Evidence · Case 03 · Reliability of Scripture

How soon the earliest copies were made

One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.

The gap between when a work was written and the earliest substantial surviving copy matters as much as the count. For most classical works that gap runs from about 400 years to more than 1,300 years, for example around 400 to 500 years for Homer and around 1,200 to 1,300 years for the earliest complete manuscripts of Plato, though small papyrus fragments of both survive from much earlier. For the New Testament the gap is far smaller. The John Rylands fragment of John, known as P52, was long dated to about 117 to 138 AD; papyrologists now give a wider range, from about 125 to 200 AD or a little later, so the case should not lean on a narrow date for it. It does not need to. Substantial copies of whole books, such as P46, P66, and P75, survive from around 200 AD, roughly a century or so after the originals.

Sources

Brent Nongbri, “The Use and Abuse of P52,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005) (opens in a new tab)
Harvard Theological Review 98, no. 1 (2005): 23-48, on the wide paleographic date range for P52

Clay Jones, “The Bibliographical Test Updated,” Christian Research Institute (opens in a new tab)
Christian Research Journal 35, no. 3 (2012), on the dates of the earliest copies

Objections & responses

P52 is a credit-card-sized scrap with a few words, and paleographers such as Brent Nongbri argue it could date anywhere from the second century to the early third. Isn’t building on it shaky?: Nongbri’s caution is well founded, which is why P52 is given a range rather than a single date. The larger point survives the correction. Even at AD 200, the gap between composition and earliest fragment is about a century, and substantial papyri such as P46 (Paul’s letters) and P66 and P75 (John and Luke) date to around 200. For Plato and Tacitus the gap is over a thousand years. P52 is a symbol; the case rests on the whole body of early papyri.
The period before AD 200 is exactly where we have the fewest manuscripts, and it is when most theological editing would have happened. Late abundance can’t fix early scarcity.: This is Ehrman’s strongest point and it deserves a straight answer. First, the early period is not blank: there are papyri from around 200, quotations in second-century writers such as Justin and Irenaeus, and early translations, all showing the same text. Second, the theory requires a coordinated change before any surviving copy was made, across communities that were often at odds with one another and had no central authority to enforce an edit. Where early editing did happen (the long ending of Mark, for instance), it left fingerprints in the manuscript tradition that scholars have found. The absence of such fingerprints for the core text is evidence, not merely absence of evidence.

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