2 Timothy 4:13 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)
13 When you come, bring the cloak that I left behind in Troas with Carpus, and the scrolls, especially the parchments.
In not so many words, the apostle Paul urged his fellow traveling companion Timothy to bring him different types of written material. What did Paul mean by the scrolls and parchments?
The New Textual Scholars of today would say that this is wishful thinking, as there is no way of knowing how many copies removed the manuscript may be. They would go on to tell you that a 9th-century manuscript might have fewer copies in between than a 3rd-century manuscript. There is a sense today that “optimism” and “hope” are bad words that we should set aside because they will only cloud our objectivity. If you doubt, look …
The Egerton Gospel (British Library Egerton Papyrus 2) refers to a collection of three papyrus fragments of a codex of a previously unknown gospel, found in Egypt and sold to the British Museum in 1934; the physical fragments are to be dated to about 150 C.E. What does the nomina sacra tell us? And how has a simple hooked apostrophe impacted two of our earliest manuscripts for many new textual scholars?
Agnostic New Testament textual and early Christianity scholar Dr. Bart D. Ehrman states, God “didn’t preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them.”
The KJVO/TRO argues, “Because the Scriptures are forever relevant, they have been preserved down through the ages by God’s special providence.”
World-renowned Bible scholars, such as Robert L. Thomas, the late Norman L. Geisler, Gleason L. Archer, F. David Farnell, and the late Gleason L. Archer Jr., among many others, have fought for decades to educate readers about the dangers of higher criticism.
We have to face the reality that while the original 39 OT manuscripts and 27 NT manuscripts were inspired by God [Lit. “God-breathed”] (1 Tim. 3:16), as the authors were moved along by the Holy Spirit (1 Peter 1:21), this was not the case with the copyists thereafter. Yes, hundreds of thousands of scribal errors crept into our manuscripts. Yet, there is solid evidence that the Bible,
