The New Testament books were written in Greek between c. AD 50 and c. AD 100, on papyrus that has long since perished. Like every ancient text, they reach us through copies of copies, made by hand until the printing press arrived in the fifteenth century.
What sets the New Testament apart is the number and age of those copies. Scraps of papyrus from the second and third centuries, complete Bibles from the fourth, early translations into other languages and thousands of quotations by early Christian writers allow scholars to trace the text back very close to its source.
A scrap the size of a credit card from a codex of John, found in Egypt. Proposed dates run from c. AD 100 to c. 200, and on any of them it is among the earliest surviving pieces of the New Testament.
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The oldest surviving collection of Paul’s letters, copied as a single book about a century and a half after he wrote them. It already treats Paul’s letters as a set to be read together.
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The earliest surviving manuscript to bind the four Gospels and Acts in one volume. Though damaged, it shows the fourfold Gospel circulating together in the third century.
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A nearly complete copy of John’s Gospel. Its scribe made hundreds of corrections in the course of the work, showing the text being checked with care as it was copied.
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The earliest copy of Luke. Its text agrees remarkably closely with Codex Vaticanus, copied about a century later, showing a carefully preserved line of transmission.
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The earliest surviving complete New Testament, found at St Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in the nineteenth century. It is now fully digitised and readable online.
Perhaps the most valued single manuscript for the Gospels. With Sinaiticus it is one of the two great fourth-century Bibles on which modern editions rest.
Long kept by the patriarchs of Alexandria and given to King Charles I of England in 1627. It also preserves the letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians.
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The chief witness to the so-called Western text, which differs most from other manuscripts in Acts. It shows the kind of freer copying scholars weigh when they compare witnesses.
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Bought in Egypt in 1906. Its copy of Mark includes the longer ending with an extra saying after 16:14 found in no other Greek manuscript, a vivid example of how variant endings of Mark circulated.
See it in the archive →| Work | Written | Earliest copy | Gap | Copies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New TestamentVarious | c. AD 50–100 | 2nd century (fragments); c. AD 200–250 (substantial papyri); 4th century (complete) | Decades for the earliest fragments; c. 250–300 years for a complete copy | 5,800+ Greek, many fragmentary; c. 10,000 Latin |
| AnnalsTacitus | c. AD 116 | 9th century (books 1–6); 11th century (books 11–16) | c. 750–950 years | 2 primary manuscripts |
| Gallic WarJulius Caesar | c. 58–50 BC | 9th century | c. 900 years | c. 250 |
| Lives of the CaesarsSuetonius | c. AD 121 | 9th century | c. 700 years | c. 200 |
| Jewish AntiquitiesJosephus | c. AD 93–94 | 9th century (Latin translation); 11th century (Greek, books 11–20) | c. 800–1,000 years | A few Greek manuscripts for each part; more in Latin |
| IliadHomer | c. 8th century BC | 3rd century BC (papyrus fragments); 10th century AD (complete) | c. 400–500 years to the earliest fragments | Well over 1,000, most of them papyrus fragments |
| DialoguesPlato | c. 390–347 BC | 3rd century BC (papyrus fragments); AD 895 (complete codex) | c. 1,250 years to the earliest complete codex | c. 250 medieval manuscripts, plus papyrus fragments |
No other ancient book comes close to the New Testament in the number of its manuscripts or their nearness to the time of writing. For most classical authors, scholars rely on a handful of medieval copies; for the New Testament they have thousands, some from the second and third centuries. Many are fragments or lectionaries (books of readings for worship), but the earliest papyri alone give a fuller and older record than survives for Tacitus or Caesar.
Alexander the Great died in 323 BC; the earliest surviving account of his campaigns, by Diodorus of Sicily, came nearly three centuries later, and the fullest, by Plutarch and Arrian, more than four. The Buddha’s teaching was passed on by memory for centuries before the Pali Canon was written down around the first century BC. For Jesus, Paul’s letters date within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, the Gospels within forty to seventy, and Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius mention him or his followers within a century. No historian doubts that Alexander lived; the reader can weigh what an earlier and fuller record means for Jesus.
Textual criticism recovers the original wording of a text from its surviving copies. Scholars compare the manuscripts reading by reading, group them into families, give weight to the oldest and most careful, and ask which reading best explains the others. Because the New Testament witnesses are so many and so widespread, a mistake made in one place is usually exposed by copies from elsewhere. Modern critical editions print the result and list the main alternatives at the foot of each page.
Hand copying produces differences, and across thousands of manuscripts they add up. Most are minor: spelling, word order, a dropped or repeated word, a synonym. A smaller number change the sense of a sentence. The few significant ones, such as the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20) and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), are well known and marked in modern Bibles with a note or brackets, in plain view for any reader to check.
As the faith spread, the New Testament was translated: into Latin in the second and third centuries, before Jerome’s Vulgate (c. AD 382–405), and into Syriac and Coptic for the churches of Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt from the third century. The translators worked from Greek manuscripts older than most that survive, so their versions show what the Greek read in their region and time.
Early Christian writers quoted the New Testament constantly. Irenaeus (c. AD 180), Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen cite it so often that much of the text could be rebuilt from their works alone. Their quotations show which readings were known where and when, and confirm that the books were being read and copied across the Mediterranean well before the great fourth-century Bibles.
