Exploring LDAB: IX. Manuscript Coverage of the New Testament (2)

New Testament Manuscript Coverage Heatmap
Figure I. New Testament Manuscript Verse Coverage in 3rd and 4th centuries

Previously in the “Exploring LDAB” blog series, I calculated roughly the manuscript coverage for every book in the New Testament. To my excitement, I’ve since found out that I can now calculate the New Testament manuscript coverage with precision. Thanks to the tremendous joint efforts of NT scholars and IT professionals, who have provided detailed manuscript information online.

There are a total of 7957 verses in the New Testament. For every single verse, one can query all the manuscripts (aka. witnesses) that testify the verse, and the date of each manuscript as determined by scholars. One can potentially rank all the variants of each verse based on the date and number of their witnesses. I envision that, in the not so distant future, it will be possible to reconstruct entire New Testament books, as close as they can be to their (original) autographed forms, programmatically based on transcribed manuscripts.

Figure I above is a heatmap representation of the New Testament manuscript coverage in the 3rd (inner circle) and 4th (outer circle) centuries. The colour gradations correspond to coverage depths: grey indicates no coverage, blue 1X coverage, and red 8X coverage. The Gospel of John has by far the best coverage in the earliest centuries; The Gospel of Matthew has poor coverage in the 3rd century, despite having 9 manuscript witnesses (second only to John with 17), as also shown in Table I below.

Table I. New Testament Manuscript Coverage in the 3rd Century

Book Total Verses %Coverage Manuscripts
John 879 99 17
Heb 303 99 3
1Cor 437 99 2
2Cor 256 98 1
Eph 155 97 2
Gal 149 93 1
Phil 104 90 1
Col 95 85 1
Luke 1151 71 5
Rom 433 68 6
1Thess 89 49 3
Rev 404 33 2
Acts 1007 31 5
Titus 46 24 1
Mark 678 23 1
Jas 108 22 2
Phlm 25 20 1
Matt 1071 12 9
1Tim 113 11 1
1John 105 5 1
2Thess 47 4 1
1Pet 105 0 0
2John 13 0 0
2Pet 61 0 0
2Tim 83 0 0
3John 15 0 0
Jude 25 0 0
Total 7957 54 51

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