Kelley Williams's Blog
Unsettled. / 06.28.09, 04:38 PM
What is unsettling for those who want to know what the original text of the New Testament said is not the number of New Testament manuscripts but the dates of these manuscripts and the differences among them. Of course, we would expect The New Testament to be copied in the Middle Ages more frequently than Homer or Euripides or Tacitus; the trained copyists throughout the western world at the time were Christian scribes, frequently monks, who for the most part were preparing copies of texts for religious purposes. But the fact that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts does not in itself mean that we can rest assured that we know what the original text said. If we have very few early copes-in fact, scarcely any-how can we know that the text was not changed significantly before the New Testament began to be reproduced in such large quantities? Most surviving copies were made during the Middle Ages, many of them a thousand years after Paul and his companions had died.
I should emphasize that it is not simply a matter of scholarly speculation to say that the words of the New Testament were changed in the process of copying. We know that they were changed, because we can compare these 5,400 copies with one another. What is striking is that when we do so, we find that no two copies (except the smallest fragments) agree in all of their wording. There can only be one reason for this. The scribes who copied the texts changed them. Nobody knows for certain how often they changed them, because no one has been able yet to count all of the differences among the manuscripts. Some estimates put the number at around 200,000, others at around 300,000 or more. Perhaps it is simplest to express the figure in comparative terms: There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
-Bart D. Ehrman
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