The manuscripts
The New Testament is the best-attested work of antiquity. Variants do not hide the story.
On a napkin
- 1Thousands of Greek manuscripts, plus versions and citations — unmatched for the ancient world. The popular combined count runs past twenty thousand; the point is not the headline.
- 2The gap from events to copies is decades, not centuries — small next to Homer’s Iliad, Plato, or Caesar. That short gap left little room for the original to vanish into rumor.
- 3Most ‘variants’ are spelling and word order. No essential doctrine hangs on a disputed line. More copies mean more small differences and more ability to recover the original.
- 4Translation is not a telephone game of English copies. We go back to the Greek.
Say this
If you throw out the New Testament because it was copied, you have to throw out almost every book from the ancient world. We do not have a rumor. We have a text we can check.
“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”