Our church recently hosted a seminar called Faith Search. One of the primary assertions of the seminar was that the earliest New Testament manuscripts maintained their reliability and integrity to the period of the printing press.
The following are just some excerpts from the seminar and the main book used:
Surprised by Faith, Dr. Don Bierle
Testing the Integrity of the New Testament
How many manuscripts have been found? (lets compare to other classics)
Plato---7
Caesar’s The Gallic Wars---10
Works of Aristotle---49
Homers The Illiad---643
New Testament writings--- 24,000+
How early are the manuscripts? (time interval between original and discovered copies)
Aristotle---1450 yrs
Caesar---950 yrs
Homer---500 yrs
Virgil---300 yrs
New Testament writings---15 yrs (within the lifetime of eyewitnesses to events)
Accuracy of of copies (rate of distortion of manuscripts due to copying errors)
The Mahabharata (Hindu religious writings)---10.3%
The Illiad---4.9%
New Testament writings---0.2%
Besides these overwhelming figures, noted manuscript scholar, Dr. Bruce Metzer of Princeton, stated that the extant writings of early church fathers contain over 36,000 quotations or allusions to New Testament books. He says that with just these quotations, they could reliably recreate the New Testament, and do it accurately.
(Also posted on Solid Rocks Ministry blog.)
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1 comment:
interesting....
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