Читать книгу Getting Jesus Right: How Muslims Get Jesus and Islam Wrong - James A Beverley - Страница 16

The remarkable stability of the text of the New Testament sharply contrasts with the lack of textual stability in other writings, especially the apocryphal works, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, whose manuscripts and recensions vary considerably. We see this also in the Gnostic writings, most of which date to the second century. The codices that have been recovered—all from Egypt—date to the fourth century AD. The textual variations and discrepancies are such that it is not possible to determine how the original text read.

All in all, the evidence strongly suggests that the text of the New Testament that we possess today is very, very close to the original—in stark contrast to what we typically see in apocryphal writings. Modern textual criticism, aided by the discovery of thousands of manuscripts and the development of remarkable technologies that help us recover text, has been very successful.