Blog on F. F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable?

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[Fr. Terry Kleven]

The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable?

N. T. Wright, Foreword

Summary of arguments:

Wright summarizes the life and faith of F. F. Bruce. Bruce was a Classicist by training, that is, he studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was an evangelical by faith and belong to the fellowship of the Plymouth Brethren all his life. Wright affirms that Bruce argued in favor of the historical reliability of the New Testament documents and the truth of their historical depiction. Wright stresses that Bruce insisted that scholarship and faith should not be divided.

Critical evaluation:

Wright is accurate to judge that Bruce’s faith and scholarship went together. His faith learned from his scholarship and his faith informed his scholarship. Christianity today tends not to be able to bring together learning and faith, but Bruce shows us why that matters and how it should be done. It would have been helpful if Wright would not only speak generally of Bruce being a reliable “foundation” (p. x) to scholarship, but if he had also shown the ongoing formulation of the direction of scholarship and of faith emerging from Bruce. How is the foundation manifest in the direction of scholarship today? I think Wright could have made a better case. For example, many scholars in the Evangelical Theological Society would use Bruce’s scholarship a lot to this day, even more than Wright. The complete archives of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS) are found at https://www.etsjets.org/. Wright could also have stress Bruce’s British Classicism more, since North American educational institutions do not often have Classics Departments.

Bruce, chapter 1

Summary of arguments:

Bruce gives a summary (part I) of the nature of the twenty-seven Greek writings which constitute the NT. He identifies the literary genre of them, four Gospels, an historical book of the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one letters, and what he calls the ‘apocalyptic” book of Revelation. Of these, the first five are historical in character—one aspect of this is that they are narrative in form—and the letters fit into the historical account of these five. Part II looks at dates. He says Jesus was crucified in AD 30. This date is calculated from Luke’s comment in Luke 3:1 in which Luke says John the Baptist begins his ministry in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. The Syrian calendar at the time, according to Bruce, is not identical to our Gregorian calendar and since Tiberius is appointed in AD 14, fifteen years after that is AD 27. Given that St. John says Jesus’s ministry is encompasses three Passovers, that would mean that Jesus’s crucifixion was in AD 30. He explains that most of the writings of the NT were written either before AD 60 or AD 80. One of the criteria which is important to Bruce is that Jesus is the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, which occurred in AD 70. His argument is that the documents are not written long after the historical events.

In part 3, he explains that the Tübingen school of the late nineteenth century headed by F. C. von Baur (d. 1860) questioned the reliability of the NT events because many important NT documents did not exist before AD 130. At this point, he turns to manuscript evidence for the writings and explains that our NT documents are much older and closer to the originals than the classical authors. For example, Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle are from the ninth century AD. Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are both fourth century AD (AD 300s) and Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Bezae are fifth century (400s). Compare this to Caesar’s The Gallic Wars where the extent copies in our libraries are nine hundred years after the date of origin and earliest copy of Thucydides’s History is thirteen hundred years later. Papyrus fragments of the NT documents go back to within a few decades of the actual writing of the NT documents.

The early attestation to the writing of the NT books is found in a collection of non-canonical texts known as the Apostolic Fathers. These are from AD 90-160 and they quote passages from the NT. Bruce concludes with a quotation from Kenyon of the authenticity and general integrity of the books of the NT.

Critical evaluation:

His summary of the genre are correct with the exception of saying Revelation is ‘apocalyptic’. It is more accurately ‘prophetic’ as are the Old Testament books, Exodus, Ezekiel, and Daniel to which it refers. The prophets also speak of the “end times”, the eschaton, but this is not necessarily well understood as apocalyptic. There is a school of NT studies that thinks the core of the NT is ‘apocalyptic’, but they use a lot of categories that are not true to biblical prophecy.

The question of the dating of the NT books remains open for me. I have not found any mention of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. Had this happened, one would think the writers would have mentioned it. In our Christian creeds, we say the NT is ‘Apostolic’ which means it was written by the Apostles—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, Jude. Remember, the Apostolic Fathers he speaks about on p. 13 are not the Apostles who are the first generation of disciples and leaders in the Church.

In my judgment, his evaluation of the early manuscript evidence in support of the integrity of the NT documents is accurate. The truth of Christianity depends upon the reliability of these historical aspects because Christianity is rooted in history.

A paragraph analysis:
Here is an analysis of a causal relation embedded in good English prose. These sentences are not “bullet-points” which are unrelated or imperfectly related,” but form a causal sequence. They are a causal argument. This is good prose.

P. 2.
Premise #1: “Christianity has its roots in history”
Premise #2: “[Premise #1] makes the reliability

[Fr. Terry Kleven]

Here is the Link for F. F. Bruce's book.
https://www.cob-net.org/compare/nt-documents-reliable-bruce.pdf