The Original Biblical Text

Of Tape Measures and Biblical Originals

A helpful piece from Justin Taylor:

The Original Text of the Bible

Even Though We Lack the Original Manuscripts

Justin Taylor 1:45 pm CT

Michael Kruger has a helpful post at TGC this morning making a helpful distinction about the reliability of the original text of Scripture:

But the original text is not a physical object. The autographs contain the original text, but the original text can exist without them. A text can be preserved in other ways. One such way is that the original text can be preserved in a multiplicity of manuscripts. In other words, even though a single surviving manuscript might not contain (all of) the original text, the original text could be accessible to us across a wide range of manuscripts.

Preserving the original text across multiple manuscripts, however, could only happen if there were enough of these manuscripts to give us assurance that the original text was preserved (somewhere) in them. Providentially, when it comes to the quantity of manuscripts, the New Testament is in a class all its own. Although the exact count is always changing, currently we possess more than 5,500 manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek alone. No other document of antiquity even comes close. [my emphasis]

You can read the whole thing here.  On this latter point, Dan Wallace once explained to me that:

The average classical author’s literary remains number no more than twenty copies. We have more than 1,000 times the manuscript data for the NT than we do for the average Greco-Roman author. Not only this, but the extant manuscripts of the average classical author are no earlier than 500 years after the time he wrote. For the NT, we are waiting mere decades for surviving copies. The very best classical author in terms of extant copies is Homer: manuscripts of Homer number less than 2,400, compared to the NT manuscripts that are approximately ten times that amount.

Here’s a chart adapted from something Dr. Wallace compiled:

Histories	Years	Date of Oldest Manuscripts	Number of Surviving Manuscripts
Livy	59 B.C.-A.D. 17	4th century A.D. (300s)	27
Tacitus	A.D. 56-120	9th century A.D. (800s)	3
Suetonius	A.D. 69-140	9th century A.D. (800s)	200+
Thucydides	460-400 B.C.	1st century A.D.	20
Herodotus	484-425 B.C.	1st century A.D.	75
New Testament	c. 5 B.C.-A.D. 90	c. 100-150	c. 5,700 (counting only Greek manuscripts) (+ more than 10,000 in Latin, + more than a million quotations from the church fathers, etc.

R. Laird Harris once offered an illustration to show that “the doctrine of verbal inspiration is worthwhile even though the originals have perished”:

Suppose we wish to measure the length of a certain pencil.  With a tape measure we measure it at 6 ½ inches. A more carefully made office ruler indicates 6 9/16 inches.  Checking it with an engineer’s scale, we find it to be slightly more than 6.58 inches.  Careful measurement with a steel scale under laboratory conditions reveals it to be 6.577 inches.  Not satisfied, we send the pencil to Washington, where master gauges indicate a length of 6.5774 inches.  The master gauges themselves are checked against the standard United States yard marked on a platinum bar preserved in Washington.
Now, suppose that we should read in the newspapers that a clever criminal had run off with the platinum bar and melted it down for the precious metal.  As a matter of fact, this once happened to Britain’s standard yard!  What difference would this make to us?  Very little.  None of us has ever seen the platinum bar.  Many of us perhaps never realized it existed.  Yet we blithely use tape measures, rulers, scales, and similar measuring devices.  These approximate measures derive their value from their being dependent on more accurate gauges.  But even the approximate has tremendous value—if it has had a true standard behind it. (R. Laird Harris, Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, rev. ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1969], pp. 88-89)

For more reflections on this, See Greg Bahnsen’s fine essay on “The Inerrancy of the Autographa.”