocles tienen alrededor de 226. El siguiente finalista después del Nuevo Testamento es la Ilíada de Homero, con alrededor de 1.900 manuscritos. Comparado con el texto antiguo promedio, eso es increíble. Pero comparado con el Nuevo Testamento, es realmente pequeño.
We also have a lot of manuscripts written very early after the original. According to New Testament scholar Dan Wallace, a manuscript specialist, “Today we have as many as 12 manuscripts from the second century, 64 from the third, and 48 from the fourth — a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New Testament. Most of these are fragmentary, but the whole New Testament text is found in this collection multiple times.”
If a manuscript lasts an average of several hundred years, then the earliest manuscripts we have may well be only a small handful of generations removed from the original. If there were only a few generations of copies, we would expect the manuscripts to be pretty close. There would be some spelling differences, some words missing or copied twice by mistake. And for the most part, that’s all we get when comparing our earliest manuscripts. But that’s no reason to doubt our confidence in what the original would have said.
A modo de ejemplo, digamos que tengo cuatro manuscritos diferentes que dicen lo siguiente:
Everyone left for home when the party died down.
Everyone left for home as the party died down.
Everyone left as the party died down.
Everyone left for home when the pary died down.
Incluso después de todas estas diferencias, ¿tiene alguna idea de lo que el original estaba tratando de comunicar? ¡Ciertamente! Cuando la fiesta se apagó, la gente se fue a casa.
The exact wording is less clear. But the fourth manuscript has an obvious spelling mistake (“pary” instead of “party”). One of them doesn’t mention the people going home, but all the others do. It’s not clear whether people left “when” or “as” the party died down, but the meaning is essentially the same. With actual manuscripts we would have more to go by, like the dating. So let’s imagine that the earliest ones used the word “when,” making reading 1 most likely the closest to the original.
If we turned to the internal evidence for these manuscripts, looking at the larger context of the writing, looking at the typical styles and writing behaviors of the authors, we might be able to get even closer to an accurate and confident assessment of what the original text would have said.
Cuando trabaja con manuscritos de los Evangelios y la Biblia en general, la gran mayoría de sus problemas no son muy diferentes a esto. Hay algunos puntos difíciles, pero no hay ninguna doctrina importante o enseñanza fundamental del cristianismo que se vea comprometida por las diferencias en nuestros manuscritos.
¿Qué pasaría si los evangelios fueran cambiados intencionalmente? Bueno, nuestros primeros manuscritos provienen de diferentes lugares del Medio Oriente. No es como si cualquier persona pudiera viajar allí y cambiar todos los manuscritos sin que las iglesias se dieran cuenta. Para que eso funcione, sería necesario acceder al texto antes de que se copiara y difundiera por todo el mundo. Pero, ¿cómo habría sabido alguien que el texto era lo suficientemente importante como para meterse con él hasta después de que ya estaba comenzando a difundirse? No hay ninguna buena razón para sospechar que hemos perdido el sentido del texto original, ni por accidente ni por mala intención.
Since we can be confident that the text we have today reflects the text that was written down, we are ready to ask if the text written down is true. I invite you to watch the rest of the videos!
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