The New Testament As a Historical Document
It is reasonable to treat the New Testament as we would any other historical document. Thucydides, the Athenian general and historian, widely regarded as the father of political realism and scientific history, wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War over four hundred years before Jesus. Although the earlier writings of Herodotus about the Greco-Persian wars are regarded as less trustworthy, scholars take his writings to be historical accounts of actual events.
People ill-disposed to religion bring to the New Testament, if they even bother to read it, a skepticism that far exceeds what they would bring to the far older histories of Thucydides or Herodotus. Yet, there they stand, the written accounts of Jesus, and the revolutionary and rapid development of early Christianity based on his life, teachings, crucifixion, resurrection, and post-resurrection appearances.
The astounding thing about the New Testament is that it was written by at least ten different people whose conclusions about the identity and significance of Jesus converged. Their writings do not at all resemble works intended to entertain. Quite the contrary. They were written to document what its authors earnestly believed. They show no hesitancy, uncertainty, or ambivalence about what they believe, only the bold proclamation that every bit of it is true.
There are, by far, more “source documents” backing up the New Testament than there are for any other ancient work or set of works. Biblical scholars refer to differences between or among these source manuscripts as “variants,” places where two or more manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts differ. No printing press existed in the West until the fifteenth century, so some variants seem due to occur because copyists made mistakes. Other variants appear to be because a copyist added what he considered an explanatory word or phrase. There are not many of these, and good modern translations of the Bible contain footnotes indicating those of importance. Scholars have been superb at determining the contents of the original documents, and there is little doubt that what we now have as the New Testament is substantially what its authors wrote.
The differences among source manuscripts total less than one percent of the New Testament, and they do nothing to change its central message. These differences legitimately matter to biblical scholars intent on getting things exactly right, but they carry no practical importance for non-scholars. The key message of the New Testament is that Jesus had two natures, one human and the other divine, and that it is in and through him that one knows the true nature of the Creator.