MEETING JUNKIE NO MORE SAYETH:
three hundred years later (when scriptures began to be written down.)
Terry - three hundred years later????!! I believe you are way off on that one. There is an extant portion of the Gospel of John carbon dated to the 1st century - http://www.carm.org/manuscript-evidence
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Terry replieth:
I want you to pay VERY CLOSE ATTENTION, please.
This is how Apologists cleverly manage to stretch the truth without lying by IMPLYING and coaxing you to form CONCLUSIONS which are in error!
Here is the example from the above apologists website:
Almost all biblical scholars agree that the New Testament documents were all written before the close of the First Century. If Jesus was crucified in 30 A.D., then that means that the entire New Testament was completed within 70 years. This is important because it means there were plenty of people around when the New Testament documents were penned who could have contested the writings. In other words, those who wrote the documents knew that if they were inaccurate, plenty of people would have pointed it out. But, we have absolutely no ancient documents contemporary with the First Century that contest the New Testament texts.
Furthermore, another important aspect of this discussion is the fact that we have a fragment of the gospel of John that dates back to around 29 years from the original writing (John Rylands Papyri 125 A.D.). This is extremely close to the original writing date. This is simply unheard of in any other ancient writing and it demonstrates that the Gospel of John is a First Century document
Okay, you read that, right?
You would practically have to be a scholar yourself to realize what it is REALLY SAYING and not what it IMPLIES it is saying.
1.Only a tiny fragment of the "early" copy (not original) of a copy of a copy ACTUALLY EXISTS! About the size of a postage stamp!!
It is that copy of a copy of a copy the size of the postage stamp WHICH DATES to 125 A.D. (More on HOW in a minute!)
2.The originals are completely gone! The copies of the originals are completely missing! The postage stamp sized fragment is all we have from the gospel of John only! Zip--Nada else.
3.Everything else doesn't appear until 300 years afterward!
The EARLIEST GOSPEL is Mark which is purported to have been written down just before the destruction of Jerusalem 60-70 A.D.. How "recent" is our oldest manuscript fragment of Mark? A.S. 350!
Now HOW did we date those early manuscripts, anyway?
The earliest fragment of the New Testament is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a piece of the Gospel of John dated to the first half of the 2nd century. For this reason, dating the composition of the texts relies on textual criticism, philological and linguistic evidence, as well as direct references to historical events in the texts instead of dating the physical manuscripts.
