[Monkey Face]

I believe that the events as compiled in the Bible are as accurate as they can be, given the many translations and revisions, so when I hear someone presenting "theories" about the death and resurrection of Jesus, I have to say that that person or group of people, is trying to fill up the time with something that sounds "good" so he can feel justified in his "research."

The truth may be just barely there, and they may present it, at the beginning, but by the time the film is finished, it is unrecognizable as "truth."

Usually, when people were crucified, the position they were hanging in caused pressure on their disphram, which in turn, caused them to suffocate.

[Das Outsider]

I believe that the events as compiled in the Bible are as accurate as they can be, given the many translations and revisions, so when I hear someone presenting "theories" about the death and resurrection of Jesus, I have to say that that person or group of people, is trying to fill up the time with something that sounds "good" so he can feel justified in his "research."

There are currently 5,664 Greek witnesses and manuscript fragments of the New Testament--though I've heard that recently the number has been revised to over 5,700. The earliest one dates from around 125 A.D. (p52 in the Rylands Library)and it is a fragment of the Gospel of John. There are many more Latin, Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts as well, but the Greek ones are the earliest. Overall, the documents span over 1,000 years of transmission and copying.

When you want to determine the accuracy of transmission with regard to a text, what do you do? Compare the manuscripts. Scholars in the 17th century, like the editors of the King James Bible, had very few Greek manuscripts to work with. As I mentioned earlier, today we have more than 5,000 of them.

In comparing these documents, it has been shown that the New Testament has a variation rate of .5 percent. What that means in practical terms is that there are no changes beyond spelling errors or omissions of a line here or there in the copies. Because the copies are so close to each other, we can reconstruct the originals, since we only have copies and not the autographs.

In other words, we are not dealing with a copy of a copy of a copy. The fidelity in transmission of the New Testament is unlike that of any other ancient document.