New Testament Manuscripts and Classical Literature: Comparing the Numbers

There are charts available online and presumably elsewhere comparing the amount of New Testament manuscripts with certain other ancient texts (e.g. Caesar’s Gallic Wars). The purpose of these charts is to emphasise the New Testament’s trustworthiness: if we have no need to doubt the reliability of the Gallic Wars, the reasoning goes, then certainly we should have no need to question the New Testament, which is far better attested. The flip side of this, of course, is that if we doubt the authenticity of the New Testament, then we should doubt that of classical texts, too.

The problem here is that while the logic appears sound, the data used in the charts is often outdated. This means Christian educators and apologists relying on this data are in fact relying on false data to prove a point. In Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, edited by Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Gurry (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2019), James B. Prothro contributes a chapter (‘Myths about Classical Literature’, pp. 70–89) in which he tackles how to compare the New Testament texts and classical literature responsibly. I don’t want to go into Prothro’s chapter in detail here—you should read his essay and the whole book if you can—but I do want to produce my own chart comparing the numbers. And I want to do this partly so I can have a quick reference point for my own occasional teaching, but also because Prothro himself doesn’t tabulate the data. However, for his numbers, Prothro appears to draw largely from an article by Clay Jones which does contain a chart.

The following table is essentially a version of Clay Jones’s one but with minor amendments drawn from Prothro’s essay, pp. 75–78. It’s the kind of chart that will need to be updated from time to time as new manuscript discoveries are made. Please do leave a comment if you know of any numbers that need to be taken into account here.

Author	Work	Date Written	Earliest Manuscripts	Time Gap (years)	Number of Manuscripts
Homer	Iliad	800 bc	c. 400 bc	400	1,757
Herodotus	History	480–425 bc	ad 100–200 fragments	c. 600	109
Plato	tetralogies	400 bc	895	1,300	210
Caesar	Gallic Wars	100–44 bc	9th century	950	251
Livy	History of Rome	59 bc—ad 17	early 5th century	400	150
Tacitus	Annals	ad 100	1st half: 850; 2nd half: 1050	750–950	2 + 31 (dated 15th century)
Thucydides	History	460–400 bc	3rd century bc	200	96
New Testament		ad 50–100	ad 130	40	5,795