The accuracy of modern New Testament translations.

Most of this booklet will be concerned with the New Testament, as it is that which records the life of Jesus; though I will have a brief look at the Old Testament, which foretells his coming.

In considering this question of the reliability of the documents we possess today, it is helpful to compare the evidence supporting the accuracy of the New Testament with that supporting the accuracy of other ancient writings. There are two areas in which the New Testament is streets ahead of any other writings of antiquity. The first is in the number of manuscripts that have come down to us. The second is in the length of the time gap that exists between the death of the authors and the writing of the first manuscript copies that have survived to the present.

Numbers of surviving manuscripts of ancient writers

The following are some examples of the number of manuscripts of ancient writers that have survived. The plays of Aeschylus are preserved in perhaps 50 manuscripts, of which none is complete. Sophocles is represented by about 100 manuscripts, of which only 7 have any appreciable independent value. The Greek Anthology has survived in one solitary copy. The same is the case with a considerable part of Tacitus' Annals. Of the poems of Catullus there are only 3 independent manuscripts. Some of the classical authors, such as Euripides, Cicero, Ovid, and especially Virgil, are better served with the numbers rising into the hundreds.

The numbers of manuscripts of other writers are: for Caesar's Gallic War 10, Aristotle 49, Plato 7, Herodotus 8, Aristophanes 10. Apart from a few papyrus scraps only 8 manuscripts of Thucydides, considered by many to be one of the most accurate of ancient historians, have survived. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livy only 35 survive, represented in about 20 manuscripts. Homer's Iliad is the best represented of all ancient writings, apart from the New Testament, with something like 700 manuscripts. However, there are many more significant variations in the Iliad manuscripts than there are in those of the New Testament.

The wealth of New Testament manuscripts

When we come to the New Testament, however, we find a very different picture. Altogether we possess about 5,300 partial or complete Greek manuscripts. Early on, the New Testament books were translated into other languages, which seldom happened with other Greek and Latin writers. This means that in addition to Greek, we have something like 8,000 manuscripts in Latin, and an additional 8,000 or so manuscripts in other languages such as Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Coptic, Gothic, Slavic, Sahidic and Georgian. As these translations began to be made before the close of the second century, they provide an excellent source for assessing the text of the New Testament writings from a very early date. On this latter point Charles H. Welsh, in his book True from the Beginning, quotes from the third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

This argument is so strong, that, if we deny the authenticity of the New Testament we may with a thousand times greater propriety reject all the other writings in the world.

A further source of valuable information is found in the numerous quotes from early Christian writers from the end of the first century onwards. As a result of recent research done at the British Museum, we are now able to document, in early Church writings, 89,000 allusions to passages in the New Testament. For instance, Polycarp, who was personally acquainted with the apostle John, quotes from the New Testament in his letter to the believers in Philippi. So does Ignatius in the seven letters he wrote while awaiting execution about AD 115. Clement of Rome cites numerous passages in a letter to Corinth about AD 95. Three hundred and thirty allusions have been documented from Justin Martyr; 1,819 from Irenaeus; 2,406 from Clement of Alexandria; 7,258 from Tertullian; 1,378 from Hippolytus and 17,922 from Origen. These are all from the 2nd and early 3rd centuries. Not all these are direct quotations. However, it would be possible to construct the whole of the New Testament, apart from about eleven verses, from these writings alone, even if we had no others.

Finally, there is the evidence from the Lectionaries: the reading lessons used in early public Church services. More than 1800 of these reading lessons have been classified. Though they did not appear until the 6th century, the texts from which they quote may themselves be early and of high quality.

All this material gives scholars an excellent resource for comparing copies and determining where discrepancies or scribal comments may have crept into the text.

Sir Frederick Kenyon, a former Director of the British Museum and one of the greatest authorities on the subject, said in his book Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts:

The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, or early translations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.

The time gap to the earliest surviving manuscripts

When we consider the time that elapsed from the date of the writer's death to the writing of the earliest surviving manuscript, we find that there is often something like a 1,000 year gap. The following table gives some examples:

Time gap from date of author to date of earliest surviving manuscript