Section 03
5,800 manuscripts
The New Testament is the best attested set of documents from antiquity, by an enormous margin.
Counting Greek manuscripts of the New Testament gives roughly 5,800. Adding Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other early translations brings the total to about 25,000.
For comparison: Homer survives in roughly 1,800 manuscripts, Plato in 210, Tacitus in 33, Caesar’s Gallic Wars in 10. The New Testament is in a different category.
Bart Ehrman, an agnostic textual critic, counts about 400,000 textual variants. Daniel Wallace counters that less than one percent are meaningful and viable. None affect any core doctrine.
If the questions concern what the authors of the New Testament wrote, we are in fairly good shape.
Bart Ehrman (agnostic), Misquoting Jesus, 2005, p. 252.
By the numbers
- Greek manuscripts
- ~5,800
- Total in all languages
- ~25,000
- Plato manuscripts
- ~210
- Tacitus Annals manuscripts
- ~33
- Earliest fragment (P52)
- ~125 AD
Strongest counter position
A skeptical position holds that variants, while not affecting doctrine, mean we cannot know the authors’ wording precisely in every detail. The site grants the partial point.
What this does not prove
The site does not claim the text is perfect in every detail. It claims the text is recoverable to a high degree of confidence, and that no doctrine depends on a contested variant.
Citations
- Daniel B. Wallace, Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament, 2011.
- Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 2005.
- Komoszewski, Sawyer, Wallace, Reinventing Jesus, 2006.
Goes deeper