Has the Towrah and Injeel or the Old Testament and New Testament been changed by man?
Jesus said Himself, “My Words shall last forever.”
It is my intent here to show you that the His word has not passed away and that it has the most amazing integrity based on the documentation that accompanies it.
If God, the Almighty, the Creator, took all the trouble to send us the truth in the New Testament, Is it reasonable that He would allow created man to change His book into a lie? I believe the answer is “No.” If God sent the New Testament to guide man, what should He do with His Word? He should protect it. If man changed the written Word of God, who would be stronger–man or God? Man. But this is impossible! God is almighty! If God did not protect His book, the New Testament, how can we be sure that He protected the other books, and that man did not change them, too?
The Qur’an tells us to believe and to study the New Testament, and contrary to popular opinion, nowhere does the Qur’an say that the New Testament was changed. This means that up to the year 600 A. D. the New Testament was not changed. The original manuscripts from which our present translation of the New Testament is taken date back at least 300 years before the Qur’an.
Let me share with you a simple diagram that shows why I believe that the New Testament was not changed.
The original writings of the New Testament were written in the first century. See A.
The oldest manuscripts of a complete New Testament is dated 350 A. D. So more than 250 years before the Qur’an, thisNew Testament was in circulation. This copy was found in the monastery of St. Catherine of Sinai. For that reason it is called Codex Sinaticus. It is displayed in the British Museum in London, where you can see it for yourself, if you go there.
A sister copy exists in the Vatican Library in Rome. It is called Codex Vaticanus. It came to us from the same time, 350 A. D. We have used mainly these copies to translate our Bible that we have today. So we will call this period, between 350 A.D. and the present C in our diagram.
Now, let us call the period between A and C, B. It covers the period of 250 years from 100 A.D. to 350 AD. It is a bridge between A and C. B has thousands of manuscripts of portions of the New Testament from many parts of the Roman world. They all AGREE AMONG THEMSELVES. If that were not enough,We have also the writings of the early church fathers who were scattered throughout the Roman world. They wrote books full of quotations from the New Testament. All of their quotations agree among themselves, even though they wrote in different times and places. If we collect all these quotations we can form the whole Injeel we have today except for some 11 verses. These verses are greetings or salutations and do not affect the basic, important teachings of the New Testament.
Now, if in period B the manuscripts and the quotations from the early church fathers all agree among themselves, it means that they have one source. That source should be A, the original copy of the New Testament books. This means that A = B.
If we compare B with C, we find that they are the same, which means that B = C. Now, if A = B because B has one source, and if B = C by comparison of the two, then A = C by substitution.
Consequently, the New Testament was never changed. It was the same during all periods of history. God protected His book in a marvelous way. If it is the written Word of God, then we have to obey it.
Lee Strobel on the reliability of the Gospel:
