How other ancient books compare

Sources

• Clay Jones, “The Bibliographical Test Updated,” Christian Research Institute (opens in a new tab)

  Christian Research Journal 35, no. 3 (2012)

• Clay Jones, “The Bibliographical Test Updated” (author’s site, with later count updates) (opens in a new tab)

  clayjones.net, July 2012, with follow-up posts revising the counts

Objections & responses

Comparing Scripture to Homer is apples and oranges. The New Testament was copied by a religious community that actively preserved it. More copies reflect motivation, not reliability.

The comparison is not meant to show the New Testament is more true than Homer. It shows that the common objection, that we cannot know what the text originally said, would apply with far greater force to every other ancient text people happily rely on. Motivated copying cuts both ways: it produces many copies, and it also produces the theological variants critics point to. Both effects are real, and textual criticism exists to sort them out. That the sorting can be done with unusual confidence for the New Testament is the whole point.

You admit the old chart with Plato at seven copies was wrong. How many other apologetics figures on this site are equally outdated?

A fair challenge, and the only honest answer is to keep correcting. The old chart was retired publicly, the Greek manuscript count was updated, the 24,000 total is flagged as unaudited, and the 95 percent word-for-word figure for the Dead Sea Scrolls was dropped. Every claim on this site carries a correction link for exactly this purpose. A site that corrects its own side’s overstatements should be more trustworthy on the figures it keeps, not less.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• We can recover what the New Testament originally said better than any other ancient book.