Can You Prove It?

2.3.ii How Close in Time?

Not only do we have a lot of manuscript copies of the New Testament documents, but they go back very close in time to the original writers. There are many manuscripts from within four centuries of when the books were first written. (Four centuries may sound like a lot, but it is small compared to the gap for most other ancient manuscripts - see the next section.) One of the most important of these is the Codex [=book form, rather than scroll or parchment] Siniaticus. The British Government bought this from the Government of the Soviet Union in 1933, for the then-huge sum of £100,000. It is now found in the British Museum. We have some manuscripts dating back to the second century, and we have fragments of manuscripts dating back to only thirty years or so after the documents were originally written.

In 'The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict', Josh McDowell cites for comparison Homer's 'Iliad'. There are 643 manuscript copies of the Iliad, and the earliest dates back only to the thirteenth century. Yet scholars do not doubt that we have essentially what Homer wrote.

Or consider the 'Gallic Wars', written about the same time as the New Testament. The 'Gallic Wars' was written in the first century BC, by Julius Caesar. Our earliest copy of it dates from one thousand years later, and there are only about ten copies altogether. But historians don't doubt that it's authentic.

By comparison, the earliest manuscripts of parts of the New Testament date from only twenty-five years after they were written.

In fact, the New Testament documents were the most copied, and most widely circulated, of any ancient documents. No other ancient document comes anywhere near this number of copies.