Humans like to count things. We like to know how many steps we’ve taken, how many birthday cards we received, how many days until Christmas. So it’s not surprising that scholars are keen to know how many manuscripts we have for the New Testament.
It’s encouraging to discover that even the most cautious academics affirm that there are more than 5,000 known hand-written documents of the NT in its original language. Before we get too carried away, it’s worth pausing to ask what this number actually tells us.
The period during which the NT text was copied by hand lasted until the end of the 15th century, and, as one would expect, many more-recent manuscripts were preserved than older ones. Though parchment can survive a long time in ideal circumstances, many ancient documents have simply perished. This is even more the case for papyrus, the other material used as ‘paper’ – only in rare circumstances will it have survived into modern times. Consequently, the calculation of over 5,000 manuscripts before the first printed Greek NT is heavily tilted towards the most recent times.
