
No other book from antiquity has so much authentication. No other even comes close:
“There is an incredibly high number of surviving copies of original Biblical writings. These copies are called manuscripts, and there are roughly 6,000 surviving manuscripts for the New Testament alone. This makes it the best attested document of all ancient writings. The next closest contender is Homer’s The Iliad, which has only 600 existing copies.
The value of having a large number of manuscripts is that it provides us with ample opportunity to compare writings, which is especially valuable when cross-checking manuscripts from different geographic areas or from different time periods.
When making these comparisons you can determine whether it is apparent that the documents were reliably copied from the same source, and you can quantify how much they may have strayed from that source by seeing where and how they differ.
In short, having an abundance of manuscripts shows us that copying Scripture was not like a game of “telephone.”
Comparing the incredible amount of manuscript evidence has shown that the New Testament is 99.5% accurate, and the vast majority of differences are in spelling or minor copyist errors.
Most importantly, you should know that not a single variation in these thousands of manuscripts has been shown to affect a theological issue in any way.
While there are undoubtedly differences among the manuscripts, we can have confidence that they stayed true to the originals because the copies themselves are so close to one another, despite being written at different times and in different places.”
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