fyi, the originals were long gone that even the scrolls are just copies of the original writings and the dead sea scrolls include copies of the deuterocanonicals like sirach, tobit, and baruch.
FYI everyone knows that fact. But we can still trust God's word. Why RCs always want to throw doubt on God's word is amazing to me. It is doing the devil's work for him. He wants God's word doubted.
In terms of quantity, the New Testament is represented far more than any other piece of ancient literature. Consider the known manuscripts of four well known Greek and Roman works: Homer was the earliest and most popular author of the ancient Greek world. His book,
The Illiad, dates to 750 BC. To date,
647 manuscripts of this book have been found. Only 190 contain a complete copy. When compared to other classical Greek writing, Homer’s work is an exception. Copies of his work are much more plentiful than other ancient books. For example, Caesar’s Gallic War, dates to 50 BC. Only 9-10 manuscripts exist with the earliest copy dating to 900 AD. Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War dates to 450 BC. Eight manuscripts have been found with the earliest copy dating to 900 AD. (There are some fragments of this book that date to the time of Jesus.) Finally, Tacitus’ Histories was written in 100 AD. Only two manuscripts are available. One dates to 800 AD, the other to 1000 AD.
In light of this, the number of ancient writings containing the New Testament is staggering. To date, over 5800 Greek New Testament fragments have been found (Taylor, 2012). Over 10,000 Latin New Testament manuscripts dating from the 2nd to 16th century have been located. The earliest are in fragments that cover a substantial amount of the New Testament. Some manuscripts have also been found in a number of other languages, including Coptic, Syriac, Gothic, and Arabic. Taking all languages together,
over 25,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament have been recovered. But there is more. Almost the entire New Testament could be reproduced by quotes from the ancient church fathers. “So extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament” (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005).
The ways ancient manuscripts are judged to be authentic.
Number of copies in original language
the University of Munster in Germany, currently lists the official number at 5,856 partial and complete manuscript copies written in the Greek language.1 These include handwritten copies of the New Testament papyri, parchment and lectionaries. If we add to this number more than 18,000 New Testament manuscripts written in other languages (translations) besides Greek, the overall count swells to more than 24,000 New Testament manuscripts! ...
time span between copies and originals
Usually, the shorter the time span, the more dependable the copy. The longer the interval between the original and the copy, the more room there is for errors, embellishments, and distortions to creep in as the text is copied and recopied...
the earliest manuscript copies currently ranging from 30-300 years from the original texts....
graph shows our documents and their originals
Plato 150 year gap
Homer 450 year gap...
accurate transmission and variant readings
Technically speaking, any deviation from the base accepted text is an error, but the kinds of “errors” represented in the New Testament text are not errors of historical, geographical, spiritual, or scientific fact. Instead, they are rather trivial. Therefore, the term “variant(s)” has been employed by scholars to avoid this confusion, since misspellings, omissions, differing word orders, updated words (substitution), and additions are much different in nature than errors of fact that would threaten biblical inerrancy or the truth value of the message...
There is no doubt that the scribes who copied the texts introduced changes. These scribal changes can be broken down into two basic types: unintentional and intentional. The greatest numbers of variant readings found in the New Testament manuscripts are
unintentional variants...
Thus, the intentional variations, for the most part, were the work of scribes attempting to make the text more readable, not change the meaning....
On the whole, it must be admitted that…New Testament specialists… not to mention laypersons, tend to be fascinated by differences and to forget how many of them are due to chance or normal scribal tendencies, and how rarely significant variants occur— yielding to the common danger of failing to see the forest for the trees.13
Whatever manuscript tradition we use as the basis for a given translation, the outcome will be substantially the same because the text is basically the same...
Despite these variants, scholars have recognized the great accuracy with which the New Testament manuscripts were copied.
Because scholars don’t possess the original writings of the New Testament (known as autographs), we must ask: How accurate are the manuscript copies (apographs)? For if the copies do not reflect the original writings of Scripture, we would have no idea what the original texts said. Because there...
defendinginerrancy.com
In other words we can trust and defend the inerrancy of scripture.
As to your other claim the dead sea scrolls held many different scrolls, so the fact that those non scriptural books are included is no surprise.