...that even if the Roman Emperor Diocletian (early 4th century) had succeeded in destroying all of the manuscripts that would become the New Testament, he could not have destroyed our ability to recounstruct it.
Why?
According to Norman Geisler and Frank Turek in their book I Don't Have enough Faith to be an Atheist, the early church fathers of the second and third centuries quoted the scriptures so often (36,289 times) that all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament can be reconstructed from their quotations!
John <><
That's an amazing fact, John! I'm glad so many of them were literate.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting question would be how much could we reconstruct today if the Scriptures were to be taken from us?
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