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Greek Manuscripts, Part or All of the New Testament (17) Page 10.
Papyri Cataloged 127
Uncial Mss. Cataloged 318
Minuscule Mss. Cataloged 2, 880
Lectionaries Cataloged 2, 436
Total 5, 761 (Numbers in all categories inch up periodically with new discoveries) German numbers from 1994 and 2011 are accessed.
ELWELL, WALTER AND YARBROUGH, ROBERT W., Third Edition (2013) Encountering The New Testament, Grand Rapids, Baker Academic.
TGC March 12 2012: Daniel B. Wallace
How many NT manuscripts do we know of?
As far as Greek manuscripts, over 5800 have been catalogued.
The New Testament was translated early on into several other languages as well, such as Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, etc. The total number of these versional witnesses has not been counted yet, but it certainly numbers in the tens of thousands.
At the same time, it should be pointed out that most of our manuscripts come from the second millennium AD, and most of our manuscripts do not include the whole New Testament. A fragment of just a verse or two still counts as a manuscript. And yet, the average size for a NT manuscript is more than 450 pages.
At the other end of the data pool are the quotations of the NT by church fathers. To date, more than one million quotations of the NT by the church fathers have been tabulated. These fathers come from as early as the late first century all the way to the middle ages.
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One of Ehrman’s theses is that orthodox scribes tampered with the text in hundreds of places, resulting in alterations of the essential affirmations of the NT.
How do you respond?
Ehrman is quite right that orthodox scribes altered the text in hundreds of places. In fact, it’s probably in the thousands. Chief among them are changes to the Gospels to harmonize them in wording with each other.
But to suggest that these alterations change essential affirmations of the NT is going far beyond the evidence. The variants that he produces do not do what he seems to claim. Ever since the 1700s, with Johann Albrecht Bengel who studied the meaningful and viable textual variants, scholars have embraced what is called ‘the orthodoxy of the variants.’ For more than two centuries, most biblical scholars have declared that no essential affirmation has been affected by the variants. Even Ehrman has conceded this point in the three debates I have had with him. (For those interested, they can order the DVD of our second debate, held at the campus of Southern Methodist University. It’s available here.)
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As I have noted online and on this website, central theology and doctrine is consistent via manuscript evidence and through the writings of the Church Fathers.
