Apologetics: How We Got the Bible, Part 3 (the oldest NT manuscripts)

We are blessed to live in an age with manuscripts, some very fragmentary, that date to the early Second Century or perhaps earlier.

For example,

The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St. John’s fragment … is a fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only 3.5 by 2.5 inches (8.9 by 6 cm) at its widest; and conserved with the Rylands Papyri at the John Rylands University Library Manchester, UK. The front (recto) contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18:31–33, in Greek, and the back (verso) contains parts of seven lines from verses 37–38. Since 2007, the papyrus has been on permanent display in the library’s Deansgate building.

Rylands Library Fragment

This fragment of John’s Gospel was found in Egypt and sold to Bernard Grenfell in 1920 and published in 1934. The fragment is so small that dating is only done by comparing the handwriting to Greek handwriting with a known date. The range is between the late First Century and early Third Century, with a date of 125 AD given by many scholars.

This fragment is from a papyrus codex, at a time when codices were novel and expensive. Obviously, John’s Gospel had to have been written long enough before this copy was made for the gospel to travel from where John was (likely Ephesus, in Asia Minor) all the way to Egypt. And the Gospel had to be well enough accepted and respected to be bound in an expensive codex. Surely that took several decades to happen.

Somehow the fragment was preserved for nearly 2,000 years. If it was found in a grave, then the owner must have so loved this Gospel that he wanted to be buried with it. Hence, the traditional date of John’s Gospel, around 90 AD, is entirely reasonable, even if the fragment were dated several years later.

The 22 Bodmer Papyri were discovered in Egypt in 1952. They are named after Martin Bodmer who purchased them. The papyri contain segments from the Old and New Testaments, early Christian literature, and pagan Greek texts. The oldest, P⁶⁶ dates to c. 200.

Papyrus 66

The manuscript [of P66] contains John 1:1-6:11, 6:35b-14:26, 29-30; 15:2-26; 16:2-4, 6-7; 16:10-20:20, 22-23; 20:25-21:9, 12, 17. It is one of the oldest New Testament  manuscripts  known to exist, with its writing dated to around 200 CE.

In common with both the other surviving early papyri of John’s Gospel; P⁴⁵  (apparently), P⁷⁵, and most New Testament uncials, Papyrus 66 does not include the pericope of the adulteress  (7:53-8:11); demonstrating the absence of this passage in all the surviving early witnesses of the Gospel of John. 

John’s Gospel was evidently popular in Egypt — and we are fortunate that its climate allowed this fragmentary texts to survive, proving that the texts are indeed ancient.

I should next mention Papyrus 46, of the Chester Beatty collection. This was a nearly complete collection of the Pauline epistles and Hebrews, omitting only the Pastoral epistles. It’s dated to about 200 AD — meaning that Paul’s letters had been gathered by that date, copied into a single collection in the form of a codex — a novel and rare form of compiling writings at that time.

I think most of us have heard the absurd arguments that the New Testament was written under Constantine, in the Fourth Century, or that Paul’s epistles all evolved over time and that we have now are not really his words. No true scholar, Christian or otherwise, believes such things, because the evidence is clear that these Christian writings are ancient, with the originals surely dating to the First Century. Manuscripts such as these make it obvious that the New Testament is as old as it claims to be.

Here’s a helpful summary of the manuscript evidence —

The oldest manuscripts tend to be papyri, because papyrus was much less expensive than vellum, and this is one reason there are so few. Papyrus doesn’t last as long as vellum, absent very unusual storage conditions (such as an Egyptian grave).

The uncials are vellum manuscripts written in all capital letters, which was the practice in the early centuries.  (They also had no punctuation or spaces between words.) Minuscules use capital and lower-case letters in a style invented much later by scribes, most likely to make the text more easily read. Lectionaries, of course, are collections of scriptures organized for weekly reading in the assemblies.

The Greek texts should add up to about 5,800 texts, most dated from the 10th Century and later.

In addition, there are 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in other ancient languages, including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian.  That’s about 25,000 manuscripts from which we get our Bibles! (Not counting manuscripts of the early church fathers’ quoting the New Testament.)

Bruce Metzger compares this abundance of evidence for the Bible to the evidence for other ancient books.

“In evaluating the significance of these statistics…one should consider, by way of contrast, the number of manuscripts which preserve the text of the ancient classics. Homer’s Iliad … is preserved by 457 papyri, 2 uncial manuscripts, and 188 minuscule manuscripts. Among the tragedians the witnesses to Euripides are the most abundant; his extant works are preserved in 54 papyri and 276 parchment manuscripts, almost all of the later dating from the Byzantine period … the time between the composition of the books of the New Testament and the earliest extant copies is relatively brief. Instead of the lapse of a millennium or more, as is the case of not a few classical authors, several papyrus manuscripts of portions of the New Testament are extant which were copies within a century or so after the composition of the original documents.”

Another author explains,

• Caesar’s Gallic Wars was written in the first century B.C. There are only 10 manuscripts in existence. The earliest textual evidence we have was copied 1,000 years after the original.
• Aristotle’s Poetics was written in the fourth century B.C. There are only 5 manuscripts in existence. The earliest textual evidence we have was copied 1,400 years after the original.

In short, the New Testament is better attested than any other ancient book — and the comparison isn’t close. And while the authenticity of the New Testament has been challenged by many, on all sorts of grounds, books of similar age with far less authentication are not subject to the same criticism.