An authorship very close in time and location to the events recorded is contraindicative of legends. Legends spring up centuries to millennia after the fact; in lands distant from the place(s) of occurrence. They endure because no one is close enough to the purported stories to challenge their authenticity.

The early church canon included the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint. Written between the third and second centuries BC, the Septuagint contained the scriptures quoted by Jesus and the Apostles. When Luke wrote “Now the Bereans... examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true,” (Acts 17:11) he was making reference to this Old Testament canon.

The early church canon also included apostolic testimony. Peter acknowledges Paul’s writings as holy writ when he stated, “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures...” (2 Peter 3:16)

In AD 160, Justin Martyr wrote that reading “the memoirs of the apostles” was a weekly custom for the assembly of believers. Theologian Ben Witherington cites the work of Martin Hengel and Harry Gamble showing that the four gospels and Paul’s writings were circulated together in codex (book) form in the early second century—further evidence that apostolic writings were accepted as Scripture by the early church.

Is What We Have What They Wrote?

Like all works of antiquity, there are no original autographs of the NT documents. That said, the NT enjoys manuscript support (copies of the autographs) far in excess of any other ancient literary work.

Consider that there are about 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the NT and 24,000 copies of portions thereof in existence. Not only is that level of support unparalleled for ancient works, but the time span between the originals and the first manuscripts is exceptionally short; within 100 years versus many centuries to millennia.

Also, the textual variation among the existing copies is extremely small. For all the hoopla over Bible contradictions, errors and inconsistencies, only about one-half of one percent of the Bible is under competent dispute—none of which affects any “material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and doctrine,” according to biblical scholar, F.F. Bruce.

Compare that with Homer’s Iliad, which has the next best manuscript support among ancient literature. For people of antiquity, Homer “was held in the highest esteem and quoted in defense of arguments pertaining to heaven, earth, and Hades,” writes Bruce Metzger. Like the Bible, Homer was memorized, served as school primers, and was allegorized and enhanced.

Yet there are only about 650 surviving copies of the Iliad, written over a thousand years after the original. Among those copies, there are over 100 times as many textual differences as the Bible. Matched up against the writing of the ancients, the transmission of the biblical narrative is in class of its own.