I’m taking another course at the church where I took the Alpha Course. This Wednesday was on the proof for the existence of Jesus. The course handout has a fill-in-the-blank outline, and I like to fill in the blanks beforehand to see how many I get right. This week’s had a table for the dates of ancient documents, when the earliest manuscript is dated to, the gap between, and the total number of manuscripts. This was obviously to compare them to the New Testament, and I believe it originates in Josh McDowell’s book Evidence that Demands a Verdict.

But while Evidence that Demands a Verdict lists specific documents, this table only had the authors Homer and Aristotle. This is a better comparison in my opinion, because the New Testament is not a single book but a compilation of various books. But it also meant that I didn’t know the answers because they aren’t the typical list! So I actually had to make some wild guesses. I knew Aristotle was 4th century BC, and I did remember seeing a copy of the Constitution of the Athenians at the British Library, and that it was from about 100AD, so that’s what I wrote down. I assumed he was cherry picking Aristotle as a weak example, so I guessed about 200 manuscripts. For Homer I wrote 700BC for the date. I remembered a story about a clay tablet a couple years ago for 400BC, so I wrote that down. And I knew that there were nearly 1800 copies of the Iliad from McDowell’s 2014 update.

When the pastor filled in the numbers, he wrote down 1100AD for Aristotle! At that point I forgot where I was and muttered “bullshit”. He also claimed there were only 49 manuscripts. This seemed unlikely to me because I’m pretty sure we have almost that many documents by Aristotle, and we can’t only have one copy of each. Then he moved onto Homer and clarified that he was talking about the Iliad. He said that the Iliad was written in 900BC, and I assumed I must just have it wrong, but now that I’ve searched the internet that seems to have been way off too. And although he said he’d just looked up the latest numbers, he gave 643 as the number of copies of the Iliad, the number from the 1972 edition of Evidence that Demands a Verdict, which is now nearly 50 years old!

I decided he must have been talking about a specific document of Aristotle’s too. But I asked him after the lecture, and he insisted that we did not have a single manuscript of any of Aristotle’s works from before 1100AD, and asked me to e-mail him if I had evidence otherwise. Thus, I wound up digging into this question.

There’s really no point to this exercise. There are unquestionably fewer manuscripts for Aristotle than there are for the New Testament, which was ultimately the point of his talk. He was off drastically off in nearly every number he gave, and the more extreme numbers may have made his talk more persuasive to the audience. But ultimately this is just an example of someone being wrong on the internet in real life, and I wasted a bunch of time proving it. But I couldn’t help myself, and I decided to post my thoughts here.

When I looked it up I learned that the Constitution of the Athenians was probably not written directly by Aristotle. It was prepared by his students at his direction and under his supervision, and he likely had a role in editing it. In modern academic terms he would be the corresponding author, but I suppose it would be fair to say it’s not one of the writings of Aristotle. Of course, the pastor believes all scripture in inerrant, and probably doesn’t believe that any of the letters in the New Testament are forgeries. The most common explanation I’ve heard for the discrepancies in vocabulary and writing style between Paul’s letters and the ones scholars consider forgeries is that they were written at Paul’s direction and he signed his name to them. And I have a feeling he’d object if I said that meant the letters weren’t written by Paul. But I haven’t actually heard this pastor make any of those claims yet, so I shouldn’t be putting words in his mouth.

Are there any manuscripts of Aristotle’s undisputed works from before 1100AD? This isn’t a simple question to answer. I googled, but could not find any comprehensive database of Aristotelean manuscripts. I found an Associated Press article about a Canadian researcher finding a 3rd century codex in Egypt containing one known work of Aristotle, and possibly also a lost work. But I can’t find any followup on what happened to this manuscript. The researcher who excavated it is an expert on Egypt, where it was found, so he didn’t do any analysis on the contents of the document because that’s not his field. Thus, searching Scholar for papers under his name yielded nothing useful. The manuscript itself doesn’t have a name or anything useful to search for. I doubt he was allowed to take it out of Egypt and back to the ROM, and I can’t find any record of it in their catalog. Thus, I suspect it’s still sitting in a museum in Egypt somewhere, unanalyzed.

Giving up on Google, I tried searching the British Library to see what else they had. The only other relevant manuscript was Papyrus 2444. Aristotle has been proposed as a potential author of that manuscript, but it would be one of his lost works. Which leads to an interesting point. How do you identify a scrap of papyrus as being Aristotle if you don’t have an extant copy to compare it to? That’s obviously impossible. So we can’t put a number on how many manuscripts we have by Aristotle. At best, we would get a number for the number of manuscripts of his known work.

Moving on, I noted that Papyrus 2444 was found at Oxyrhynchus. I knew that there was huge collection of Greek manuscripts found at Oxyrhynchus, and they were all from the 4th century or earlier. So if I was looking for a manuscript from Aristotle from really early that was a good place to start. And they have an online database.

A quick search there yielded exactly what I was looking for: a 2nd century fragment of Nicomachean Ethics and an early 3rd century fragment of Categories. Both were stored at Oxford, so I decided to search their site directly. Neither of those manuscripts showed up, but I did get another Aristotle manuscript, Protreptikos, which was also found at Oxyrhynchus and dates to the 2nd century.

That’s 3 manuscripts, all over 800 years earlier than the date he gave. That’s enough to satisfy me that he’s very wrong. But are they the earliest? Who knows! Searching finds from a single city is not a great method for locating the earliest manuscript. Oxyrhynchus is by far the most likely place for manuscripts from that time period to be found. But if there was an older manuscript, it probably wouldn’t be from there. But there aren’t any equivalent finds of massive piles of Greek manuscripts from earlier time periods. I’m also not sure how complete my search of Oxyrhynchus was, given that the POxy Online site and the Oxford site both found Oxyrhynchus manuscripts for me – but with no overlap. And neither site covers claimed Oxyrhynchus papyri that are in private hands, like the copy of Psalms at the Ark Encounter.

Now onto the quantity question. I have no idea where the pastor got the number 49 from for the total number of Aristotelian manuscripts. Bekker’s 19th century edition of the Corpus Aristotelicum used 102 manuscripts, and I assume that predates any source the pastor would be using. I still think he must have used a source that was referring to a particular document of Aristotles and just confused it with his entire works. Princeton has a searchable database of digitized Greek manuscripts which comes up with 640 for Aristotle. But that’s only the digitized ones, and it doesn’t include any of the manuscripts I’ve already found.

And that’s where I’m giving up. He was off by at least double on the timeline, and over 11X on the number of manuscripts. I’m not going to pretend this was in any way a comprehensive search, but those are absolute minimums.