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> Greek New Testament papyri are among the oldest and rarest traces of Christian scripture. Only about 130 have been recognized by the Institute for New Testame

• coliveira 11y ago
  The first mass-consumed book of ancient times was the Iliad. Fragments of it exist from the 3rd century BCE. There are around 1000 manuscripts of it known today. But due to the difficulty of copying ancient documents, only books considered very interesting would be reproduced and therefore most of the ancient literature perished when Greek and Roman libraries were burned down at the decline of ancient civilization. Of course, the remaining literature was exactly the religious literature of the people doing the burnings. The surprising thing about the NT is that these fragments only start to pop up from the mid to late second century. Some of the books of the NT don't even appear until the 4th century. Which says that these books either didn't exist in the first century, or that they were not considered important to be preserved at that time, or maybe even that christianity didn't exist before the mid-second century as propagated by standard christian books.
  • veddox 11y ago
    AFAIK, the earliest fragment known of the NT dates from ~110 AD, which is only about 20 years after the last book of the NT (Revelation) was written. Considering that the oldest manuscript we have of Caesars "De Bello Gallicum" is 900 years older than the original, that's pretty good...