The Bible and Ancient Books

I’m intrigued to know when the first copies of the Bible were discovered, who discovered them and how were they verified. I have heard, from a layman Christian, that the process by which an ancient text is identified and validated, invovles in some way, finding several editions of a text and validating that they are the same, and thus accurately ascertain their existence.

For example, I was told, that several hundred copies of the bible were discovered from the start, and that only one copy of Platos Republic (i.e. of the orginal) was ever found.

What truth is thee in this?
Has their only been one ancient copy of Plato found?
Has the Bible been verified more than The Republic?

Hope to hear from you.

:slight_smile:

Well, it’s hard to pinpoint a date of discovery, because there wasn’t much of a time when we were without it. Do you mean what are the earliest copies we have? We have fragments from the second century, and complete manuscripts from the third and fourth, as far as I can tell. Keep in mind that the Bible has always been embedded in the Church, which has been around since the events described in the Bible itself- it’s not as though someone found the Bible, and then decided to create a religion based on what he read in it. Other way around, really.
With respect to the Republic, if it turned out that Plato didn’t really write it, or didn’t really exist, we’d just attribute the words to an unknown, and they’d go on being the same worth to philosophy as ever, so it’s not really the same thing. I have heard though, on many occasions, that we have move manuscript evidence for the New Testament than we do for any other ancient writing, so what you’re saying wouldn’t surprise me.

I always thought the Dead Sea Scrolls were interesting.

This is the sort of claim I have heard from Christians quite regularly - it there any validity in it? Any Truth?

How does the evidence of the new testament manuscript compare with other philosophical text?

Was the Christian Church established before the Christian Bible?

So many question: such an interesting topic!

Can any Biblical Scholars or Theologists or Philologist contest or elaborate such a claim?

Yeah, the Christian Church existed before the Bible, as the Bible, at least. It was the Church as an established organization that assembled it, Paul’s letters were written to Church bodies, wherein he referred to people by titles given to Church authorities. So you had an organized Church through the process where the Bible was being written and finally assembled as such.
As far as the claim about the New Testament vs. other ancient texts, this is one of those things that’s going to be hard to research on the internet, because of all the bias out there. Here’s an article: scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus … ripts.html

The issue is going to be that if you try to Google up the info on other texts, you’re going to run into a lot of articles who only bring up manuscripts of Plato to make points about the New Testament- it’s a very popular line of argument. So happy hunting.

For most of the time since 1611 when it was published, the most widely used English translation of the Bible was the King James Version. Its New Testament was based on the Textus Receptus or “received text.” It was based on late medieval manuscripts, which were copied over and over for centuries.
In 1859, a 4th-century manuscript of the entire New Testament, together with much of the Old Testament in Greek translation was found in a monastery on Mount Sinai. Known as the Codex Sinaiticus, it in the British Museum. Another fourth-century manuscript called Codex Vaticanus is available in the Vatican Library at Rome.
In addition to those, ancient papyrus manuscripts of New Testament books have been found during the last fifty years. About 25 Greek New Testament papyri have been found from the third century. There are two copies of the Gospel of John from about A.D. 200 A.D. About 2,400 cursive New Testament manuscripts have been found from the 9th to the 15th centuries, and about 270 from the 4th to the 9th centuries.
Bible scholars note that the two fourth-century manuscripts agree closely with the third-century papyri. They believe these manuscripts are more accurate than Textus Receptus upon which the King James Version was based.