The Faithful Transmission of the New Testament in Time

More and earlier copies

New Testament manuscript evidence is far superior to that of other ancient works. That is to say, there are more extant manuscript copies, and much closer to the original compositions, when compared to other well-regarded ancient works. The chart below shows a comparison of the New Testament manuscript evidence against that of other ancient works.

As can be seen from the chart, while we have as many as 210 manuscript copies of Plato's Tetralogies and 109 copies of Herodotus' History. However, the New Testament is supported by as many as 5,500 Greek manuscripts (the original language) and 18,000 translated manuscripts. Likewise, while we have manuscripts of Livy's History of Rome that date to within 500 years of the original composition and manuscripts of Homer's Iliad that date to within 400 years of the original composition, the New Testament is supported by manuscripts that date to within 100 years of the original composition.

Textual critics of ancient documents rely on multiple, early, and independent copies of the original works in order to better reconstruct what the original authors wrote. The New Testament, with its many early copies found throughout the ancient world in different languages, stands out as one of the most faithfully transmitted set of documents in all history. Some hyper-skeptics are not impressed with the manuscript evidence for the New Testament and regard modern reconstructions as utterly corrupt and detached from the originals. Since the New Testament is supported by superior manuscript evidence, applying equal skepticism to all ancient works would force us to discard virtually all knowledge about the ancient past. This may be acceptable for the hyper-skeptic, but most reasonable people do not go as far.

The witness of the early Fathers

Over 1 million quotations of the NT can be found in the homilies and commentaries of the Early Fathers. “So extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” (Metzger, B. M., & Ehrman, B. D. (2005). The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 126.)

Additionally, consider the following quotes from two quotations from the patristic sources which inform this discussion:

Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics 36, (A.D. c.160)

“…run over [to] the apostolic churches, in which the very thrones of the apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally.”

The Latin word used authenticae often refers to original documents, but here it may refer to complete and intact copies of the NT. Either way, this quote shows how valued such manuscripts were to the Early Fathers.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5:30:1 (A.D. c.180)

“…this number [of the beast] being found in all the most approved and ancient copies [of Revelation].”

Bishop of Lyons Irenaeus suggests here that he had access to very early copies of Revelation. This shows that the early Church was serious about creating and retaining early copies of the New Testament works. Furthermore, when questions arose, Irenaeus pointed to these early copies as authoritative, demonstrating that the early Church understood (as modern scholars understand today) that it was important to return to the earliest copies.

Textual corruption?

While thousands of variants exist among the NT manuscripts, the grand majority of them are trivial errors that do not affect the meaning of the text. Even New Testament critic and skeptic Dr. Bart Ehrman agreed with the position of another scholar, Dr. Bruce Metzger, that “essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” A breakdown of the nature of the textual variants is shown below. As can be seen, only about 1% of these variants are even considered meaningful and viable (meaning they have been part of the original works), yet even these variants are only considered to alter the meaning of the text slightly, and essential Christian teachings are absolutely unaffected.