Preservation Of Scripture
No ancient book has been better preserved through the centuries than the Bible.
By way of comparison:
Herodotus’s History - only eight (8) manuscripts have survived, the oldest dating to approximately 1300 years after the original.
Caesar’s Gallic Wars - a mere ten (10) manuscripts have been discovered, the earliest of which is a thousand years removed from its author.
History of the Peloponnesian War – only eight (8) manuscripts survive, all of them dating more than 13 centuries after the original.
Manuscript
Number Surviving
Number of years elapsed from original to oldest manuscript found
Herodotus’s History
8
1,300
Caesar’s Gallic Wars
10
1,000
History of the Peloponnesian War
8
1,300
Illiad
643
New Testament (Greek copies)
5,000
New Testament (Greek, Latin, Ethiopic)
25,000
Some only 25 to 50 years
When it comes to the preservation of ancient manuscripts, no other text comes close to the writings of Scripture. There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.
The second most well-attested work of antiquity is Homer’s Iliad – 643 surviving copies have been found.
Ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament number more than 5,000 – ranging from small fragments of papyri to complete codices containing all 27 books.
A few of those manuscripts are only 25 to 50 years removed from the originals. When ancient manuscripts (such as Latin and Ethiopic) are included, the number mushroom to nearly 25,000.
Additional testimony comes the ante-Nicene church fathers, whose writings contain some 32,000 citations or allusion to the New Testament text.
In His sovereign, providence, the Holy Spirit preserved a myriad of ancient witnesses to the biblical text so that, after two millennia, believers can rest assured in the trustworthiness of Scripture.
The science of textual criticism analyzes and compares ancient biblical manuscripts to determine the contents of the original autographs. Before the invention of the printing press around 1450, biblical manuscripts were copied entirely by hand, sometimes resulting in scribal errors.
But through the careful process of textual analysis, such errors and embellishments can be identified and correct by comparing the manuscript in question with other, earlier manuscripts. Because so many New Testament scriptures have survived, biblical scholars are able to determine the original text with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
(John MacArthur – New Testament Commentary on Mark)
