Defenders of the NT text mention 5000 manuscripts, but these are mostly irrelevant, and the early evidence is very partial. Therefore, the NT text cannot be trusted. Response?

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Dr. John Oakes wrote in Bible Manuscripts and Textual Questions, General, Q & A, Reliability of the Bible.

Editor’s note: This question is most likely coming from a Muslim source who is trying to undercut the evidence for the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts. He/she is attempting to undermine the evidence, to claim its strength is exaggerated by believers.

Question:

Not all NT writings are attested by 5000+ manuscripts. Thus, by stating that there are 5000+ manuscripts of the NT, a misleading impression is given as if there are 5000+ manuscripts of all the individual NT writings. Textual critics do not count manuscripts; they consider the quality and age of manuscripts. Of the 5000+ manuscripts, around 90% belong to the Byzantine text type. This is deemed to be the worst and the latest of the text types. As a result, manuscripts of this text type are barely used to reconstruct the earliest forms of the NT text. The vast majority of the manuscripts are from the Middle Ages, and hardly 2.5% from the first five centuries. The earliest NT manuscripts are fragmentary and completely lacking from the first century. For the major part of the second century, there was nothing, save the tiny p52 and p90. Substantial witnesses only began to emerge from around c. 200. The vast majority of manuscripts date from the 9th century and onward. Nevertheless, the nature of the Gospel tradition means that we cannot simply take everything recorded in all the Gospels as unquestionably genuine reports about what Jesus said or did. What do you say?

Answer:

Typically, those who mention the 5000+ ancient Greek manuscripts do so in order to compare the New Testament manuscript evidence to the number of extant manuscripts of other ancient works. The person making this statement is stating truth–that most of those 5000 manuscripts are of the Byzantine type. But the point of New Testament scholars is to compare the New Testament to other ancient documents, such as the copies of Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Caesar and similar writings. When we do so, the case for the New Testament is revealed to be extraordinarily strong. Here are some examples:

Caesar’s Gallic Wars Written 58-50 BC Oldest manuscript in Latin AD 850—900 years later. There are about 10 Latin manuscripts, mostly only partial.
Tacitus AD 100 4-1/2 of 14 Histories and 12 of 16 Annals survive. Only 2 Latin manuscripts—one from 9th, the other from the 11th century.
Herodotus and Thucydides. Both from 5th century BC. Both have 8 Greek manuscripts, both from about AD 900. More than 1300 years after the original.

Qualitatively, the same holds for Aristotle and Plato as for Herodotus.

In each of these important ancient documents, the oldest manuscript we have is several hundred or even well over a thousand years after the original. So, the statistics are this:

All these important docs: 10 or less total manuscripts, virtually all partial, all many hundreds after the original.

Bible: 5000+ manuscripts, many complete, but also many partial, the oldest being about 40 years after the original.

There is a massive difference between the New Testament evidence and that of any other ancient document. The New Testament is the best attested ancient writing, by far. This is the plain truth. The attempt of the author above to minimize this fact is misleading at best.

The facts in the article are nearly correct. However, they are presented in a highly biased way. For example, 2.5 % of 5000 manuscripts, means that there are nearly 150 manuscripts from the New Testament within 350 years of their writing. This compares to zero–let me repeat–ZERO for all these other ancient writings. Again, the evidence for the New Testament is overwhelmingly strong. The person you are quoting is correct to say that the later, Byzantine texts are of less importance, mainly because they are all so similar, but also because they are later. But let us put this in context… these manuscripts are about as long after the original than the oldest manuscripts of the other ancient writers, which should be noted. If we ignore the few hundred truly ancient manuscripts, and only compare those from around a thousand years later, the New Testament has about 5000 of these, while the other ancient texts only have a few. This is why it is relevant to mention the 5000 manuscripts.

Also, this person understates the evidence somewhat. There are more like ten manuscripts from the second century, not just two. This person is correct that the very early manuscripts are only fragmentary. However, comparing the similarity of the very early fragments to the Byzantine text allows us to get a good feeling for the quality of the rest of the text, for which we do not have extremely early manuscripts. Besides, what the author does not mention is that we have three entire New Testaments from the fourth century. The Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus codexes are entire Greek New Testaments from around 300 years after the original. Again, this is very strong attestation to the reliability of the Greek New Testament, and we have no analogous manuscript evidence for any other ancient Greek or Latin texts. None..

Those who do lower criticism of the New Testament (looking at the available manuscripts) estimate that the Greek New Testament we have is somewhere between 99.5 and 99.8% accurate, and that the tiny fraction about which there is any doubt appears to have no significant impact on what we know about Jesus or any Christian doctrine. This article is largely accurate in the facts it lists, which is to be commended, but it is also biased in that it implies that we do not have a reliable Greek New Testament. The facts very strongly speak otherwise.

John Oakes

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Defenders of the NT text mention 5000 manuscripts, but these are mostly irrelevant, and the early evidence is very partial. Therefore, the NT text cannot be trusted. Response?