Manuscript Evidence Of The Bible
The New Testament is constantly under attack and its reliability and accuracy are often
contested by critics. But, if the critics want to disregard the New Testament, then they
must also disregard other ancient writings by Plato, Aristotle, and Homer. This is
because the New Testament documents are better preserved and more numerous than
any other ancient writing. Because the copies are so numerous, they can be cross
checked for accuracy. This process has determined that the biblical documents are
extremely consistent and accurate.
Procedure for Testing a Document's Validity
All ancient documents go through the same test, whether they are of spiritual nature or non-spiritual
nature. The God of the bible has no problem with scrutiny or close examination. He is the God who says, “test
all things”.
1. Bibliographical (i.e, the textual tradition from the original document to the copies and manuscripts
of that document we possess today)
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External evidence (how the document squares or aligns itself with facts, dates, persons from its own
contemporary world).
The Materials Of Extant N.T. Greek Manuscripts
Papyrus
During the early Christian era, the writing material most commonly used
was papyrus. This highly durable reed from the Nile Valley was glued together
much like plywood and then allowed to dry in the sun. In the twentieth century
many remains of documents (both biblical and non-biblical) on papyrus have been
discovered, especially in the dry, arid lands of North Africa and the Middle East.
Parchment
This was made from the skin of sheep or goats, and was in wide use
until the late Middle Ages when paper began to replace it. It was scarce and
more expensive; hence, it was used almost exclusively for important
documents.
Examples
1. Codex/Book - Vaticanus and Codex Siniaticus
These are two parchment copies of the entire New Testament which date from the 4th century
(325-450 A.D.).
2. Older Papyrii
Earlier still, fragments and papyrus copies of portions of the New Testament date from
100 to 200 years (180-225 A.D.) before Vaticanus and Sinaticus. The outstanding ones are
the Chester Beatty Papyrus and the Bodmer Papyrus II, XIV, XV .
From these five manuscripts alone, we can construct:
All of Luke, John, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2
Thessalonians, Hebrews, and portions of Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Revelation. Only the Pastoral Epistles
(Titus, 1 and 2 Timothy) and the General Epistles (James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1, 2, and 3 John) and Philemon
are excluded.
3. The oldest Fragment
1. Perhaps the earliest piece of Scripture surviving is a fragment of a papyrus codex containing John
18:31-33 and 37. It is called the Rylands Papyrus and dates from 130 A.D., having been found in
Egypt. The Rylands Papyrus has forced the critics to place the fourth gospel back into the first
century, abandoning their earlier assertion that it could not have been written then by the Apostle
John.
Extant Manuscripts (Manuscripts available today)


There are presently 5,686 Greek manuscripts in existence today for the New Testament,
(There are no original manuscripts ["autographs"] extant, but the number and similarity of copies
allows scholars to reconstruct the originals.)
If we were to compare the number of New Testament manuscripts to other ancient
writings, we find that the New Testament manuscripts far outweigh the others in
quantity.
Author
Lucretius
Date
Written
Earliest
Copy
died 55 or 53
B.C.
Approximate Time Span
between original & copy
Number of
Copies
Accuracy of
Copies
1100 yrs
2
----
Pliny
61-113 A.D.
850 A.D.
750 yrs
7
----
Plato
427-347 B.C.
900 A.D.
1200 yrs
7
----
1100 A.D.
800 yrs
8
----
Demosthenes 4th Cent. B.C.
Herodotus
480-425 B.C.
900 A.D.
1300 yrs
8
----
Suetonius
75-160 A.D.
950 A.D.
800 yrs
8
----
Thucydides
460-400 B.C.
900 A.D.
1300 yrs
8
----
Euripides
480-406 B.C.
1100 A.D.
1300 yrs
9
----
Aristophanes
450-385 B.C.
900 A.D.
1200
10
----
Caesar
100-44 B.C.
900 A.D.
1000
10
----
Livy
59 BC-AD 17
----
???
20
----
Tacitus
circa 100 A.D.
1100 A.D.
1000 yrs
20
----
Aristotle
384-322 B.C.
1100 A.D.
1400
49
----
Sophocles
496-406 B.C.
1000 A.D.
1400 yrs
193
----
900 B.C.
400 B.C.
500 yrs
643
95%
1st Cent. A.D.
(50-100 A.D.
2nd Cent.
A.D.
(c. 130
A.D. f.)
less than 100 years
5600
99.5%
Homer
(Iliad)
New
Testament
Fact: as you can clearly see here are thousands more New Testament Greek manuscripts than any
other ancient writing.
1. The internal consistency of the New Testament documents is about 99.5% textually pure. That
is an amazing accuracy.
2. In addition there are over 19,000 copies in the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic languages.
The total supporting New Testament manuscript base is over 24,000.
3. Almost all biblical scholars agree that the New Testament documents were all written before the
close of the first century.
4. If Jesus was crucified in 30 A.D., then that means that the entire New Testament was
completed within 70 years.
5. This is important because it means there were plenty of people around when the New
Testament documents were penned who could have contested the writings. In other words,
those who wrote the documents knew that if they were inaccurate, plenty of people would have
pointed it out. But, we have absolutely no ancient documents contemporary with the first
century that contest the New Testament texts.
6. Furthermore, another important aspect of this discussion is the fact that we have a fragment of
the gospel of John that dates back to around 29 years from the original writing. This is
extremely close to the original writing date. This is simply unheard of in any other ancient
writing and it demonstrates that the Gospel of John is a first century document.
Below is a chart with some of the oldest extant New Testament manuscripts compared to when
they were originally penned. Compare these time spans with the next closest which is Homer's Iliad
where the closest copy from the original is 500 years later. Undoubtedly, that period of time allows for
more textual corruption in its transmission. How much less so for the New Testament documents?
To be skeptical of the 27 documents in the New Testament, and to say they are unreliable is to allow all
of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested
bibliographically as these in the New Testament.
Important
Manuscript
Papyri
Contents
p52
(John Rylands
Fragment)3
John 18:31-33,37-38
P
(Chester Beatty
Papyrus)
Rom. 5:17-6:3,5-14; 8:15-25, 2735, 37-9:32; 10:1-11, 22, 24-33,
35-14:8,9-15:9, 11-33; 16:1-23,
25-27; Heb.; 1 & 2 Cor., Eph., Gal.,
Phil., Col.; 1 Thess. 1:1,9-10; 2:13; 5:5-9, 23-28
46
P66
John 1:1-6:11,35-14:26; fragment
(Bodmer Papyrus) of 14:29-21:9
P67
Matt. 3:9,15; 5:20-22, 25-28
Date
Original
Written
MSS
Date
Approx.
Time
Span
circa
96 A.D.
circa
125
A.D.
29 yrs
50's-70's
circa
200
A.D.
Chester Beatty Museum,
Approx. Dublin & Ann Arbor,
150 yrs Michigan, University of
Michigan library
70's
circa
200
A.D.
Approx.
Cologne, Geneva
130 yrs
circa
200
A.D.
Approx. Barcelona, Fundacion San
130 yrs Lucas Evangelista, P. Barc.1
Location
John Rylands Library,
Manchester, England
If the critics of the Bible dismiss the New Testament as reliable information, then they must also
dismiss the reliability of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Homer, and the other authors mentioned
in the chart at the beginning of the paper. On the other hand, if the critics acknowledge the historicity
and writings of those other individuals, then they must also retain the historicity and writings of the New
Testament authors; after all, the evidence for the New Testament's reliability is far greater than the
others. The Christian has substantially superior criteria for affirming the New Testament documents than
he does for any other ancient writing. It is good evidence on which to base the trust in the reliability of
the New Testament.
DID YOU KNOW?

Clement of Rome (a disciple of the apostles) cited Matthew, John, and 1 Corinthians in 95 to 97 A.D. Ignatius
(who knew the apostles well) referred to six Pauline Epistles in about 110. Polycarp (disciple of apostle John)
quoted from all four Gospels, Acts, and most of Paul's Epistles from 110 to 150. Taitian's harmony of the Four
Gospels completed in 160 A.D. Irenaeus (who apparently heard the apostles) quoted from Matthew, John, Acts,
and 1 Corinthians in 160 A.D.

Of the four Gospels alone, there are 19,368 citations by the church fathers from the late first century on. Even if
we had no manuscripts, virtually the entire New Testament could be reconstructed from these quotations. This
argues powerfully that the Gospels were in existence before the end of the first century, while some eyewitnesses
(including John) were still alive.
Reliability of the Old Testament


Jewish scholars performed "unbelievable" care in copying
and preserving Scripture.
The Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 are dated from the
third century B.C to the first century A.D. These
manuscripts predate by 1000 years the previous oldest
manuscripts. There is word for word identity in more than
95% of the cases, and the 5% variation consists mostly of
slips of the pen and spelling.
In 1947, a young Bedouin goat herdsman discovered some strange clay jars in caves near the valley of
the Dead Sea. Inside the jars were some leather scrolls. The discovery of these "Dead Sea Scrolls" at Qumran
has been hailed as the outstanding archeological discovery of the twentieth century. The scrolls have revealed
that a commune of monastic people called “Essenes” lived in the Dead Sea Valley area from 150 B.C. to 70 A.D.
Most scholars believe that when the Essenes saw the Romans invade the land they put their cherished scrolls in
clay jars and hid them in the caves on the cliffs of Qumran northwest of the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea Scrolls include a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, a fragmented copy of
Isaiah, containing much of Isaiah 38-6, and fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament.




The majority of the fragments are from Isaiah and the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy).
The books of Samuel, in a tattered copy, were also found and also two complete chapters of the
book of Habakkuk. In addition, there were a number of non-biblical scrolls related to the
commune found.
These materials are dated around 100 B.C. The significance of the find, and particularly the copy
of Isaiah, was recognized by Merrill F. Unger when he said, "This complete document of Isaiah
quite understandably created a sensation since it was the first major Biblical manuscript of great
antiquity ever to be recovered.
Interest in it was especially keen since it antedates by more than a thousand years
the oldest Hebrew texts preserved in the Massoretic tradition."
The supreme value of these Qumran documents lies in the ability of biblical scholars to compare
them with the Massoretic Hebrew texts of the tenth century A.D. If, upon examination, there were little or no
textual changes in those Massoretic texts where comparisons were possible, an assumption could then be made
that the Massoretic Scribes had probably been just as faithful in their copying of the other biblical texts which
could not be compared with the Qumran material.
What was learned?
A comparison of the Qumran manuscript of Isaiah with the Massoretic text revealed them to be
extremely close in accuracy to each other: "A comparison of Isaiah 53 shows that only 17 letters differ from the
Massoretic text.
a.
b.
c.
d.
Ten of these are mere differences in spelling (like our "honor" and the English "honour") and
produce no change in the meaning at all.
Four more are very minor differences, such as the presence of a conjunction (and) which are
stylistic rather than substantive.
The other three letters are the Hebrew word for "light." This word was added to the text by
someone after "they shall see" in verse 11.
Out of 166 words in this chapter, only this one word is really in question, and it does not at
all change the meaning of the passage. We are told by biblical scholars that this is typical of
the whole manuscript of Isaiah."
The Septuagint
The Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, also confirms the accuracy of the
copyists who ultimately gave us the Massoretic text. The Septuagint is often referred to as the LXX because it
was reputedly done by seventy Jewish scholars in Alexandria around 200 B.C. The LXX was a very literal
translation from the Hebrew, and the manuscripts we have are pretty good copies of the original translation.
You can now be sure that copyists worked with great care and accuracy on the Old Testament, even back to 225
B.C.
Think About It
"The interval then, between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes
so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to
us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of
the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.” (The Bible and Archaeology, Sir
Frederic G. Kenyon, former director and principal librarian of the British Museum, stated about the New
Testament)
Setting aside measly trivialities such as changes of order, the insertion or omission of the article with
proper names, they all add up to less than a thousandth part of the whole New Testament." In other words, the
small changes and variations in manuscripts change no major doctrine: they do not affect Christianity in the
least. The message is the same with or without the variations. We have the Word of God.
The evidence for the early existence of the New Testament writings is undeniable for anyone who will
look at the evidence. The wealth of materials for the New Testament becomes even more significant when we
compare it with other ancient documents which have been accepted without question.
If the critics of the Bible dismiss the New Testament as reliable information, then they must also
dismiss the reliability of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Homer, and the other authors.
On the other hand, if the critics acknowledge the historicity and writings of those other
individuals, then they must also retain the historicity and writings of the New Testament
authors; after all, the evidence for the New Testament's reliability is far greater than the others. The Christian
has substantially superior criteria for affirming the New Testament documents than he does for any other
ancient writing. It is good evidence on which to base the trust in the reliability of the New Testament.