Introduction: the surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts

Writings from antiquity, such as the Greek New Testament, have been transmitted to us through manuscripts that were copied and recopied numerous times until the printing press, by permitting the production of multiple identical copies, slowed and eventually brought hand-copying to an end. Currently some 5,500 different Greek manuscripts of New Testament writings on papyrus, parchment and paper have survived (as well as thousands of manuscript copies of translations in Latin, Syriac, Coptic and several other ancient languages). Only 1 per cent of these Greek manuscripts contain the entire twenty-seven books, because most manuscripts, as they were produced and circulated, contained a smaller group of writings, commonly the Four Gospels or the Pauline Letters, or Acts and the Catholic Letters. Surviving manuscripts, however, frequently have only a single book, as is the case with about 83 per cent of our manuscripts (excluding lectionaries) up to around 800 CE, while 15 per cent have two to nine books, and only seven manuscripts from this period (2 per cent) contain ten or more New Testament writings. Often it is not possible to tell how many writings originally occupied an individual manuscript, especially in the numerous cases where portions of only one or a few writings survive.

Then too, the quantity of manuscripts in use in Christian communities at any given time cannot be known or even estimated, yet the proportion of extant early manuscripts (from the first eight or nine centuries) compared to later surviving copies became a crucial point in the text-critical developments and controversies to be assessed below. The table shows that only 6 per cent of all surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament date prior to the period around 800 CE, and therefore 94 per cent were copied and utilised after that period. The table indicates also that manuscripts from the first eight centuries of Christianity very often are fragmentary: 90 per cent survive with only one to twenty-four leaves (written on both sides), so that a mere 10 per cent have twenty-five or more leaves. The size of a complete ancient codex depended on numerous factors, but volumes with significant portions of the New Testament generally contained 150 to 300 leaves.