What the James Ossuary shows us about the Original Texts of the Gospels

We don't have the original manuscripts of the Gospels and that's not a bad thing.

Let me show you why...

An ancient ossuary (box for holding bones) was found in someone's personal collection in 2002. Surprisingly it dated to within the first century. Even more surprising is the inscription on the box.

It reads, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

The first part "James, son of Joseph" is interesting, but perhaps not an uncommon coincidence. Now for James to have been both the son of Joseph AND to have had a brother named Jesus - that's on another level. But there is a problem. There are some who believe that inscription "brother of Jesus" is a later addition to the box. And the more we examine it, and the more people argue over it one thing remains clear....we will never really know whether the entire inscription is original or not.

So what does this have to do with the Gospels?

If someone was in possession of the original manuscripts down through the last 2,000 years what could they have done? They could have made possible edits just like the inscription on the James Ossuary. Or at least we would never really know.

But instead of the original manuscripts, we have something much better.

We have over 5,800 manuscripts and pieces of manuscripts of the New Testament - just in the original language alone. This doesn't include the mountains of manuscripts we have in other near eastern language (Latin, Syriac, Coptic).

The Bible was freely transmitted around the world and as such, we can compare lines of transmission and accurately see where mistakes, misspellings, or even changes were made.

Because of this, we can have greater confidence that what we have today, is what was written then, than we could if we just had the original documents.