Play all audios:
Michael Kruger has a helpful post at TGC this morning making a helpful distinction about the relialibity 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. > > Advertise on TGC > 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.”