[squirt]

when we talk about a great multiplicity of manuscripts, how does that contrast with other ancient books that are routinely accepted by scholars as being reliable? consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about AD 116, his first 6 books exist today in only one manuscript, and it was copied about AD 850, books 11-16 are in another manuscript dating from the 11th century, books 7-10 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 1st century historian Josephus, we have 9 Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War, and these copies were written in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, there is a Latin translation from the 4th century and medieval Russian materials from the 11th or 12th century, these numbers are suprising, there is but the thinnest thread of manuscripts connecting these ancient works to the modern world, by comparison, how many New Testament Greek manuscripts are in existence today? more than 5000 have been cataloged, is that unusual in the ancient world? what would the runner up be? the quantity of New Testament material is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity, next to the New Testament, the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer's Illiad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks, there are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of it today, some are quite fragmentary, they come down to us from the 2nd and 3rd century AD and following, when you consider that Homer composed his epic about 800 BC, you can see there's a very lengthy gap, in describing the New Testament manuscripts, the earliest fragments of papyrus, which was a writing material made from the papyrus plant that grew in the marshes of the Nile Delta in Egypt, there are now 99 fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one or more passages or books of the New Testament, the most significant to come to light are the Chester Beatty Biblical Papri, discovered about 1930, of these, Beatty Biblical Papyrus number 1 contains portions of the 4 gospels and the book of Acts, and it dates from the 3rd century, Papyrus number 2 contains large portions of eight letters of Paul, plus portions of Hebrews, dating to about the year 200, Papyrus number 3 has a sizable section of the book of Revelation, dating from the 3rd century, another group of important papyrus manuscripts was purchased by a Swiss bibliophile, M. Martin Bodmer, the earliest of these, dating from about 200, contains about 2/3 of the gospel of John, another papyrus, containing portions of the gospels of Luke and John, dates from the 3rd century, at this point, the gap between the writing of the biographies of Jesus and the earliest manuscripts was extremely small, but what is the oldest manuscript we possess? how close in time can we get to the original writings, which experts call "autographs"?