Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Facts about bible accuracy

There are more than 24,000 partial and complete manuscripts of the New Testament.

There are also about 86,000 quotations from the early church fathers and several thousand Lectionaries.

While there are around 150,000 variations 99% hold no significant change whatsoever. Most are spelling errors, a missing word or letter, or a simple reversal of the order of two words, for example saying "Christ Jesus" Instead of Jesus Christ. In other words, no tenet of the Christian faith is at all effected by these variations. The fact that we have so many manuscripts makes the margin of doubt very low.

There is more manuscripts copied, with greater accuracy, than any secular ancient book. In fact the average gap between manuscripts of other ancient books, and their original writing is around 1000 years.

The New Testament has a fragment within 1 generation of it's original writing, whole books within 100 years of the original manuscript, most of the new testament within 200 years, and the entire new testament within 250 years of it's completion date.

There are, like I said before, 86,000 quotations of the New Testament from the early church fathers, as well as thousands of early church worship books which contain new testament quotes. We have so many quotes from the early church fathers that if we were to lose all manuscripts we could still reconstruct all but 11 verses of the New Testament from material written from between 150 to 200 years from the time of Christ.

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