Free More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell Page A

notable ancient writings.
    The history of Thucydides (460–400 BC ) is available to us from only eight manuscripts dated about AD 900, almost thirteen hundred years after he wrote. The manuscripts of the history of Herodotus are likewise late and scarce. And yet, as F. F. Bruce, Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, concludes,
No classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest manuscripts of their works which are of use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals. 15
    Aristotle wrote his poetics around 343 BC , and yet the earliest copy we have is dated AD 1100 (a gap of almost fourteen hundred years), and only forty-nine manuscripts exist.
    Caesar composed his history of the Gallic Wars between 58 and 50 BC , and its manuscript authority rests on nine or ten copies dating one thousand years after his death.
    Bruce Metzger, author or editor of fifty books on the manuscript authority of the New Testament looks at other first-century notables:
Consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about AD 116. His first six books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about AD 850. Books eleven through sixteen are in another manuscript dating from the eleventh century. Books seven through ten are lost. So there is a long gap between the time that Tacitus sought his information and wrote it down and the only existing copies.
With regard to the first-century historian Josephus, we have nine Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War, and these copies were written in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. There is a Latin translation from the fourth century and medieval Russian materials from the eleventh or twelfth century.
    “The quantity of New Testament material,” confesses Metzger, ‘is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity.” 16
    When I first wrote this book in 1977, I was able to document forty-six hundred Greek manuscripts of the Bible, abundantly more source material than exists for any other book written in antiquity. As of this writing, even more Greek manuscripts have been found, and I can now document more than fifty-six hundred of them.
    Daniel Wallace, professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Greek text and New Testament manuscripts, states,
Well over 200 biblical manuscripts (90 of which are New Testament) were discovered in the Sinai in 1975 when a hidden compartment of St. George’s Tower was uncovered. Some of these manuscripts are quite ancient. They [the recent manuscript discoveries] all confirm that the transmission of the New Testament has been accomplished in relative purity and that God knows how to preserve the text from destruction. In addition to the manuscripts, there are 50,000 fragments sealed in boxes. About 30 separate New Testament manuscripts have been identified in the fragments, and scholars believe there may be many more. 17
----
    What Do You Think?
     
    Do you—or someone you know—believe that because the Bible text is ancient it can’t be trusted? Are there other nonbiblical ancient texts that you have no problem trusting?
----
    When it comes to the manuscript authority of the New Testament, the abundance of material is truly remarkable in contrast to the manuscript availability of other classic texts. After the early papyri manuscript discoveries that bridged the gap between the times of Christ and the second century, a profusion of other manuscripts came to light. More than twenty thousand copies of New Testament manuscripts are in existence as of 2009. The Iliad, which is second to the New Testament in manuscript authority, has only 643 manuscripts in existence.
    Jewish scholar Jacob Klausner says, “If we had ancient sources like those in the Gospels for the history of Alexander or Caesar, we