The Alleged “Corruption” Of the Christian Scriptures

Richard Terrell

It is an article of faith among secularists, various types of “liberals,” ordinary know-nothings as well as Muslims that the scriptures that form the basis of the Christian faith have been “corrupted.” That is, in some way or another, they do not represent with an adequate degree of honesty or integrity the matters they present.

This theme is widespread in the churches as well as among people outside them. It is a tragic probability, though, that Christian laypeople are ill-prepared to respond to these perspectives. If I am correct in this assessment, it is a witness to the preference for what passes as “Christian Education” programs for sentimental moral exhortation and what I’d call “just believe-ism” — don’t worry about it, just believe. This, however, will likely prove unsatisfying for people who actually think, while convincing them that the Christian faith really is a form of “blind faith” at odds with reason and intelligence.

Within the churches themselves, we note the long-range impact of the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible that emerged in the 18th century and eventually became the ossified orthodoxy of biblical studies in mainline seminaries and university religious studies programs. Whereas there are many specific issues that arise from this tradition, here I will go to the core assumption, which is a radical denial of the premise of communication between God—acting from beyond time itself—to humanity living within space and time. In other words, the “supernatural” orientation of biblical faith, and hence the entire theme of revelation, is set aside as a beginning point for understanding the character of scripture.

What ensues from this presupposition is a forced denial, from the very beginning, of any statement or description that points beyond what might be explained by natural processes. So, you get the “Jesus didn’t say that, Jesus didn’t do that,” sort of statements seen in the “demythologizing” writings of Rudolf Bultmann, so influential in the mid-twentieth century, and more recent, Bultmann-inspired and trendy writers like Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong. In this view of things, a central doctrine of the Christian faith is dismissed as unnecessary, mistaken, irrational, even “insulting to God,” this being the doctrine of the Substitutionary Atonement—Christ’s death on the cross for the sins of the world. Superstition! “Slaughter house religion!” is the cry from church leaders and laity that buy into this understanding.

A core belief in his framework is the notion that the New Testament consists of vague memories representing a historical ground which has been layered over by later “myths” and legends, creating an essentially fictional “Christ of faith” who bears no essential relationship to the actual “Jesus of history.” No connection exists, in this view, between what is written in the New Testament and an actual eye-witness community that knew Jesus, walked with him, heard him, saw him, and learned from him. Or, if there is such a connection, it has been buried beneath the impress of fantastic stories making Jesus into something he never even claimed to be. A further dogma in this arena is the notion that of equal value to the books of the New Testament were other “books left out of the Bible” — gnostic and other writings — that were suppressed out of political, power-brokering considerations by “the [evil and corrupt] church. What I would describe as the “contrivance theory” of New Testament origins lies at the center of the fiction writer Dan Brown’s ignorant and tendentious novels, such as The Da Vinci Code.

It is not my intention, here, within the limitations of this essay, to refute these claims, except to say that they are effectively refuted in a substantial literature that exists and which deserves to be offered to the awareness of students in university religious studies (but which, in general, is not. Nevertheless, see bibliographical citations below). More importantly, these are matters that the churches themselves should be taking up with their congregations, simply because in today’s world the authority of the scriptures is not something that can be take from granted. Just the other day I received an inquiry from a Christian layman seeking a scholarly source on how the Bible came into being. Good question. But how many Christian laypeople do you know that would even have curiosity about such a matter or be able to engage in a reasonable dialogue with somebody about it? How many Christian education curriculums have we seen that even deal with the issue?

Here are some essential matters to keep in mind:

• There are thousands of manuscripts, in whole or in part, of New Testament writings—over 5000 in Greek alone. This evidence outstrips all writings of the ancient world by a monumental distance, and offers textual scholars an “embarrassment of riches” [Bruce Metzger] in the study of the New Testament text and transmission. There is literally nothing to compare with this abundance.

• Through all these thousands of manuscript copies of original, first-century documents (the earliest of which dates from about 125 A.D., the Rylands fragment of the Gospel of John), counting all marginal glosses and variations, not one single point of core Christian doctrine is in question.

• The earliest writing of the New Testament canon is dated by scholars at 50 A.D., as close to Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection as we are to the memories of 9/11, and exhibits a high Christology evidently born among the earliest Christian believers/followers.

• It is evident that the high Christology that is denied by the “corruption” accusations arose early, not late.

• There is no other corpus of writings—religious or otherwise—of the ancient world that has undergone more scholarly examination and for which textual evidence exists than the New Testament.

• The skeptical conclusions regarding the New Testament are, for the most part, forced on the basis of philosophic presuppositions rather than actual textual evidence.

In view of these realities, for me anyway, the burden of proof considering claims of the “corruption” of the New Testament rests on those who would make the claim. It is easy to claim something, but something else to support it. The failure of “liberal” New Testament scholars to engage their skeptical impulses toward the “higher criticism’s” intellectual foundations is itself a failure of scholarship. As for Islam’s claim that the New Testament has been corrupted, I would simply point out that any organization or movement that threatens scholars with death for the simple act of advocating inquiry into its own scripture’s textual origins and integrity is not worth listening to when scholarly matters are under consideration.

Sources of Study
(Most of these books present the issues of biblical scholarship for an interested lay readership, and do a good job of making the principles, arguments, and counter-arguments accessible).

Bock, Darrell, The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities
Borg, Marcus, and Wright, N.T., Jesus: Two Visions
Bruce, F.F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
Dodd, C.H., The Founder of Christianity
Dunn, James D.G., The Evidence for Jesus
Geisler, Norman, Christian Apologetics
Hurtado, Larry, How On Earth Did Jesus Become a God?
Jenkins, Philip, The Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way
Montgomery, John Warwick, History and Christianity
Pitre, Grant, The Case For Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ
*Robinson, John A.T., Can We Trust the New Testament?
Strobel, Lee, The Case for Christ
Johnson, Luke Timothy The Real Jesus
Witherington, Ben, III, The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Da Vinci

*— concerning this book by John A.T. Robinson: Robinson was a “liberal” clergyman and scholar in England who popularized the notion of a secularized Christianity under the influence of the theories of Rudolf Bultmann. This was the impact of his 1972 book called Honest to God. However, late in life Robinson wrote a book, Re-dating the New Testament, of which the book cited here is a kind of abstract. Robinson came to the conclusion that if one sets side the traditionally accepted presuppositions of the so-called “higher criticism” and looks at the New Testament with a renewed concern for objectivity, there is no reason to assume that anything in the New Testament could not have been written before 70 A.D., the year of the destruction of the temple in the invasion of Jerusalem by the Roman forces under Titus. This has an important bearing on whether or not the writings evolved within the context of an existing and surviving eye-witness testimony.

(Richard Terrell, the writer of this discussion, is a retired Professor of Art-Emeritus of Doane Universtiy, Crete, Nebraska. He is a Christian layman who has served as pulpit minister and interim pastor of four churches in the Lincoln, Nebraska area, and studied New Testament, Church History, and Christian Apologetics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois).