Thread by @TimONeill007

@zebril8 @story_cosmos The fact that we have earlier fragments of the gospels than for almost all other ancient works is correct. But not terribly significant. Manuscript survival is a function of two things: (i) the popularity of the work and (ii) the incentive to maintain a chain of transmission. ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... This is why we have far more and far earlier copies and fragments of the works of Homer than, say, the works of Archimedes. Homer was the most widely read and so widely copied author in the ancient world. His works also continued to be part of the curriculum in the ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... Christian era. So we have evidence of both a lot of copies in the ancient world and a long and continuous chain of transmission. Archimedes, on the other hand, wrote very technical works for a highly specialist audience. He also wrote in Doric Greek rather than the Attic ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... Greek that later became standard. So there were far fewer copies to begin with and a highly narrow line of transmission that failed completely for several of his known works. Most ancient authors fared like Archimedes, or worse (so their works are all lost).
NT texts had ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... very few early copies, due to the tiny size of the Christian sect prior to the later third century, but a very strong line of transmission. So from the fourth century onward a very, *very* large number of copies of them were made, more of these copies were likely to be ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... preserved and so more copies and early fragments are likely to survive. The NT texts were, for centuries, considered more important than "information regarding Julius Caesar". Or Homer. So of course we have more and earlier copies and fragments. Big deal.
This tells us ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... nothing about the reliability of the claims made in these texts, so why apologists stress this fairly unremarkable fact as though it's somehow significant to their arguments about the veracity of Christian claims I have no idea.
The tweet above also states categorically ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... that " a fragment of John.... is dated 100-125 A.D." This is correct in that *some* date the Rylands Fragment/P52 that early. But the most recent analysis does not, and puts it closer to the end of the second century or into the third. Apologists always ignore this. It is ...

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... claimed above that gJohn was actually written by the disciple of that name "himself an eyewitness writing just decades later" as though this is an established fact. It isn't. And most critical scholars would regard that as faith-based nonsense.
So are the claims "accurate"?

@zebril8 @story_cosmos ... I call them "tendentious" and also "quite dubious".