The Evidence
Manuscript Tradition
Dead Sea Scrolls, Masoretic, Septuagint, and preservation evidence
Reliability of the New Testament Manuscripts
The Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster registers just under 6,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts — roughly 140 papyri, 320 majuscules, 2,900 minuscules and 2,400 lectionaries — against ten usable copies of Caesar's Gallic War and two of Tacitus' Annals. The earliest, a scrap of John in Manchester, was copied within a century of the ink drying.
high confidence
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Textual Preservation
high confidenceManuscript Evidence
Eleven caves at Qumran yielded roughly 930 manuscripts between 1947 and 1956, about 230 of them biblical — copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible but Esther, written between 250 BC and AD 68. The Great Isaiah Scroll, twenty-four feet of parchment carbon-dated to the second century BC, handed scholars a complete Isaiah a thousand years older than anything previously known.
The Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls
high confidenceInscriptional Evidence
Two rolled silver amulets from a sealed burial chamber on the shoulder of the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem carry the priestly blessing of Numbers 6 and the divine name YHWH, incised in paleo-Hebrew around 600 BC. They are the oldest surviving text of Scripture — four centuries older than any Dead Sea Scroll — and they sit in the Israel Museum.
P52 (Rylands Papyrus P457, ~125 AD)
high confidenceEarly Witnesses
Rylands Greek Papyrus 457 — a credit-card-sized scrap of a papyrus codex carrying John 18:31–33 on one side and 18:37–38 on the other — is the oldest identified copy of any New Testament text. It is held in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, and dated by handwriting to the first half of the second century.
The Septuagint and New Testament Quotations
high confidenceTextual Transmission
Roughly two-thirds of the New Testament's some 300 Old Testament quotations follow the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew that became the Masoretic Text. The Dead Sea Scrolls then produced Hebrew manuscripts that read with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text in hundreds of places, proving the Greek translators were rendering a real Hebrew text rather than paraphrasing.
Codex Sinaiticus (~350 AD)
high confidenceEarly Witnesses
Codex Sinaiticus, copied around AD 330–360, is the oldest surviving complete New Testament and the oldest Christian Bible bound in a single volume. Its roughly 400 surviving leaves are divided between the British Library, Leipzig University Library, St Catherine's Monastery at Sinai and the National Library of Russia — and the whole book has been reunited, page by page, online.