Manuscript Attestation For The New Testament or Jesus Christ versus Julius Caesar

Ryan Anderson has responding to a comment I made on one of my blog posts Jesus in the Qur'an. I admit that it's gone far from the subject of the text but worth scrutinizing. One person said that they didn't believe it was true that Jesus is mentioned anywhere outside of the New Testament. To which I provided a link to Mariano Grinbank's blog in which he lists 236 attestations to Jesus Christ covering a span of three centuries. Ryan Anderson disagreed that this was significant and even wants to throw out most of them. According to him, we have only 6 - the Gospels and two references from Josephus. I think that there are far more than that, but be that as it may. I challenged Ryan to name someone else from antiquity who has as much attestation as Jesus. He countered with Julius Caesar. He went as far as saying the there are countless references to Julius Caesar from the first two centuries of his death. I want to first say that I was not saying that there is no proof of anyone in antiquity who lived and did important things that we can definitively know about other than Jesus Christ. I was saying that Jesus is just as well attested if not more than anyone else we accept as historical fact.

At the this link: Manuscript Attestation For The New Testament; I found a great article that summarizes what the manuscript evidence exist for the New Testament and for Julius Caesar's work "The Gallic Wars". First, I loved the way the post summarizes the rules scholars use to measure the validity of an ancient document as historical.

QUESTIONS RAISED IN THIS TEST...
1. "How many copies of the document in question are available?"
    a. In order to compare them with one another
    b. The more, the better
2. "Where were the copies found?"
    a. If they all came from one place, collusion is possible
    b. But if they are from places far removed by time and location,
        collusion is unlikely
3. "What length of time passed between the original and the
    earliest copies?"
   a. If the earliest copies we have were written hundreds of years
       after the original, a lot of changes could have been made and
       we would not know it
   b. But a short interval of time would increase our assurance in
      the reliability of the copies
4. "What variances exist between the copies?"
   a. If the copies of a document are filled with significant
      differences, then it would not be possible to know what the
     original author wrote!
   b. But if the variances are few and minor, then the process of
    copying over the years has been faithful to the original!

The Article summarizes how the answers stack up on four ancient documents I've got a couple asides I need to mention. I will italicize them to set them apart.

   A. HOW MANY COPIES OF NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS ARE AVAILABLE?
     1. Over 4,000 Greek manuscripts; 13,000 copies of portions of the
        New Testament in Greek! We have more than 5,000 now!
     2. Compare this with other ancient historical writings:
        a. Caesar's "Gallic Wars" - only 10 Greek manuscripts
        b. "Annals" of Tacitus - 2
        c. Livy - 20; Plato - 7; Sophocles - 100

  B. WHERE WERE THESE COPIES FOUND?
    1. Various places:  Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Italy
    2. Such varied locations would make COLLUSION very difficult

 C. WHAT LENGTH OF TIME PASSED BETWEEN THE ORIGINAL AND THE EARLIEST COPIES?
   1. We saw in the previous lesson that several PAPYRI FRAGMENTS have been dated to within 50-100 years Yeah, I know not everyone agrees with the dates but the sheer number of copies is indisputable and gives us better reliability than other ancient manuscript.
   2. We have several nearly complete New Testament GREEK MANUSCRIPTS which were copied within 300-400 years, for example:
     a. Codex Sinaiticus, found near Mt. Sinai
     b. Codex Alexandrinus, found near Alexandria in Egypt
     c. Codex Vaticanus, located at the Vatican in Rome
   3. But COMPARE THIS WITH MANUSCRIPTS OF VARIOUS CLASSICAL HISTORIES:
     a. "Histories of Thucydides" - earliest copy is 1300 years removed from the original
     b. "Histories of Herodotus" - earliest copy is 1350 years removed from the original
     c. Caesar's "Gallic War" - 950 years
     d. Roman History of Livy - 350 years (and the earliest copy is only a fragment)
     e. "Histories" of Tacitus - 750 years
     f. "Annals" of Tacitus - 950 years (and there are only two manuscripts)

 D. WHAT VARIANCES EXIST BETWEEN THE COPIES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT?
   1. It is true that there are SOME VARIATIONS between the many thousands of manuscripts available
     a. But the vast majority are very minor (spelling, differences in phraseology, etc.; modern translations often note the differences in footnotes)
     b. Only 1/2 of one percent is in question (compared to 5 percent for the Illiad)
   2. Even then, it can be stated:  "No fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading...It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain:  especially is this the case with the New Testament."
      -- SIR FREDERICK KENYON (authority in the field of New Testament textual criticism)

The point I want to stress in this article is that "The Gallic War" - which everyone seems to agree was written by Julius Caesar - has no original. It's lost. However the earliest copy is almost 1000 years after the original and we have only 10 copies in Greek. My point is that by the rule, if Julius Ceasar's campaign in ancient France is well documented as historical fact, then so is Jesus. The manuscript evidence is better in this case for the New Testament as a whole, then for the Gallic War from the first century BC.