Bait and Switch Evidence: Appropriating from Plato

How poor Plato was dragged into the issue of New Testament reliability details the misplaced reasoning in support of the Christian Bible. Plato figures into the discussion because of the rules applied among textual critics. The closer in time to the original work, the more reliability can be assigned to a copy. The more extant copies available, the better the chance of determining the original content. While 24,000+ copies of the New Testament survive in some form, only 7 copies from Plato survive and the oldest dates back to the 10th century or about 1400 years after the author wrote it. This, according to New Testament defenders, is proof that the Bible that is read today is the Bible that was written by Paul and Mark and John.

In reality, all this demonstrates is that more people have copied the New Testament than Plato's Republic. The analogy is comparative, not substantive. The chances that the Bible is a more accurate representation of the original is greater than for the works of Plato. Whether that means the Bible IS an accurate representation is a separate issue that Plato, unfortunately, cannot elaborate upon. According to this logic the Qur'an, which is 600 years more recent; with a much smaller gap between the original and the copies, is more reliable. In the Qur'an Jesus is just a profit who did not rise from the dead.

At the heart of the comparison issue is the difference between philosophy and religion. Plato's Republic is an original work, from the mind and quill of the man himself. Plato was conveying ideas and concepts; a philosophy. There is no incentive for copyists to intentionally alter the texts. If they did not agree with the texts all they had to do was argue against them. No one was going to perish because of it (although some fourth century Christians that adhered to neo-Platonism were labelled as heretics and suffered because of it).

The motives for copying the New Testament were different. The texts themselves were the basis of the world view since there were many (anonymous?) authors. If one did not agree with the texts one could not simply argue against them. They had to either interpret them selectively, ignore portions that were not agreeable, or alter them. All of these were done frequently in the early centuries of Christianity. The implications for New Testament accuracy is huge because of the early diversity. Those doing the initial copying were very few in number and amateurs, at best. Because the huge majority of the early Christians were illiterate, the message was left to the few that could read it. Copying was left to the even fewer that could read and write it. That later professional scribes and copyists could make hundreds of thousands of errors only highlights how difficult this must have been for the early amateurs. When combined with the fact each city church developed a particular doctrine, used and copied particular texts, and passed around only those texts that aligned with their own views, it is impossible to substantiate any of the surviving texts as "true." The claims of truth ultimately rest entirely on faith. However; this is not the claim being made by Christian supporters of their textual validity. They claim the texts are empirically true.

It should be no surprise to anyone that the viewpoint that prevailed was the one centered around the church in Rome. The church became the most powerful. Whether it was also the "true" version is simply a guess unless one subscribes to the view that might makes right. By the second century there were dozens of different gospels in circulation and these are just the one's historians know about. There may, in fact, have been hundreds. The version of the Gospel of John that survived to make it to the third and fourth century copying state was only one version; the version that Rome approved. Whether the versions of John's Gospel that were used by Gnostics were the same is nearly impossible to substantiate and whether the surviving version is the one actually penned by John (assuming this is the author) is even less knowable.

The bottom line is that the huge weight of evidence demonstrates there to be no certainty whatsoever that the Christian Bible that survived is an accurate account of what the original authors wrote. Christian arguments for the validity of their bible demonstrates that New Testament literalists do not understand what constitutes a proper defense of their materials. And what it really demonstrates is that they have none.