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The NT text has far better support than you indicate. See this OLD thread:

These Geek manuscripts were copies of copies since they date back to 350 Ad.My point to Dr E is that we trust the Catholic Church for giving authenticity of the ORIGINALS

WE have no way of knowing that the Greek manuscripts are translated correctly from the complete ORIGINALS written in the 1st century since we don't have them. We trust the Catholic Church.

I have no problem believing the manuscripts are correct along with copies that came after because I trust the tradition of Church ,but Dr E and others believe the Church was corrupt,so they have a problem of not trusting.

From your source... 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in whole or in part. The best and most important of these go back to somewhere about AD 350, the two most important being the Codex Vaticanus, the chief treasure of the Vatican Library in Rome

The key word is Vatican Library.

So, we trust the Church!

Hope all is well with you and your family and horses

You will note many of the parchments date well prior to the church council which you say gives them authenticity. In fact, they were being used as scripture almost immediately. No one waited for a church pronouncement to make them scripture - the church waited until there was consensus among the congregations before it ratified what was already being done.

We generally trust the Greek manuscripts...at least, among Protestants. Not translations, but the Greek.

One thing that gets me angry is when Catholics feel a need to denigrate the word of God to build up their tradition. As I understand it, the Catholic teaching is that scripture IS the word of God and reliable, BUT that it needs the ‘lens’ of tradition to ensure it is understood clearly and correctly.

Obviously, I’m a Baptist because I reject the need to read scripture thru tradition - but it is at least a possible position. I reject it because A) scripture is pretty easy to read and understand, and B) the Catholic Church of 1400 hardly showed signs of being more spiritual and Godly than scripture.

But there is no need for a Catholic to pretend that we don’t know what was written, or that we rely on the Catholic Church councils of the late 300s to ‘make’ scripture scripture. It didn’t ‘make’ the Old Testament, nor did it ‘make’ the New. The churches - congregations - decided what they accepted as God’s word, and the council merely ratified current practice.

The Catholic Church did not wake up one day and suddenly find itself astray. It was a gradual process, and I don’t know many evangelicals who believe it was totally bad by 500 AD, or many who believe it was totally bad in 1400...but by 1400, internal reform was a fantasy. The Catholic Church of 2010 is much truer than it was in 1400, but it did so in response to pressure from the Protestant Churches.

Regardless of whether you accept the Baptist interpretation of history or the Catholic one, there is no requirement to pretend scripture isn’t trustworthy. A great deal of work has been done over the last couple hundred years, and yet all that research shows the manuscripts used by the KJV were pretty good - there is no significant doctrine (or any minor ones that I know of) that can’t be supported by both the KJV and the ESV (or NASB, or NAB even).

Both Catholics and Protestants ought to be gladly proclaiming the truth and trustworthiness of God’s Word, rather than attacking it or pretending it took a Church Council to approve of God’s Word. In reading the Church Fathers, I haven’t seen passages attacking scripture, but rather they used scripture to support their ideas. They did so because they understood, as did Jesus, that the word of God is true and comes from God, not man.

BTW, the horses and family are fine.

And yes, the Vatican library has one of the most important texts existing. The other big ones include “the wellknown Codex Sinaiticus, which the British Government purchased from the Soviet Government for £100,000 on Christmas Day, 1933, and which is now the chief treasure of the British Museum...the Codex Alexandrinus, also in the British Museum, written in the fifth century, and the Codex Bezae:, in Cambridge University Library, written in the fifth or sixth century...” Yet I do not say that I trust scripture because I trust the British Museum, or Cambridge University!

Again, as Catholic teaching has been explained to me here, I think Catholics ought to be praising scripture as the reliable word of God. We differ, not in accepting scripture as the word of God, but in whether or not Catholic tradition has a valid input on how one interprets scripture.

For example, I’ve debated transubstantiation with Catholics, with both of us going over John 6 line by line. And we differ, not is WHAT John 6 contains, but what it MEANS - and that is because a Catholic is required to interpret scripture through tradition, while I am not.