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This means less significant than may appear since it is a comparison across linguistic boundaries. There has been an estimate of between 400,000 variations among all these manuscripts (from the 2nd to 15th century) which is more than there are words in the New Testament. Note, however, that a single difference prevents agreement. When comparing one manuscript to another, with the exception of the smallest fragments, no two copies agree completely throughout. The latest substantial find was in 2008, when 47 new manuscripts were discovered in Albania at least 17 of them unknown to Western scholars. It is not an easy task to reconstruct the original words of the New Testament.Whether or not any of these ancient authors said anything that was true is another question, one we cannot answer simply by appealing to the number of surviving manuscripts that preserve their writings." Bruce Metzger wrote: " Lest, however, the wrong impression be conveyed from the statistics given above regarding the total number of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, it should be pointed out that most of the papyri are relatively fragmentary and that only about fifty manuscripts (of which the Codex Sinaiticus is the only Uncial manuscript) contain the entire New Testament." Įvery year, several New Testament manuscripts handwritten in the original Greek format are discovered. They all contain mistakes - altogether many thousands of mistakes. Textual scholar Bart Ehrman disagrees: " It is true, of course, that the New Testament is abundantly attested in the manuscripts produced through the ages, but most of these manuscripts are many centuries removed from the originals, and none of them perfectly accurate. Because there are more New Testament manuscripts than any other ancient writing (e.g., we only have 10 copies of Julius Caesar's 'The Gallic Wars'), Christian apologists such as Josh Mcdowell and Norman Geisler assert that by literary standards, the New Testament is a reliable witness to the original text. The vast majority of these manuscripts date after the 10th century. The dates of these manuscripts range from circa 125 (the John Ryland's manuscript, P 52 oldest copy of John fragments) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the 15th century. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. Oldest extant mss c.11th century CE, oldest mss available to scholars 16th century CEįolio 65v from Codex Alexandrinus contains the Gospel of Luke with decorative tailpiece. Hebrew, Paleo Hebrew and Greek(Septuagint)Ĭodex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and other earlier papyriĪleppo Codex, Leningrad Codex and other incomplete mss Their methods resulted in significant variations among texts arising at an average rate of just under one consonant in every 1,500. Īncient Jewish scribes developed many practices to protect copies of their scriptures from error. These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE to 70 CE. Notably, there are two scrolls of the Book of Isaiah, one complete ( 1QIs a), and one around 75% complete ( 1QIs b). Every book of the Tanakh is represented except for the Book of Esther however, most are fragmentary. Out of the roughly 800 manuscripts found at Qumran, 220 are from the Tanakh. Before this discovery, the earliest extant manuscripts of the Old Testament were in Greek in manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. The 1947 find at Qumran of the Dead Sea scrolls pushed the manuscript history of the Tanakh back a millennium from the two earliest complete codices (see Tanakh at Qumran). 1008 CE) are the oldest Hebrew language manuscripts of the Tanakh. 2.5 Dating the New Testament manuscriptsĪ page from the Aleppo Codex, Deuteronomy.