Copies of Copies of Copies ...
we know that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, if all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have any confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written? this isn't an issue that's unique to the bible; it's a question we can ask of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity, but what the New Testament has in it's favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived, why is that important? the more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross check them to figure out what the original document was like, the only way they'd agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts, what about the age of the documents? certainly that is important as well? this is something else that favors the New Testament, we have copies commencing within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in the case of other ancient texts, maybe five, eight or ten centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy, in addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time - into Latin, Syriac and Coptic, and beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic, and alot of others - Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety, how does that help? because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually produce the contents of the New Testament, in addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the new Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters and so forth from the early church fathers
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