How do theists justify the translations of the scriptures?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I've heard this nonsense before, and it is manifestly untrue.  There are absolutely, positively NOT 25 000 copies of the Bible that have been preserved for two millennia.

What IS true is that there are 25 000 handwritten manuscripts of the NT, but even this is a misrepresentation of what the situation is.  There are no extant manuscripts from the first century, and only eight (I think) from the second.  For the first four centuries, there are approximately 100 manuscripts.  The copying craze started after that (largely due to the advent of monasteries).

But what is a manuscript?  It is anything that is written by hand, irrespective of length.  The oldest bit of the NT is a fragment of John about three inches long - for historians, this counts as a manuscript.  We don't have anything more substantial than that until around 200 CE.

The overwhelming majority of that 25 000 number so often bandied about weren't written until well after the NT was codified - say, between the 11th and 16th centuries (Mr. Guttenberg largely put the brakes on copying out the Bible by hand).

So, are there 25 000 manuscripts of all or part or the NT?  Yes, but it is almost entirely irrelevant from an historical perspective.  All that really matters are the hundred or so from the first four centuries.


Boru

actually:
The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian.

It's a little more complete than your dismissal would have us believe.

Not to mention the OT roll in all of this. in that there are hundreds of copies of the OT that date back upto 500 years beore Christ that have all been well documented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript

Bottom line is no matter how you slice it there is more written of the bible and more verified hand written copies than any other text

I'm not arguing the number of manuscripts, just pointing that you were wrong earlier when you said there are 25 000 handwritten copies dating from the first century - that's simply incorrect.  The manuscripts from the first 400 years of Christianity are the only ones of any real historical value (for reasons which should be obvious), there are only about 100 of those, and only one of them is complete.

But the '25 000' figure is essentially meaningless.  The number of copies of any text tells us only the importance people placed on it.  It doesn't tell us anything about the truth or falsity of what is in the text.  If there were only one copy of Newton's Principia, it would still be true.  If there were 100 million copies of Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys And The Avocado Of Death, it would still be fiction.

This isn't to say that the NT is untrue (there are other reasons to suppose that), just that the number of manuscripts isn't a basis on which to conclude...well...anything.

Boru