White/Ehrman Debate: How Many Early NT Manuscripts Have We?

The fallout from the “Did the Bible Misquote Jesus?” debate continues. One disputed point in the debate was James White’s claim that a dozen manuscripts from before 300 AD show the relative earliness and stability of our manuscript witnesses, as opposed to Bart Ehrman’s frequent comments about the lateness (fourth century?) and lack of similarity of the early NT manuscripts. Post debate White put up a blog post showing his list of the pre-300 AD manuscripts, which apparently Ehrman found overly enthusiastic, Ehrman viewing several of the listed manuscripts as more likely post-300 AD.

Well now Dan Wallace has entered the discussion, in a  2/2/09 article on bible dot org, “Second Century Papyri”. He gives his own very similar list, and comes up with ten reasonable pre-300 manuscripts, and three more serious candidates. Since he is Dan Wallace, he then gives us some numbers as to how many NT books in portion these manuscripts represent, and what percentage of the NT these portions testify to. His most difficult claim is that these fragmentary manuscripts are substantially the same as the later complete manuscripts of the fourth century, as that requires great familiarity with the manuscripts, something most of us laymen do not have.

Thanks to Bart Ehrman’s fame, we laymen are becoming increasingly educated about these things in a small stream of books, debates, mp3s and even, dare I say it, YouTube videos. Check this latest article out.