Sherlock Holmes wrote: ↑Fri May 27, 2022 4:01 pmbenchwarmer wrote: ↑Thu May 26, 2022 8:53 pmThe above was from 2018, so we have a span of 20 years and > 500 million copies. What does this tell us? It tells me this book is popular. It certainly doesn't tell us that Hogwarts is a real school for magicians.
I always laugh when someone brings up the number of Bibles printed. As if that is some measure of it's truth or validity. In the age of the internet, we can ALL access any published (to the internet) material. Does this mean it's all true because we can all read it? Clearly not.
Well I certainly did not refer to the number of Bibles printed (in fact I did not refer to Bibles at all). All of the ancient documents listed in the chart predate printing and come from a time when hand copying was the only means available for replicating documents.
Look at the chart, the NT is exceptional as you can see.
It's exceptional, but benchwarmer's response shows why your argument based on that specific criterion is flawed. The "number of copies" argument is support for a
different claim, namely that the manuscripts we have are reasonably close to autographs, or at least an earlier form. It's often mistakenly cited, as you have done, as evidence that its content is historically trustworthy. Likewise, even if the original manuscript of
Harry Potter were lost, we could be reasonably certain that we could reconstruct a text very similar to the original. Also likewise, the number of copies preserved doesn't offer any assurance that Hogwarts is real.
To extend the analogy a bit further, there are actually two main variants of the first
Harry Potter book in English:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone with a number of textual differences. We could perform literary and textual criticism across those variants and attempt to reconstruct an original and find likely patterns for those differences. To extend it even further (and because I'm nothing if not a nerd), I own copies of the first
Harry Potter book translated into both German and
Homeric Greek. We could examine those translations along with the English variants and determine, for example, whether the translators were likely working from an English variant and whether it was one of the two that we have, a combination of the two, or an unknown variant. The more manuscripts we have, the more we could learn about its literary history, but that still wouldn't do much to inform us about the main character's status as an actual historical wizard.