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

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

References:

• New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room – INTF. Accessed March 24, 2019. http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de.