Archeological Evidence: Manuscripts

In this blog series on New Testament reliability, we’ve explored a lot of evidence to support its trustworthiness. But one major piece of the puzzle remains: how did we get the New Testament we have today? Where did the stories of Jesus, the early church, and the future judgment come from? Was it all written hundreds or thousands of years after the fact? Was it based oE one old guy’s story? Questions like these can be answered by looking at something called manuscript evidence. Manuscripts are the early, handwritten copies of ancient documents that preserve texts over time. When looking at manuscript evidence, we must examine the data like a historian. We will learn what makes an ancient text more, or less reliable, and what is normal for ancient documents in terms of the manuscript evidence that supports them. Then, we will evaluate how the reliability of the New Testament compares.

When examining the data like a historian, two main questions should be asked: how many manuscripts exist to preserve the text, and how much time has passed between the manuscripts and the events they describe?
When there are more manuscripts of the same text, there are more pieces of the puzzle to put together, verify, and correct one another. If 100 manuscripts contain John 3:16, and 95 of them say “ForGodsolovedtheworld”,2 of them say “ForGod lovedthisworld”and three of them say “For G d so loved the wo ld” we can overlay those texts to see what the true meaning of the text is!

A text is also more trustworthy when there is a smaller time gap between the manuscripts and the events they describe. For example, if right now, you had to write about what you did for Christmas of 2024, it would probably be a more accurate retelling than if you wrote about Christmas of 2024 in 50 years. A smaller time gap also means the manuscript has less copies between itself and the original. This is helpful because each time a manuscript is copied, there is opportunity for error to creep in. To verify that later manuscripts were copied accurately, we want to use the manuscripts that are closest in time to the original text.

Now, let’s apply our knowledge on real ancient documents.

One example of a widely respected ancient document is Homer’s Iliad, the epic poem recounting legendary events of the Trojan War, which happened around 1200 BC. Historians believe this story was first written around 750 BC (450 years after), but we don’t have any manuscripts from 750 BC. In fact, the oldest fragments we have are from 300 BC, which is 900 years after the war it describes! Despite this giant time gap, historians still refer to and rely on the Iliad to understand ancient Greek culture. Today, we have around 643 ancient manuscripts of this poem, and in the realm of ancient documents, that’s an incredible rarity. On average, ancient documents are only preserved by 5 – 20 manuscripts! The Iliad’s 900-year time gap is similar to other ancient texts, most written 500 – 1,500 years after the events they describe. Some of these are works of Plato (7 copies, 1,200 years), and Caesar (10 copies, 1,000 years).

So, if this is what’s normal for ancient documents, is the Bible the same? Was the New Testament created using only a few manuscripts that were written 1000 years or more after Jesus lived? If so, the New Testament wouldn’t seem so trustworthy after all.

Thankfully, we don’t need to be concerned! The New Testament has over 5,600 Greek (original NT language) manuscripts and over 24,000 manuscripts when including copies in other languages. In comparison to the impressive 643 manuscripts for the Iliad, and 5-20 for most other ancient documents, the New Testament has no competition in quantity.

We must also consider how close in time the manuscripts we have are to the events they describe.
While some New Testament manuscripts were written much later—1,400 years after—the earliest manuscript historians have, was written only about 100 years after, around AD 125! While this is impressive on its own, it gets even better. We have manuscripts from every New Testament book, besides 2nd Timothy and 3rd John, written less than 300 years after Jesus.1 Moreover, when we look at only 2nd century (and possibly some 3rd century) manuscripts, they include almost half of our New Testament verses today!2 Rather than a 500 to 1,500 year time gap with 5 to 20 copies, the New Testament has 67 Greek copies within 300 years, and 5,600 by the 14th century.

After looking at the evidence, I pray you can see the good reasons to believe God has preserved His Word! No historical text comes close to the Bible in number of copies or closeness in time. In fact, because of all the evidence, historians estimate that we can know what the original authors of the New Testament wrote with over 99% accuracy! Even the less than 1% that we aren’t sure about doesn’t aEect any major Christian doctrine or teaching. God preserved his word, giving us confidence that is INCOMPARABLE to any other ancient document, so we can trust that what the Bible says today is the same as what it said in the beginning!

Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”

1 https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Earliest-New-Testament-Manuscripts#:~:text=Oxyrhynchus- ,The%20Earliest%20Manuscripts,all%20New%20Testament%20verses6.
2 https://bible.org/article/second-century-papyri