Faith in what?
The Christian "faith" is precisely the absolute confidence in the historical facticity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, a recorded event with vastly more immediate and quantitative manuscript evidence than the historical facticity of Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul (but you don't doubt the facticity of that event, do you? Of course not...)
In considering the New Testament we have tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament in part or in whole dating from the second century A.D. to the late fifteenth century when the printing press was invented. These manuscripts have been found in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, making collusion unlikely. The oldest manuscript, the John Rylands manuscript has been dated to 125 A.D. and was found in Egypt, some distance from where the New Testament was originally composed (Asia Minor). Many early Christian papyri were discovered in 1935, which have been dated to 150 A.D., and include the four gospels. The Papyrus Bodmer II, discovered in 1956, has been dated to 200 A.D. and contains 14 chapters and portions of the last seven chapters of the gospel of John. The Chester Beatty biblical papyri, discovered in 1931, has been dated to 200-250 A.D. and contains the Gospels, Acts, Paul's Epistles, and Revelation. The number of manuscripts is extensive compared to other ancient historical writings, such as Caesar's "Gallic Wars" (10 Greek manuscripts, the earliest 950 years after the original), the "Annals" of Tacitus (2 manuscripts, the earliest 950 years after the original), Livy (20 manuscripts, the earliest 350 years after the original), and Plato (7 manuscripts).
Author |
Written |
Earliest Copy |
Time Span |
# Mss. |
Caesar |
100-44 B.C. |
900 A.D. |
1,000 yrs |
10 |
Plato |
427-347 B.C. |
900 A.D. |
1,200 yrs |
7 |
Thucydides |
460-400 B.C. |
900 A.D. |
1,300 yrs |
8 |
Tacitus |
100 A.D. |
1100 A.D. |
1,000 yrs |
20 |
Suetonius |
75-160 A.D. |
950 A.D. |
800 yrs |
8 |
Homer (Iliad) |
900 B.C. |
400 B.C. |
500 yrs |
643 |
New Testament |
40-100 A.D. |
125 A.D. |
25-50 yrs |
24,000 |
What? Are we to believe those Jonestown Kool-Aid drinkers were Buddhists then?