Only Copies? When I first found out that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, I was really skeptical. I thought if all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have any confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written. However, this is not an issue that is unique to the Bible, its a question we can ask of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity. What the New Testament has in its favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived. The more often you have copies what agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way theyd agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts. We have copies commencing within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in the case of other ancient texts, maybe five, eight or ten centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy. In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early timeinto Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of othersGeorgian, Ethiopic, a great variety. This helps because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. IN addition to that, even if we lot all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters and so forth of the early church fathers.
What is a great multiplicity of manuscripts? Well, consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about AD116. His first sex books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about AD850. Books eleven through sixteen are in another manuscript dating from the eleventh century. Books seven through ten are lost. So there is a long gap between the time that Tacitus sought his information and wrote it down and the only existing copies. With regard to the first century historian Josephus, we have nine Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War and these copies were written in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. There is a Latin translation from the fourth century and medieval Russian materials from the 11th or 12th century. There is but the thinnest thread of manuscripts connecting these ancient works to the modern world.
By comparison, there are more than 5,000 New Testament Greek manuscripts in existence today. Next to the New Testament, the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homers Iliad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks. There are fewer then 650 Greek manuscripts of it today. They come down to us from the second and third century AD and following. When you consider that Homer composed his epic about 800BC you can see theres a very lengthy gap (if you consider 1,000 years to just be lengthy).
What are some of these manuscripts? There are now 99 fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one of more passages or books of the New Testament. The most significant to come to light are the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, discovered about 1930. Of these, Beatty Biblical Papyrus number one contains portions of the four gospels and the book of Acts, and it dates from the third century. Papyrus number two contains large portions of eight letters of Paul, plus portions of Hebrews, dating to about the year 200. Papyrus number three has a sizable section of the book of Revelation, dating from the third century. Another group of important papyrus manuscripts was purchased by a Swiss bibliophile, M.Martin Bodmer. The earliest of these, dating from about 200, contains about two-thirds of the gospel of John. Another papyrus, containing portions of the gospels of Luke and John, dates from the third century. The earliest portion we possess today would be a fragment of the gospel of John, containing material from chapter eighteen. It has fiver versusthree on one side, two on the otherand it measures about two and a half by three and a half inches. It has been dated by many experts as having originated between AD100 to 150. Lots of prominent paleographers, like Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir Harold Bell, Adolf Deismann, W.H.P. Hatch, Ulrich Wilcken and others have agreed with this assessment. Deissmann was convinced that it goes back at least to the reign of Emperor Hadrian, which was AD 117-138, or even Emperor Trajan, which was AD98-117. Here we have, at a very early date, a fragment of a copy of John all the way over in a community along the Nile River in Egypt, far from Ephesus in Asia Minor, where the gospel was probably originally composed.
What of the other manuscript evidence? We have what are called uncial manuscripts which are written in all-capital Greek letters. Today we have 306 of these, several dating back as early as the third century. The most important are Codex Sinaiticus, which is the only complete New Testament in uncial letters, and Codex Vaticanus, which is not quite complete. Both date to about AD350. A new style of writing, more cursive in nature, emerged in roughly AD800. Its called minuscule and we have 2,856 of these manuscripts. Then there are also lectionaries, which contain New Testament Scripture in the sequence it was to be read in the early churches at appropriate times during the year. A total of 2,103 of these have been catalogued. That puts the grand total of Greek manuscripts of 5,664. In addition to the Greek documents there are thousands of other ancient New Testament manuscripts in other languages. There are 8,000 to 10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts, plus a total of 8,000 in Ethiopic, Slavic, and Armenian. In all, there are about 24,000 manuscripts in existence. We can have great confidence in the fidelity with which this material has come down to us, especially compared with any other ancient literary work. Said the late F.F. Bruce, eminent professor at the University of Manchester, England: There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.(F.F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, Old Tappan, NJ, Revell, 1963, 178). Sir Frederic Kenyon has said that in no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament (Frederic Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, New York, Macmillan, 1912, 5). Kenyon later concluded: the last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed (Frederic Kenyon, The Bible and Archeology, New York, Harper, 1940, 288).
What about copying errors? Granted errors did creep into scribes copying efforts. However, there are factors counteracting that. For example, sometimes the scribes memory would play tricks on him. Between the time it took for him to look at the text ad then to write down the words, the order of words might get sifted. He may write down the right words, but in the wrong sequence. This is nothing to be alarmed at, because Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language. Meaning it makes a whale of a difference in English if you say dog bites man or man bites dogsequence matters in English. But in Greek it doesnt. One word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence; consequently the meaning of the sentence isnt distorted if the words are out of what we consider to be the right order. So yes, some variations among manuscripts exist, but generally theyre inconsequential variations like that.
