The average Greco-Roman author has fewer than twenty copies of his writings still in existence. Usually, there are far fewer. The New Testament boasts more than fifty-eight hundred copies in Greek alone. But the New Testament was translated into various languages early on — languages such as Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, Gothic, Armenian, and Arabic. Altogether, there are more than twenty thousand manuscripts of the New Testament. To be sure, some of these are small scraps of papyrus, and most are not complete New Testaments. Nevertheless, the average-size manuscript is more than four
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