When Christians mention that there are more than 5000 Greek manuscripts of the NT, they create a false impression, because the great majority are very late and not helpful to the accuracy of the text.
Question:
Christian Apologists often combine two separate facts to create a false impression: they point out that the earliest fragments date to the 2nd century, and then state that there are over 5,000 manuscripts. This leads people to assume there are thousands of 2nd-century documents. In reality, the earliest centuries are represented by a mere handful of fragments. The overwhelming majority (roughly 95%) of those 5,800 Greek manuscripts date from the 9th to the 16th centuries. Many of those 5,800 entries are scraps of papyrus the size of a credit card, containing only a few verses or even a few broken letters. Further, Christian Apologists claim that “The text is 99% pure across manuscripts” but the math is inflated because late-medieval scribes were copying from the same standardized Byzantine text type, meaning late copies just repeat the same late variations.” What is your response?
Answer:
Your teacher is stating something which has a grain of truth. First of all, there are about a dozen manuscripts from the second century AD, as well as a couple dozen more manuscripts from the third century. In addition, there are three complete Greek manuscripts from the early fourth century, as well as dozens more from the fourth century. Taken all together, this trove of evidence provides extremely strong manuscript support to the reliability of the Greek New Testament.
Your teacher points out that, when Christian apologists mention the 5000 Greek manuscripts available to us, the large majority are of the Byzantine text type, meaning that they come from the ninth century or later, and therefore add very little extra evidence to support the reliability of the original Greek text. To this extent, I suppose he can argue that mentioning the 5000 texts gives a somewhat biased view of the evidence for the New Testament text.
Speaking for myself, I do occasionally mention the 5000 texts, but I only do it when comparing the textual evidence for the New Testament when compared to the works of Tacitus, Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato and others. In this case, we are comparing apples to apples, so to speak. In other words, we are comparing the total number of available texts, including the ones closer to the original writing, as well as ones quite a bit later. So, when I mention 5000 Greek texts of the New Testament versus 12 texts for the writings of Aristotle, there is no bias there. In both cases we are looking at overall, total numbers.
But… Speaking for myself, when I talk about the reliability of the actual Greek text, I only refer to the truly ancient manuscripts. In that context I do not mention the 5000 manuscripts, most of which are not all that relevant. So, in this case, when defending the reliability of the Greek New Testament, I list the manuscripts we have from the second century, providing pictures of the actual manuscripts, as well as those from the third century, and slides of Codex Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, from the early fourth century. Of course, we also have evidence from the thousands of quotes from Christian authors in the second through fourth centuries, as well as Coptic and Latin translations from as early as the second century.
I believe that the criticism here is misplaced, because what matters is whether the Greek New Testament is a reliable version of the original. In this case, using the complete manuscripts from the early fourth, as well as the earlier manuscripts, as well as the quotes of the second and third century church fathers, scholars can conclude with GREAT confidence that the Greek New Testament we have is at least 99.5% accurate, and this is a conservative statement. These are the facts. Period.
By they way, you have misquoted Christian apologists here in a rather blatant way. You say that Christians claim the New Testament manuscripts agree across all manuscripts to the 99% level. This is NOT TRUE. I have never heard anyone making this claim. The claim, based on evidence, is that when we take into consideration all of the manuscripts, including many extremely minor spelling changes, word order changes and the like, which are easily corrected, and when we produce a final textually criticized text. It is THIS TEXT—this scholarly reproduced text, based on massive research, which is at least 99.5% accurate. Please do not mischaracterize the claim of Christian scholars here. I suppose it is your teacher, not you who made this inaccurate statement, so I can forgive you easily. But… You should be skeptical of this teacher you are quoting as to his motivations.
Here is what bothers me a bit when I hear Muslim apologists making this argument. What they fail to note is the lack of quality evidence for the Arabic Qur’an. The Caliph Uthman, who noted all the discrepancies in the text of the Qur’an chose to eliminate all the outstanding texts, and to create a single unified text. He did so about 50 years after the originals were written, which is similar to the time between the writing of the New Testament and the oldest extant manuscripts. There are two problems with this. In the process, he eliminated nearly all the evidence for the wide variety of Qur’anic texts. Only a couple of manuscripts survived his attempt to destroy all disparate texts, which includes the Sana’a manuscript from Sana’a in Yemen. When this text was studied, hundreds of textual variants were uncovered, and that is with only a single manuscript! What is ironic is that Muslim scholars refuse to work on this text, as to talk about textual variants in the Qur’an is to risk one’s life.
As for the New Testament, there are dozens of scholars today whose life is devoted to looking at all the available manuscript evidence, and to help to restore as precise an original as possible. Their tireless efforts have created a wonderfully precise Greek text. Ironically, Muslims refuse to do this. As far as I know, Muslims make literally no effort to try to reproduce the accurate original of the Qur’an. Instead they make the blatantly false statement that they have the perfect original–a claim which cannot be supported by the evidence. For this reason, we can say with great confidence that the text of the Greek New Testament is considerably more reliable than the accepted text of the Qur’an. What do Muslims do about this fact? They ignore it!!! And I am not exaggerating here! Instead, they continue to pour out exaggerated and sometimes completely false claims about the problems with the New Testament text. The hypocrisy here is very clear. I believe that your teacher ought to spend more time helping to repair and correct the Quranic text errors, and let Christians do their hard work to critique the Greek New Testament. Unfortunately, Uthman made his job rather difficult.
But here is the problem. Muslims proclaim loudly the New Testament is corrupt. Why? Because of the evidence? No! Because the statements by Muhammad are in diametric opposition to what the New Testament says. Muslims are between a rock and a hard place here. They have a leader who said things clearly opposed to the New Testament, for example on things so basic as whether Jesus was crucified or not, and what Jesus said about himself. They MUST insist the New Testament is corrupt. But is there any chance the New Testament has been so corrupted so as to add a fake story about the crucifixion? There is no textual uncertainty which will take away the crucifixion or the statement that Jesus is God. This is an absolutely ludicrous proposal, as all Muslim apologists are well aware. But… They continue their campaign to unfairly impugn the New Testament. Good luck with this attempt, given the overwhelming evidence for the reliability of the Greek New Testament.
To summarize, I suppose it is true that some Christian apologists have overplayed the fact that there are more than 5000 Greek manuscripts. If they do so without also mentioning that the number of truly ancient and therefore truly important manuscripts is more like a couple hundred, then perhaps they ought to present a fuller picture. This is a legitimate criticism, at least of some apologists, though I have not been guilty personally of this error. But… Good point. However, it is rather clear the motivation behind this effort. It is to cast aspersions on the New Testament, and to create a false sense of how unreliable it is, and also an attempt to take our attention away from the much larger issue of the reliability of the Qur’an.
John Oakes
