The Case For Christ

essentially I'm holding copies of ancient historical records. The
original manuscripts of the biographies of Jesus-Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John-and all the other books of the Old and New
Testaments have long ago crumbled into dust. So how can I be sure
that these modern-day versions-the end product of countless
copying throughout
the ages-bear any resemblance to what the authors originally
wrote? In addition, how can I tell if these four biographies are
telling the whole story? What if there were other biographies of
Jesus that have been censored because the early church didn't
like the image of Jesus they portrayed? How could I have
confidence that church politics haven't squelched biographies of
Jesus that were every bit as accurate as the four that were
finally included in the New Testament, and that would shed
important new light on the words and deeds of this controversial
carpenter from Nazareth?
These two issues-whether Jesus' biographies were reliably
preserved for us and whether equally accurate biographies have
been
suppressed by the church-merited careful consideration. I knew
that there was one scholar universally recognized as a leading
authority on these matters. I flew to Newark and drove a rental
car to Princeton to visit him on short notice.
THE SECOND INTERVIEW BRUCE M. METZGEI PH.D.
I found eighty-four-year-old Bruce Metzger on a Saturday
afternoon at his usual hangout, the library at Princeton
Theological Seminary, where, he says with a smile, "I like to
dust off the books." Actually, he has written some of the best of
them, especially when the topic is the text of the New Testament.
In all, he has authored or edited fifty books, including The New
Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content; The Text of the
New Testament; The Canon of the New Testament, Manuscripts of the
Greek Bible; Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament;
Introduction to the Apocrypha; and The Oxford Companion to the
Bible. Several have been translated into German, Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, Malagasy, and other languages. He also is
coeditor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha
and general editor of more than twenty-five volumes in the series
New Testament Tools and Studies.
Metzger's education includes a master's degree from Princeton