Sir, the FACT is, that the best, most-accurate New Testament manuscripts are the oldest-known ancient Greek ones.
For a
highminded man who scorns the
unlearned and ignorant KJVOs your statement is surprisingly (perhaps not) amateurish, a parroting of an oft-heard mantra, made more palatable by superficial common sense, but untenable as a maxim of manuscript evidence.
That is a very simplistic view of "evidence". If you're going to be correcting the words of God based on that "evidence", you adopt a more nuanced understanding. "evidence" is to be
weighed.
1. Some manuscripts are older because they were
ignored of believers, thus surviving the wear-and-tear of other manuscripts (think a well-read Bible VS one remaining on the shelf collecting dust). The Sinaiticus was found in St. Catherine's Monastery located at the base of Mt. Sinai. According to some, it was found in a trash can, waiting to be burned! The Vaticanus is so named because it is contained in the Vatican library; it is the sole property of the Vatican. It was discovered on a shelf there in 1481, where it had apparently been
forgotten about for centuries! Furthermore, some manuscripts survived longer because the authorities
sanctioned them while burning other manuscripts and persecuting certain believers. Government censure is nothing new.
2. Those two manuscripts were written on expensive
vellum, helping their preservation.
3. The preoccupation with the age of manuscripts leads to the arbitrary prejudice against readings of locations which did not have favorable
climates for preservation. Byzantine manuscripts had the disadvantage of being produced in climates which were not as suitable for manuscript preservation as Egypt.
4. Manuscripts in Alexandria were
corrupt by 200 A.D. The oldest New Testament manuscript fragment is P52, which dates to about 125 A.D. However, the earliest manuscripts that provide distinguishable readings date to about 200 A.D. (e.g. P46, P66). These manuscripts come from Egypt and are witnesses of the Alexandrian text-type. However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said: "...the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please."
(Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father's own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 A.D. were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, "Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted—within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse". Better yet, Paul himself tells us that New Testament was being corrupted in his day; so while the "oldest is best" advocate resorts to the analogy of a stream, wherein the water is purer the nearer it is to the source, Pickering wisely comments "This is normally true, no doubt, but what if a sewer pipe empties into the stream a few yards below the spring?
Then, the process is reversed - as the polluted water is exposed to the purifying action of the sun and ground, the farther it runs the purer it becomes (unless it passes more pipes). That is what happened to the stream of the New Testament transmission. Very near to the source, by 100 A.D. at least, the pollution started gushing into the pure stream".
5. Later manuscripts can contain
early readings the same way that the NA/UBS text contains early readings. The date of a manuscript does not indicate the date of the parent copies used by the copyist. The NA/UBS text is a "late text", being a product of the 19th and 20th centuries. The NA/UBS text itself is late although its readings are early (agreeing with early uncials and papyri). Thus to accept that the late 19th-20th century NA/UBS text contains early readings, one would have to accept the proposition that late texts can contain early readings. Thus to be open-minded one would have to admit that other late texts (i.e. Byzantine manuscripts) may also contain early readings.
Some "FACT" you're quoting...