The Alands have a nice chart showing the distribution of Greek New Testament manuscripts by century in their textual criticism handbook, but the data are almost 30 years old now. Thankfully, it’s possible to update their chart with data from the online Kurzgefasste Liste.
Here is the absolute distribution:
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And here is a distribution as a percentage of all the manuscripts for each century:
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Of course there are caveats. These are simply based on the Gregory-Aland categories with the problems that attend them. Second, I followed the Alands in listing a manuscript with its upper date range so that a 2nd/3rd century manuscript is listed in the 3rd here. There were just over 300 manuscripts that fall into that category. Lastly, I made sure my own data was clean before I produced my charts, but I don’t make any claims that the numbers are 100% accurate.
Feel free to correct these, use them in your lectures, or frame them for your children’s wall.
Here is the absolute distribution:
And here is a distribution as a percentage of all the manuscripts for each century:
Of course there are caveats. These are simply based on the Gregory-Aland categories with the problems that attend them. Second, I followed the Alands in listing a manuscript with its upper date range so that a 2nd/3rd century manuscript is listed in the 3rd here. There were just over 300 manuscripts that fall into that category. Lastly, I made sure my own data was clean before I produced my charts, but I don’t make any claims that the numbers are 100% accurate.
Feel free to correct these, use them in your lectures, or frame them for your children’s wall.