“I’ll be honest with you,” I said to Metzger. “When I first found out that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, I was really skeptical. I thought, If all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have any confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written? How do you respond to that?”
“This isn’t an issue that’s unique to the Bible; it’s a question we can ask of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity,” he replied. “But what the New Testament has in its favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived.”
“Why is that important?” I asked.
“Well, the more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way they’d agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts.”
“OK,” I said, “I can see that having a lot of copies from various places can help. But what about the age of the documents? Certainly that’s important as well, isn’t it?”
“Quite so,” he replied. “And this is something else that favors the New Testament. We have copies commencing within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in the case of other ancient texts, maybe five, eight, or ten centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy.
“In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time—into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of others—Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety.”
“How does that help?”
“Because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. In addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church
fathers.”
While that seemed impressive, it was difficult to judge this evidence in isolation. I needed some context to better appreciate the uniqueness of the New Testament. How, I wondered, did it compare with other well-known works of antiquity?
A Mountain of Manuscripts
“When you talk about a great multiplicity of manuscripts,” I said, “how does that contrast with other ancient books that are routinely accepted by scholars as being reliable? For instance, tell me about the writing of authors from about the time of Jesus.”
Having anticipated the question, Metzger referred to some handwritten notes he had brought along.
“Consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about AD 116,” he began. “His first six books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about AD 850. Books eleven through sixteen are in another manuscript dating from the eleventh century. Books seven through ten are lost. So there is a long gap between the time that Tacitus sought his information and wrote it down and the only existing copies.
“With regard to the first-century historian Josephus, we have nine Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War, and these copies were written in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. There is a Latin translation from the fourth century and medieval Russian materials from the eleventh or twelfth century.”
Those numbers were surprising. There is but the thinnest thread of manuscripts connecting these ancient works to the modern world. “By comparison,” I asked, “how many New Testament Greek manuscripts are in existence today?”
Metzger’s eyes got wide. “More than five thousand have been cataloged,” he said with enthusiasm, his voice going up an octave.
Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ Movie Edition: Solving the Biggest Mystery of All Time (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).
