As time goes on, we’re not getting farther from the text. We’re getting closer.
This site makes the case that the New Testament text has been transmitted reliably: it was copied through many independent lines rather than one chain; the earliest known copies have moved more than a thousand years closer to the originals since 1516; the famous disputed passages are few and are printed in the footnotes; the Gospels’ personal names fit first-century Palestine; and the Gospels interlock in ways no one arranged. Every chart also shows what skeptics say.
The interactive charts need JavaScript. The sources are:
- INTF Kurzgefasste Liste, ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/liste
- Bruce Metzger & Bart Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. (2005)
- Robert B. Stewart (ed.), The Reliability of the New Testament: Ehrman and Wallace in Dialogue (2011)
- Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity (2002); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed. (2017)
- Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View (2017); Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (2005)
- Data files and code: github.com/LexReach/closer-not-farther