P75 (the Bodmer Papyrus) has a substantial fraction of Luke and John. P46 (part of the Chester Beatty collection) has much of nine epistles. Six of them (P4, P32, P64, P66, P77, and P103) are scraps, but in this group we get our first substantial manuscripts. (Though it’s probably obvious, I’ll emphasize that these dates are all just approximations, and arguments can be made for different dates.)Īnother handful of manuscripts date to around 200 CE. Three more manuscripts (P90, P98, and P104) are also scraps of a similar size and date to the second half of the second century. It is our oldest New Testament manuscript and dates to the first half of the second century. Consider papyrus P52 above-yes, that is considered a “manuscript.” It is a tiny fragment of John just 9cm long. There are one hundred manuscripts in the first four centuries, and many of these are just tiny scraps. Our 25,000 manuscripts became 5800 Greek manuscripts, but those have now dwindled to just those few in the first few centuries after the crucifixion. The vast majority of the manuscripts, from perhaps the sixth century and after, never enter the conversation. The scholarly analysis for whether some of these passages are authentic or not turn on just a few manuscripts, and this chart shows why. I recently explored the three most famous additions to the New Testament (the Comma Johanneum, the woman caught in adultery, and the long ending of Mark). The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, which explains much of the drop on the right of the chart. The twelfth century has the most, with 1090 manuscripts. (The data is from Wikipedia, with manuscripts categorized on the cusp of two centuries put into the earlier century.) We have zero manuscripts from the first century and eight from the second. This chart shows the number of Greek manuscript copies by century. ![]() ![]() Now consider when these manuscripts were written. We can avoid the extra layer of interpretation imposed by a translation by focusing on just the 5800 Greek manuscripts. The originals of every New Testament book were written in Greek, but three-quarters of these manuscripts are translations into other languages. That doesn’t mean the original copy was history-just like the original copy of The Wizard of Oz or the Arthurian legends wouldn’t be a record of history.Ĭonsider the claim of 25,000 manuscripts. ![]() The first problem is that more manuscripts at best increase our confidence that we have the original version. But if that’s the case, we must then accept the far-better attested New Testament manuscripts-or so the popular argument goes. Do we conclude that our records of Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar or Histories by Tacitus are so unreliable that they can’t inform our understanding of the past? Of course not.
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