How many manuscripts of the New Testament exist compared to other ancient books?

Whosoever Will, A Mile of Witnesses: For Homer's Iliad (the most copied work of classical antiquity) scholars count under two thousand manuscripts. For the historians we trust without a second thought, the numbers are humiliating: Caesar, Tacitus, Herodotus reach us through a few dozen copies at best, the earliest a thousand years or more downstream from the men who wrote them. No one stands at a lectern and asks whether Tacitus wrote Tacitus. Then there is the New Testament. More than five thousand eight hundred Greek manuscripts catalogued and counting. Add the early translations: around ten thousand in Latin, thousands more in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, and the figure climbs past twenty thousand. One survey measured the New Testament evidence at over two and a half million pages: a mile of witnesses, against the four feet a typical classical author can muster. If we threw out the New Testament for lack of evidence, we would have to burn every history book in the building first.

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