Quote Originally Posted by miley
I think that the fact that reading and writing at that period in time(biblical times) was not such a common thing for people to do and the fact the the majority of the bibical texts(the christian at least) were recording a long long time after the fact. Ever heard of a thing called a tall tale. Now i'm not saying that they are all lies but it would have been very easy for the generations of people passing the stories down to alter them slightly each time. Civil war accounts were documented as they occurred and copied many many times. That is the difference between the bibical and the historical thing.
we can apprecitate the tremendous wealth of manuscript authority for the new testment by comparing it to textual material available to support other notable ancient writings.

The history of thucydides {460-400 BC} is available to us from only 8 manuscripts dated about AD 900 almost thirteen hundred years after he wrote it.
The manuscripts of the history of Herodotus are likewise late and scarce. And yet ,as F.F.Bruce, Rylands Professer of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, concludes," No classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earlist manuscripts of there works which are of use to us are over 1,300 years later then the originals.
The quantity of the new testment matarial is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity.
We have over 5,600 greek manuscripts of the bible. The whole being written before the fall of jerusalam in A.D. 70.