Codec

One of the arguments I often come across about the historical authenticity of the Bible is number of copies and date of them. Usually summarised something like
with the Bible being variously attibuted as up to 14,000 copies in existance with the first being only 200-300 years after the event, and fragments only 40years after the event.

I know its not really an argument in itself, but I wondered if this is a case of cherry picking the evidence. Are there other ancient texts that we have lots of copies of, date from a similar time and have perhaps short time spans?

Anyone kow of examples? Some trivial examples, which aren't books, would be the rossetta stone, the Egyptian stylie - but are there any manuscripts?

Doug Shaver

I have not done the research myself, but I have read commentaries on the claim you refer to by people who could have and probably would have. Apparently, the figures for the nonbiblical manuscripts are actually representative.

The figures for the New Testament manuscripts, though, are grossly inflated, to put it mildly. A typical claim is 5,300 Greek manuscripts. If you're counting only more or less complete copies, the actual number is four. The other 5,296 or whatever are just portions, and mostly small ones.

Codec

The figures I've seen quoted include:

• 5,000 Greek manuscripts,
• 8,000 Latin manuscripts,
• 1,000 versions from other languages.

Haven't managed to find a reference to what these actually are as yet, but I haven't looked very hard either.

Presumably the Tacitus copies quoted, for instance, are complete copies.

S.C.Carlson

Complete copies of the New Testament that is. Throughout the Middle Ages, the N.T. typically circulated in separate volumes, one for the four gospels, one for Paul's letters, one for Acts and the catholic epistles (the "praxapostolos"), and a separate one for Revelation. The distribution and popularity of these parts are not equal, too. For example, there are about 3-4 times as many copies of the gospels as there are of Revelation.

Stephen

andrewcriddle

there are several thousand NT manuscripts in languages other than Greek or Latin. Eg there are well over 1,000 Armenian NT manuscripts and well over 300 Syriac Peshitta manuscripts.


Actually no.
All manuscripts of the 'Annals' of Tacitus are probably copies of an extant medieval manuscript

It (and all copies thereof) lack large parts of the original work.

Andrew Criddle

welsh extian

Anyone got a debunking for this oft-quoted evidence for the authenticity of the NT?

Roger Pearse

Surely it would be a good idea to find out whether this evidence is in fact correct before trying to debunk it?

It can't be debunked with integrity, because it is in fact true. Whether it is significant is another matter.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

There are several issues all intertwined here, and until they are separated, it is impossible to respond to this question.

Firstly, are we presuming that the contents of the biblical text are correct simply because it has been well transmitted to us? Is this post of mine correct, merely because it is exactly what I wrote?

So I think that we are really discussing whether or not the New Testament text has come down to us accurately -- or at least, as accurately as texts in general come down to us -- from antiquity.

Secondly, are we happy to lose the majority of our knowledge of ancient literature? The majority of texts from antiquity reach us in a single hand-written copy (i.e. manuscript), usually written no earlier than the revival of learning in the 9th century and often much later. Some texts are now extant in no manuscript; a manuscript existed in 1500, someone printed a text from it, and then the manuscript was lost. Examples are Velleius Paterculus, and Tertullian De ieiunio. Again Macarius Magnes, Apocriticus existed in a manuscript in 1900, but this is now lost and we depend on a very rare printed text of that time. The NT is extant in very large numbers of copies, in various languages, some of very early date. Any argument that 'proves' that we do not certainly have a text of the NT which is more or less what the authors wrote will likewise dispose of all ancient literature.

Thirdly, we need to keep clear the distinction between literary texts which reach us by copying down the centuries, and archaeological inscriptions, or fragments of letters, etc, all by their very nature originals. If we discard everything except these, we lose most classical literature.

I'm not quite sure why people get into difficulties on this. Who copied all the ancient texts? What sort of texts did they need? The answer is monks, who needed (a) bibles and (b) prayer books and (c) books of ancient theology. So these are going to exist in quantity, and early copies will get preserved (all other things being equal, statistics comes into it somewhere). So naturally the NT is going to be one of the best preserved texts.

Whether the tale it tells is true is, of course, quite another issue. But atheists who try to debunk the transmission of texts always end up as obscurantists. Don't go there.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Steven Carr

Don't we have originals of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Or at least some of them are originals, I believe. I may be wrong.

The early manuscript , p72, contains Jude and 1 and 2 Peter, and also The Nativity of Mary,the eleventh Ode of Solomon,Melito's Homily on the Passover,the Apology of Phileas.

How can the existence of p72 prove the historical authenticity of 1 and 2 Peter while the very same manuscript is no evidence at all that the Nativity of Mary is historically authentic?

Are there any Greek manuscripts before AD 800 which contain 27 and only 27 New Testament books? No - a factoid, at least as relevant as any in the table in the OP (ie of no relevance whatsoever)



How do the manuscripts of Genesis compare, time-gap-wise, with the originals? Are we ready to concede that we do not have what the original author of Genesis wrote?

Vorkosigan

Sure, after all, printing came in quite early in China. I seem to recall that one of the sutras placed in Japanese temples by an early medieval queen had a million copy run. In any case, we have plenty of copies of stuff directly from the writer's hand from all over the old world -- papyri in Egypt that contain letters, legal documents, grocery lists, diaries from Chinese tombs, etc. That would invalidate this claim, on technical grounds, in which case the goalposts would undergo a sudden violent shift. What they mean is some hazy thing about the most-copied book that goes back deepest in time or something. Even then you can find stuff in China that is probably closer, although I am too lazy to search it out, at which point they will tell you that they meant only the West. Ya can't win with these guys.

Vorkosigan