Читать книгу Getting Jesus Right: How Muslims Get Jesus and Islam Wrong - James A Beverley - Страница 19

The text of the New Testament Gospels is fully extant in manuscripts 250 years or so removed in time from the originals, and it is partially extant in several manuscripts much closer in time. It is widely agreed that the text we have today is very close to the original, so close that no major teaching is in doubt. This fact calls for a presumption that we have something pretty close to the original text of the Gospels.

How reliable is the text of the Qur’an? It is hard to say, because proper collation and comparison have not yet taken place. The work of Francois Deroche, Keith Small, and Dan Brubaker, among others, suggests that a lot of work needs to be done with Qur’anic manuscripts before we know if the text of the Qur’an has been as well preserved as the text of the New Testament.¹⁷

In chapter 1 we were able to show that there are good reasons to conclude that the Greek New Testament Gospels provide us with early, reliable historical information about Jesus. In the present chapter we have seen that the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are old, numerous, and accurate. In the next chapter we will address the important question of how Jesus understood himself and his mission.