There is an illustration that’s often used by Christian apologetics to help explain how we can trust the integrity of the Bible. It’s called Aunt Sally’s Recipe, and you can read the full version here, but I’m going to give a quick summary below, and then I’d like to explore the error with that illustration.
The basic idea is that your elderly aunt was given a recipe, and it’s so amazing that she hand-wrote several copies of the recipe and gave them out to family members. Then her dog ate her original copy of the recipe, so now she’s called the family together to see if they can piece together the original from the copies she’s made. The problem is, since she hand-wrote all the copies, there are spelling errors, words in the wrong order, and maybe even a missing ingredient. But because they have enough copies of the recipe, it’s easy to find the misspellings, fix any word swaps, and replace any instances where an ingredient is missing.
Sounds great, right? You have 20 copies of a recipe, and you’re bound to be able to figure out the original! This is exactly how Bible scholars assure you that the books in the New Testament are accurate.
I want to simplify this illustration. For my illustration, we are going to imagine a cookie recipe passed down through generations, and all we have to do is determine four of the ingredients. Much simpler than having to figure out the over 30,000 variances we have in the New Testament texts. Also, our oldest copy of the recipe was written only 10 years after the original, not over 150 years, like all of our New Testament manuscripts. Piece of cake! (Or cookie… whatever.)
So here is your test; below is every known copy of the recipe we have, spanning almost 100 years. At the bottom of the illustration, you will be able to select what four ingredients should be used for the cookies and see if you got the recipe right!
As a hint, the scholars who do this work with your New Testament will often look for texts that have the most copies in agreement. They also look closely at the oldest texts because there wouldn’t have been as many copies, and in theory, fewer variances.
In our illustration, the original copy received six copies, 10 years after the original was written. And we’re lucky enough to have one of those copies!
To help you with the math, 26 of 37 copies use two sticks of butter, 23 of 37 use dark chocolate, 20 of 37 copies suggest walnuts, and most (23 of 37) do not add coconut. This is mostly consistent with the oldest copy; however, the oldest copy calls for almonds and not walnuts.
So give it a shot and let me know in the comments how you determined the correct recipe, and how you fared.
Hopefully this illustration shows you the error in “Aunt Sally’s” method for determining which texts should be included in the New Testament. Spoiler: our oldest known copy was actually wrong. And just because we had a majority consensus of some ingredients, it didn’t mean the majority was correct!
As I mentioned before, it’s not that I don’t believe in the Word of God. But I take offense to the idea that we are telling the unsaved and new believers that they must accept that the current Bible is inerrant and inspired, when it takes about five minutes of research to prove that wrong. And then what does the new believer do with that information?