Time gap from date of author to date of earliest surviving manuscript
Tacitus 700 years
Livy 400 years
Caesar 900 years
Catullus 1,600 years
Aristotle 1,400 years
Plato 1,200 years
Aristophanes 1,200 years
Thucydides* 1,200 years
Euripides 1,500 years
Sophocles 1,400 years
Herodotus 1,300 years
*For several papyri of Thucydides, the gap is 500-600 years.
The first complete copy of the Odyssey we have is from 2,200 years after it was written! Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest manuscript of their works, which are of any use to us, are so much later than the originals.
The date of New Testament manuscripts
Again the evidence is impressive. The best and most important New Testament manuscripts go back to somewhere about AD 350, the two most important being the Codex Vaticanus, the chief treasure of the Vatican Library in Rome, and the well-known Codex Sinaiticus. This latter codex (a codex is a book with leaves, as opposed to a scroll) was discovered by a German nobleman and scholar, Count Tischendorf, at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century. On Christmas Day, 1933, it was purchased from the Soviet Government by the British Government for 100,000 pounds and is now the chief treasure of the British Museum. The Chester Beatty Papyri, the existence of which was made public in 1931, contain most of the New Testament and are dated AD 200 - 250. The Bodimer Collection in Geneva includes several New Testament papyri of the 3rd century, some as early as 200. The Codex Alexandrinus, also in the British Museum, was written in the fifth century, and the Codex Bezae, in Cambridge University Library, in the fifth or sixth century.
*The earliest piece of the New Testament that has been discovered is a fragment of a papyrus codex containing a part of John's Gospel, chapter 18, now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. This was acquired in Egypt in 1917, where it was probably written, and is dated on palaeographical grounds around AD 130. This means that John's Gospel was circulating in Egypt within a generation of having been written, though he wrote his gospel, according to tradition, at Ephesus in modern-day Turkey.
It is because many of the significant manuscript discoveries have only been comparatively recent, that a good modern translation of the Bible is considerably more accurate than the Authorized Version (otherwise called the King James Version) of 1611. New tools and texts have opened up worlds of thought and life of which our predecessors a century ago were ignorant. We can also now say that the New Testament text is far better attested to than any other ancient writings, and this would include the Hindu Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Muslim Koran.
The cumulative effect of this wealth of evidence was summed up by F. J. A. Hort of Cambridge University, one of the greatest textual critics of the New Testament, in his book Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek. He said that, leaving aside the comparatively trivial variations between the manuscripts:
the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole...and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text.
To quote Sir Frederick Kenyon again, from The Bible and Theology:
The interval between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.
It is probably true to say that the New Testament Greek text, as we have it today, is about 98% pure, and this is a conservative estimate! One thing is certain - no variant readings are significant enough to call in question any of its doctrines.
