The Documentary Evidence - Bible Learning Center

Were Jesus’s Biographies Reliably Preserved for Use?

There are no surviving original manuscripts of the New Testament.
Compared to other ancient texts, the New Testament has by far the most manuscript copies.
Today there have been over 5,000 Greek manuscripts cataloged, many dating back to within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals.
In addition to Greek manuscripts, there are thousands of other ancient New Testament manuscripts in other languages. There are 8,000 to 10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts, plus a total of 8,000 in Ethiopic, Slavic, and Armenian. In all, there are about 24,000 manuscripts in existence.

Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about 116 AD. His first six books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about 850 AD.
We have nine Greek manuscripts of the first-century historian Josephus’ The Jewish War, which were copied in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.
There are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad (800 BC) that were copied in the second and third century AD.
The manuscript evidence for the New Testament is overwhelming when juxtaposed against other revered writings of antiquity—works that modern scholars have absolutely no reluctance treating as authentic.

The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri discovered in 1930 contain portions of the four gospels and the book of Acts. It dates back to the third century.
A fragment of the gospel of John, containing material from chapter eighteen, dates back to 100-150 AD.

There are tens of thousands of variations among the ancient manuscripts.
But in Greek, one word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sentence; consequently, the meaning of the sentence isn’t distorted if the words are out of what we consider to be the right order.
Variations, when they occur, tend to be minor rather than substantive. And the more significant variations do not overthrow any doctrine of the church.

First, the books must have apostolic authority—that is, they must have been written either by apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of apostles.
Second, the books must conform to the rule of faith—that is, the document must be congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative.
Third, the book had to have had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.
The canon (books of the New Testament) was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics.
The canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn’t derive their authority from being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together.