were written and had begun to circulate. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that, but for our purposes it should be sufficient.
When Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) produced the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, he had at his disposal only seven manuscripts, not one complete, and none older than the twelfth century.1 As he published new editions over the next 20 years he acquired several more manuscripts. His work of comparison and collation laid the groundwork for the discipline now known as textual criticism.
Today we have approximately 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, representing some 2.6 million pages of text. Most of these manuscripts are medieval, but several are much older. We now have Codex Vaticanus, which dates to AD 330–340 and preserves most of the Old Testament (in Greek) and the New Testament. We have Codex Sinaiticus (housed in the British Museum), which dates to the same period and also preserves most of the two Testaments (though several pages at the beginning of this codex are lost). Scholars suspect that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are two of the fifty copies of Scripture that Emperor Constantine (AD 272–337) commissioned. We also have Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Beza and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, all of which date to the fifth century. We also have several more fifth- and sixth-century codices, often containing only parts of the New Testament. One of these is the very significant Codex Washington, which contains the four Gospels.
We also have a number of papyri, many of which are older, sometimes much older, than the codices that have been mentioned. The oldest of these ranges in date from the late second century to the late third century. They provide us with most of the text of the Gospels and virtually all of the text of Paul’s letters, as well as fragments, sometimes large fragments, of the other New Testament writings. To date we have some 127 Greek New Testament papyri. More will be said about these papyri.
We have many “miniscules”—manuscripts written in smaller, longhand style. Most of these date to the ninth century or later. Among them, manuscript 33, known as the “queen of the miniscules,” is a gem, for it is carefully copied and based on old text of good quality.
We also have approximately 10,000 Latin translations of the New Testament. Again, most of these date to the medieval period, but some are earlier. We also have several thousand lectionaries, in Greek and in Latin, in which passages of Scripture are quoted. We also have countless tens of thousands of quotations of Scripture in the writings of the Church Fathers. From these alone we could reconstruct almost the entire New Testament. We also have thousands of manuscripts in Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac and other languages from the Byzantine and Medieval periods.2
The value of this vast inventory of manuscripts is that scholars are able to compare the readings, so that in cases where there are variant readings or obvious mistakes in the text, it is possible to determine what the original reading was. Although there is some disagreement, textual critics believe that the text of the New Testament was quite stable in its first two centuries (for which, admittedly, we have only small samples of evidence) and that we have restored the text to within 98 percent or 99 percent of the original.3
There simply are no legitimate grounds for thinking that we do not know how the original manuscripts read. There are no grounds for thinking that the Jesus of the New Testament Gospels that we have today is different from the Jesus of the New Testament Gospels when they were first written and circulated in the first century.
Oldest Greek Codices
The remarkable stability of the text of the New Testament sharply contrasts with the lack of textual stability in other writings, especially the apocryphal works, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, whose manuscripts and recensions vary considerably. We see this also in the Gnostic writings, most of which date to the second century. The codices that have been recovered—all from Egypt—date to the fourth century AD. The textual variations and discrepancies are such that it is not possible to determine how the original text read.
All in all, the evidence strongly suggests that the text of the New Testament that we possess today is very, very close to the original—in stark contrast to what we typically see in apocryphal writings. Modern textual criticism, aided by the discovery of thousands of manuscripts and the development of remarkable technologies that help us recover text, has been very successful.
How Well Established Is the Arabic Text of the Qur’an?
In a later chapter we shall discuss significant discrepancies in Qur’anic manuscripts. But it will be helpful at this point to say something about textual study of the Qur’an, to see how it compares to New Testament textual criticism. The first thing we observe is that Qur’anic textual criticism is only in its infancy. Qur’anic textual critic Keith Small informs us,
It is widely acknowledged that there has never been a critical text produced for the Qur’an based on extant manuscripts, as has been done with other sacred books and bodies of ancient literature. The current printed texts of the Qur’an are based on medieval Islamic tradition instead of collation and analysis of extant manuscripts. In other literary disciplines it is almost taken for granted that scholarly study of a text must start with a text based on the collation and analysis of the oldest and best manuscripts available for that text. Qur’anic studies operates with an open knowledge of this lack concerning the Qur’an, and as such methods and their results have had to be adapted to this fundamental deficiency.4
What Small has said here will come, we suspect, as a surprise to Christians and Muslims alike. We have had Muslims say to us that because the Qur’an is inspired it is without errors or textual variants (“unlike the Christian Bible,” it is often implied!). Small adds, “There is a widespread and long held belief among Muslims that the text of the Bible was corrupted so much that a new revelation, the Qur’an, had to be sent” and “the text of the Qur’an has been preserved perfectly.”5 But this is plainly not true. We have read Small’s studies, and the Qur’anic textual variants are plain to see. There seems to be a wide gap between Qur’anic textual reality and popular Muslim beliefs. Indeed, according to Qur’anic scholar Efim Rezvan,
It is today evident that the real history of the fixation of the Qur’anic text attested in early manuscripts differs in extremely serious fashion from the history preserved in the Muslim tradition. Only an analysis of manuscripts will allow us to reconstruct the true history of the canon’s establishment.6
Most Muslims know nothing of what Rezvan is saying. Muslim scholars usually maintain publicly the fiction that there are few variants and they are only minor and unintentional.7 He and a number of Qur’anic scholars know full well that variants exist among the manuscripts of the Qur’an, despite the attempt in the seventh century to destroy all variant manuscripts. In the last fifty years, a number of projects have attempted to put the Qur’anic text on a firmer footing, but for one reason or another these projects have not been brought to completion. Sometimes the reason is resistance, motivated by religious ideology, perhaps out of fear that serious problems with the text will come to light.8
For his part, Keith Small is optimistic that by diligent study of Qur’anic manuscripts, through collation and comparison (as is done in New Testament scholarship), a critical text that closely approximates the original, or at least one of the early forms of the text, can be achieved. He states,
The methods of textual criticism which have been developed over the last three centuries for sacred texts, the Greek and Latin classics, and other ancient literary traditions have proven that they can substantiate the historical authenticity of ancient texts, as well as document stages and changes in textual transmission of these bodies of literature.
