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Sunday, December 23, 2012

An Immense Amount of Manuscripts

Today, we have a veritable storehouse of manuscripts of the Christian Greek Scriptures. By comparison, a mere handful of manuscripts, represent other ancient writings, and these are centuries removed from their originals. Fifty manuscripts can be attributed to the plays of Aeschylus, with 100 going to Sophocles, a mere one manuscript each to Titus' Greek Anthology and Annals, three Catullus' poems, and about as Euripides, Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil. On the other hand, the New Testament has some 5,750 manuscripts in Greek, 10,000 in Latin, and 1,000 in other languages, giving us a total of close to 15,000 manuscripts. Even though many are fragments, some are a sizeable portion, and others are a whole. It must be kept in mind that the 27 books of the Christian Greek Scriptures were originally penned in the latter part of the first century [50 - 100 C.E.]; with over 100 of these papyrus manuscripts that are extant (still in existence), having been dated between 110 and 300 C.E.

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