Even so—despite the imponderable difficulties—we do have manuscripts of every book of the New Testament; all of these manuscripts were copied from other, earlier manuscripts, which were themselves copied from earlier manuscripts; and the chain of transmission has to end somewhere, ultimately at a manuscript produced either by an author or by a secretarial scribe who was producing the “autograph”—the first in the long line of manuscripts that were copied for nearly fifteen centuries until the invention of printing. So at least it is not “non”-sense to talk about an original text.
