spin

Some years ago I was at an archaeological site near Rome called Ostia Antica, where there are some monuments from the Roman era with plaques at the bottom containing lists of local fire brigade members. Each of those unique lists of names that are insignificant to us is more reliable than the new testament. You know that each man lived, you know where, you know when (because each list was dated to an emperor) and you know what they did.

In the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes is the mortuary temple of Ramses II, which contains a copy of a treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites. In the ancient capital of the Hittites another copy was found. This treaty with only two copies separated by a few thousand kilometers and in two languages is more reliable than the new testament.

Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, that apologetic work, whose manuscript remains are so awful has been shown by the amount of verifiable material in it to be more related to the historical past than the content of the new testament and thus more reliable.

The chart in the o.p. is ignorant of the fact that while many new testament fragments were found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, so were numerous, less religiously significant, classical texts. Some of them from prior to the change of the era, making the chart incomplete and religiously biased. It is aimed at clueless people.

Diogenes the Cynic

Well, the entire use of the word "reliability" with regards to manuscripts is an intentional sleight of hand meant to confuse the audience into thinking that the word has anything to do with the content.

It's one of Holding/Terkel's favorite obfuscations.

mountainman

There is no walking talking cross in Mark, I've looked. It sounds like something that Monty Python would write.

The Gospel of Peter is docetic. Eusebius cites Origen, Justin Martyr and Serapion as mentioning gPeter although in the case of Justin, MR James comments that “the evidence is not demonstrative”. Eusebius has an unknown Serapion report that he walked into a Gnostic library and “borrowed” a copy of this text. The Gnostics regularly make fun of the passion. Jesus is laughing, or someone else is being crucified.

All this gnostic stuff is late, and clearly is textually dependent on the canonical books. Crossan's hypothesis is unsupported by anything other than the hypothesis of the Historical Jesus. When people use the HJ hypothesis, they can, and do, claim anything.

spin

I take the logic to be that the texts have such support that they are more reliable on a manuscript level, imputing reliability on the content because they are far more trustworthy in form of content, thus, by triple whammy, the content is more reliable apparently in preserved veracity!

mountainman

There is evidence that the Christians burned Plato c.325 CE. See Constantine's circular letter "Calling All Bishops" about the burning of the books of the Platonist Porphyry. The thesis of Charles Freeman is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not just fade away, it was purposefully suppressed. Socrates critical questioning was a menace to the Christian state.

aa5874

What!!! If reliability of manuscripts is meant to confuse then one cannot rely on any claim in the NT.

The claim that Jesus was from Nazareth, was baptized by John and crucified based on the NT was meant to confuse not to be relied on as history if what you say is true.

The reconstruction of the past, History, like Scientific theories MUST depend on Content that is RELIABLE.

Sheshbazzar

The Bible is RELIABLE?

Lugubert

I might have overlooked the answers in this or other threads, but:

How complete are these 24.000 "copies"? There is quite a span between a full NT as intended in the diagram and P52.

Would it be possible to assign them to copy shops/traditions, so that we for example find 4.000 copies from shop A etc., thereby reducing the copy number to a much smaller number of origins?