Josiah Concept Ministries

I will now wash my hands of the Christian Forums, forever.  I spent an hour responding to a post in one of their apologetic forums, and then was told by the system that I can’t post my reply because my post count is less than 100.  Unless your post count is higher than 100, you can only chat and you are not allowed in their apologetics forums.

Well, screw that.  That is what I do: apologetics.  I’m not going to spend my time in their stupid chat forums talking about meaningless crap when it would be much more productive for me to spend time doing what I am called to do.

So that I didn’t waste my time, I will post here what I cannot post there.  A user pointed us to this article, and challenged us to reply to it.  Though the poster said that the author has made his case well, I disagree after only having read three paragraphs.  The claim is made that we have no New Testament documents dating before a.d. 350-400.  Excuse me?  What about these?

• John Rylands MSS, which date to a.d. 130, the oldest extant NT MSS.  These generally confirm the date of composition and the place of composition of the gospel of John, according to Geisler and Nix in General Introduction to the Bible.
• Early Christian Papyri, dating to a.d. 150, which were written by someone who had access to the four gospels and knew them very well.
• Papyrus Bodmer II, dating to a.d. 200.  Contains 14 chapters of John, and fragments of the last seven chapters.
• The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri are dated between a.d. 200-250 and contains all four gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, and Revelation.
• Noncanonical works by early Church Fathers that date from a.d. 95 through a.d. 120 that quote from various canonical sources and thus provide indirect witness to their contents.

For this author to say that we have no MSS dating before 350-400 is an outright lie.  That he quotes a source that backs him up on this says that his source is outdated.  All of the MSS referenced above have been known since 1935, which means that the source he quotes must have been written before that–OVER SEVENTY YEARS AGO!

While I still plan to read this in-depth and respond as best I can at a later date,  I can already say that that statement in only the third paragraph causes the entire article to lose all of its credibility and as such it should be flushed down the toilet posthaste!