The New Testament is the best-attested manuscript of Antiquity

Summary:

New Testament documents are better attested than any other works of antiquity. We have a total of over 24,000 manuscripts, including 5,800 in Greek, 10,000 in Latin and between 500 and 1,000 in other languages. It's easy to compare them to reconstruct the original text, as we have 500 manuscripts dating from before the year 500. Before Gutenberg invented the printing press, we already had over 5,700 manuscripts in different languages. That's a record! By way of comparison, the second most attested text we have from antiquity is Homer's epic poem The Iliad, of which we have only 50 copies dating from around 500 years after its origin. Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars is also an example of a comparison often used in this context. The oldest surviving manuscripts of this work date from the early 10th century (over nine hundred years after the author's death!). In all, only 251 manuscript copies of the work exist, yet historians consider the Gallic Wars to be a serious historical source, despite the fact that it is one hundred times less reliably attested than the New Testament manuscripts.

To make this radical difference in historical attestation clear, historians offer the following analogy: "If the average-sized manuscript were two and one half inches thick, all the copies of the works of an average Greek author would stack up four feet high, while the copies of the New Testament would stack up to over a mile high! This is indeed an embarrassment of riches."(J. Ed. Komoszewski, M. J. Sawyer, D. B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss the Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture, Kregel Publications, 2006).

This abundance of manuscripts allows us to compare them with each other and ensure that they have been faithfully transmitted to us with very few variants. This means that they reliably communicate their original message, and are not a conglomeration of distorted stories accumulated over time. If there were a large number of forgery errors, this would be easily detectable by comparing manuscripts from different regions. Let's not forget that the numerous copies were made by professional scribes, trained and paid to carry out their work meticulously. The idea that the latter might have made changes for ideological reasons contradicts everything we know about ancient scribes. Indeed, copying sacred manuscripts was a way of glorifying God. We can only imagine how meticulous the scribes were in carrying out their work, which they regarded as a sacred mission.

As far as the Gospels are concerned, it is possible to ascertain that they began to circulate at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, thanks to quotations from the so-called "apostolic" Church Fathers (Clement, who died in 96; Ignatius, who wrote his letters in 107; and Polycarp in 120). Between them, they attest to knowing 25 of the 27 texts of the New Testament (only Jude and the third letter of John are not mentioned). We can therefore deduce that most of the New Testament books were in circulation before the year 100, which proves that, from the end of the first century, New Testament writings quickly became authoritative among Christians.

In addition, there are 36,000 quotations of the New Testament by the Church Fathers, to the extent that even the atheistic and skeptical exegete Bart Ehrman admits that the writings of these early Fathers constitute such abundant sources that they alone would make it possible to reconstruct the New Testament almost in its entirety if all the 24,000 manuscripts we possess were destroyed (Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Itss Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 126).

The theologian and author J. Warwick Montgomery concluded that the exaggerated distrust of the New Testament was completely unfounded and irrational, and led to the impossibility of having any historical knowledge of the ancient world: "Skepticism about the texts we have from the New Testament plunges all the classics into obscurity, for no other document of antiquity is so bibliographically authenticated as is the New Testament" ― John Warwick Montgomery, History and Christianity.

Going further:

Bruce M. Metzger et Bart D. Erhman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Oxford University Press, 2005.

More information:

• Michael Jones, The Reliability of the New Testament (Textual Corruption), 23 janvier 2015.
• Daniel Wallace, Is the New Testament reliable?, 11 décembre 2020.