The lost originals

We don’t have any of the original Gospel manuscripts¹.

In the same way, we don’t even have any of the original texts of any classical Greco-Roman literature as well.

A vast majority of ancient texts have disappeared in the dust. 85% of Christian writings known by title in the 2nd century CE are lost². The writings of the Roman historian Tacitus exist in only two manuscripts, and it is believed they contain about only half of what he wrote (Jesus legends, 168).

Papyrus & codex

Copies of the Gospels were produced rapidly for a high demand, mostly for the usage in the liturgical meetings, as they were read out loud at a time where they couldn’t no longer afford to have a living eyewitness or an apostolic figure to tell them the stories of Jesus orally.

That was how Mark has composed this Gospel⁶. A literary work might take many days to dictate and weeks to complete (average of 5h a day). Paul’s letter to the Romans might have taken 2-3 weeks or more from the time of dictation to the final version. Copying was much faster⁷.

Just to give you an idea of how long it could have taken for Paul to write his letters.

Daniel B. Wallace and Craig A. Evans estimate a possibility that the original Gospels (autograph) survived up to around 150 CE⁸⁹, or even more.

Because of their limited resources, Christians had to get help from more ‘professional’ scribes from outside the region: Egypt, Italy, Greece, or Turkey¹⁰.

Textual criticism

Because the originals are lost, scholars must use a technique called “textual criticism” to compare all the surviving copies to reconstruct the originals. The more copy we have, the better we can recover.

The earliest fragment we have is called “P52“, from the Gospel of John, found in the Rylands Library (Manchester, UK). It’s about the size of a credit card, and it dates around 125-175 CE. If the Gospel of John is initially written in the 90s CE, then we only have a small gap of only around 30 years.

Just to give you an idea of the time gap is between the original and the first surviving copies.

Our 2 earliest & complete manuscripts:

• Codex Vaticanus (300 – 325 CE)
• Codex Sinaticus (330 – 360 CE)

Three factors can affect the confidence of scholars to determine their reliability:

1. How many copies exist?
2. How large is the time gap between the original & 1st surviving copy?
3. How significant are the differences?

A lot of surviving copies

The average number of surviving copies of any classical Greco-Roman texts is around 20¹⁴.

We have more than 5,856 Greek New Testament manuscript today¹⁵. Not only that, but we also have surviving copies in other languages¹⁶. Giving us a total of 18,130 NT manuscripts.

We can be entirely confident that we have enough manuscript to compare with each other.

Corruption of the texts

Scribes make mistakes

We have a ton of surviving texts! But scribes accidentally or intentionally edited several passages of the New Testament while they were copying them. Scribes got tired; they didn’t know Greek, had terrible eyesight and had a ton of reason behind the mistakes. The proof: not a single manuscript is precisely the same as another one.

Scholars estimate around 750K+ variants between all the New Testament copies that we have. With only 140K words in the New Testament, we can assume that there are more mistakes than there are words.

That is a bias claim: the reasons why we have so many variants, it’s because we have a ton of surviving copies, and they have many translations. If we only have two surviving copies, there would be fewer ‘errors’ between them. And if we only have the originals, then we would have 0 errors.

One example of intentional ‘mistake’: P45, P66 and P75 abbreviated the word ‘stauros’ to create what scholars call a ‘taurho’ compendium. Many manuscripts are written in tiny print for private reading or pocket edition (easy transportation)¹⁷.

Do they matter?

Even if true, 99% of them don’t make any difference.
We are talking here about small grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, etc.

Then, what about the 1% that remains?
None of them affect any single fundamental doctrine of the faith¹⁸.

“In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.” ¹⁹
Bart D. Ehrman

Added stories

As Daniel Wallace stated, only 2% of content was added within fourteen century²⁰. Some of those passages aren’t found in the oldest manuscripts we have²¹.

• the woman taken in adultery (Jn 7:53-8:11)
• Jesus telling his disciples they can drink poison and handle snakes (Mk 16:9-20)
• the Father, Son & Holy Spirit, all 3 are one (1 Jn 5:7)

But that’s not an issue. The story of the adulterer doesn’t affect theology at all. It’s just a nice story that could possibly happen. And even without the ending of Mark²² & John’s trinitarian²³ formula, these passages are already corroborated in the other Gospels and Paul’s letters.

Church Fathers

If we destroy all the 4 Gospels, we can (almost) reconstruct the entire New Testament using quotations from the Church Fathers alone²⁴.

In 1920, Fr. Joseph Denk found more than 700K quotes toward the New Testament²⁵.

Today, it’s estimated that we have more than 1 million of them²⁶.
Do the math: The New Testament has around 8k verses.
Divide that, and you’ll get an ‘average’ of 125 quotes per verses.

From under 50 years removed from John’s Gospel, J. Warner Wallace estimates around 80 features that corroborated the 3 Apostolic Father’s letters with the claims of the New Testament: 47 from Ignatius, 14 from Polycarp and 19 from Clement²⁷.

The Patristic period starts from the Apostles, and end up to around 749 CE. Within 400 years, there are already 36,389 citations coming from 7 Church Fathers²⁸.