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OLDEST CHRISTIAN WRITING

Sinaiticus text

The oldest manuscripts of the collected books of the Bible date back to around A.D. 350. One is a Vatican manuscript written in Greek. It is now in the Vatican Library. The other is the Sinaitic manuscript from the St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai. Also known as Codex Sinaiticus, it contains the earliest known complete copy of the New Testament . Handwritten on parchment in Greek, it was found in 1844 and 1859 and was split up into parts. Only 823 of an estimated 1,487 pages survive, with parts of it still at St. Catherine’s and large chunks of it in the British Museum and other parts in Russia and Germany. In the 2000s, the various parts were united at the Internet address codexsinaiticus.org. A codex is an academic term for an ancient book with pages.

Some of the texts from Christianity’s earliest centuries were made on costly parchment or vellum. The the vast majority of were written on papyrus, the paper of the ancient world, often associated with the ancient Egyptians. . The oldest known individual books date back to around 100 B.C. and are part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These include a few lines from Isaiah coped before 73 B.C. See The Dead Sea Scrolls africame.factsanddetails.com

Robert Draper wrote in National Geographic: Why all the fuss about old Bibles and older scraps of Egyptian papyrus? For David Green, who has invested much of the family fortune in a world-class museum dedicated to the Bible, it boils down to this: Is their faith based on fact or fiction? “When visitors to our museum see an ancient text,” Green says, “they’re seeing evidence that what they believe isn’t just a bunch of fairy tales.” But how good is that evidence? Assuming for the moment that the God of the Bible actually exists and that he somehow spoke to the authors of the ancient biblical documents — do we have now what they wrote then? After all, none of their original writings, what scholars call the autographs, have been found. Their words survive only because they were hand copied countless times until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. And even conservative scholars admit that no two copies are exactly alike. [Source: Robert Draper, National Geographic, December, 2018]

Oldest Bibles in the World

1) Codex Vaticanus (The Latin Bible) was published in A.D. 300-305 in Greek. It was written and translated by unknown scribes and discovered in an unknown location, possibly Rome, Alexandria, or Caesarea. Kept at the Vatican Library since around the 15th century, the Codex Vaticanus is the oldest known Bible in existence. The verses are written on sheets of vellum, and it is believed that it was translated by at least three scribes. Most scholars believe that the Codex Vaticanus is the most closest to the original as it was written only a few hundred years after the death of Jesus. Though incomplete is also considered to be one of the best translations of a Greek Bible. Though this isn’t a complete translation of the Bible, it is remarkably intact and mostly complete. It’s missing most of Genesis, Hebrews, and Revelations. [Source: oldest.org]

2) Codex Sinaiticus (The Sinai Bible) was published in A.D. 330 — 360 in Greek. It was written and translated by unknown scribes and discovered in Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. Discovered in the 19th century, the Codex Sinaiticus was widely considered to be the oldest Bible in existence until the Codex Vaticanus was accurately dated. Today, parts of the Codex Sinaiticus are on display at the British Library in London. See Below

3) Codex Alexandrinus was published in A.D. 400 to 440 in Greek. It was written and translated by unknown scribes and discovered in Alexandria , Egypt. Given to King Charles I of England in 1627, it has 773 pages and can be seen in its entirety on website of the British Library. The pages are made of vellum, and it is hand-written. Because of the delicate condition it is rarely touched. The Codex Alexandrinus is the most complete very old New Testament and is similar the New Testament version still in use today.

4) Codex Ephraemi was published in A.D. 460 in Greek. It was written and translated by unknown scribes and believed to have been made in Egypt. It was originally thought to have been complete Bible, but today, most of the Old Testament is missing, and only about 2/3 of the New Testament exists. Researchers believe that this text was written by two scribes, whose identities are unknown, based on other manuscripts. The scribes switched from one manuscript to another as they wrote. Today this Bible can be seen in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

5) Codex Sassoon is the oldest- known near-complete Hebrew Bible is the Codex Sassoon. It is one of only two codices, or manuscripts, containing all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible It is — the Christian Old Testament — to have survived into the modern era and is estimated to be 1,100 years old. According to Sotheby's, the Codex Sassoon is significantly more complete than the Aleppo Codex, dated to the same era. See SACRED TEXTS OF JUDAISM: THE TORAH, TANAKH AND TALMUD africame.factsanddetails.com

6) Aleppo Codex was published in A.D. 930 in Hebrew. It was written and translated by Masoretes and discovered in Tiberias, Israel, The Aleppo Codex is a full manuscript of the Bible and was held and protected and hidden away for more than 1,000 years in a number of Jewish communities in Egypt, Jerusalem, and Aleppo, Syria, from whence it gets its name. In 1958, it was smuggled out of Syria the country and given to Izhak Ben-Zvi,the President of Israel. The manuscript has 294 pages. Many pages are missing pages due to damage from a riot in 1947. A great effort has gone into recovering the missing pages, though ultimately, no one knows what has happened to them. Today, the Aleppo Codex is housed at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

7) Leningrad Codex was published in 1008 in Hebrew. It was written and translated by Samuel ben Jacob, and Others and discovered in Cairo, Egypt. The Leningrad Codex is known for being the oldest complete Hebrew translation of the Bible and is one of the best examples of Jewish medieval art. One striking thing about the Leningrad Codex is that some of the books are out of order and is in remarkably good shape. Today, the Leningrad Codex is kept at the National Library of Russia.

8) Gutenberg Bibles are the oldest printed books in the West. They date to the mid-1450s, when Johann Gutenberg and his partner Johann Fust published more than 150 large-format copies of the Bible in Latin in Mainz, Germany. The printing technology used to make them became available as early as the 1430s. Gutenberg printed about 180 copies of the Bible, which were first available in about 1455. Forty-nine copies (or substantial portions of copies) have survived. They are mostly owned by university libraries and other major scholarly institutions. The last sale of a complete Gutenberg Bible took place in 1978, when copy now in Austin, Texas, sold for $2.4 million. The price of a complete copy today is estimated at $25−35 million. [Source: Wikipedia]

9) Coverdale Bible was published in 1535 in English. Compiled by Myles Coverdale and produced in Zurich, Switzerland or Antwerp, Belgium, it is the oldest English translation of the full Bible and contains both the Old and the New Testaments. There were at least 20 editions of the Coverdale Bible, with the final edition being published in 1553. Myles Coverdale did much of the work to create early English Bibles. He made a career out of Bible printing and was involved in making other famous Bibles such as the Geneva Bible and the Great Bible.

10) Great Bible was published in 1539 in English. It was written and translated by Myles Coverdale and published in England. The Great Bible was commissioned by King Henry VIII of England. Every parish in the country was required by the King to buy a copy of it from the Crown. There were six full editions of the Great Bible, and there were more than 9,000 copies made. At the time, this was the only version of the Bible that was permitted to be read in English churches. Most of the Great Bible was based on the Tyndale Bible, which was more a collection Biblical texts written by William Tyndale than bonafide Bible.

11) Geneva Bible was published in 1560 in English. It was printed, written and translated by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale and discovered or published in Geneva, Switzerland even though it was in English, This is because during the reign of Queen Mary, many English theologians fled to other parts of Europe, including Geneva, to continue their religious studies. Mostly translated by William Tyndale, with help from Myles Coverdale, it was the primary English translation of the Bible for many years, was even brought to America by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. The Geneva Bible was the first Bible to be mechanically printed for mass production., and was widely purchased by the general public.

Didache: the First Christian Document?

Didache

“The Didache (pronounced 'did ah kay') is a Christian manual giving unique details regarding baptism, eucharist and church leadership from an early period of Christian development. |Its name comes from the title, The Teaching (Didache) of the Lord, by the Twelve Apostles, to the Gentiles. At present scholars are still divided over the date and significance of the Didache. However, over the past few years there has seen a steady movement in favour of the idea that the Didache contains extremely ancient material. |::| According to the BBC: “Christianity as a world religion began when St Paul persuaded Jesus's Disciples at a crisis meeting in Jerusalem that you didn't have to become a Jew to be a Christian. An Oxford academic, Alan Garrow, claims to have identified the record of that meeting in a section of a document called The Didache describes the process leading to the baptism of Gentiles wishing to convert to the (Jewish) Jesus movement. It does not require them to be circumcised - and thus does not require them to become Jews as a preliminary step. [Source: BBC, August 4, 2009|::|]

The Didache, also known as The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, is a brief anonymous early Christian treatise, dated by most modern scholars to the first century. The first line of this treatise is "The teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles (or Nations) by the twelve apostles". The text, parts of which constitute the oldest extant written catechism, has three main sections dealing with Christian ethics, rituals such as baptism and Eucharist, and Church organization. The opening chapters describe the virtuous Way of Life and the wicked Way of Death. The Lord's Prayer is included in full. Baptism is by immersion, or by affusion if immersion is not practical. Fasting is ordered for Wednesdays and Fridays. Two primitive Eucharistic prayers are given. Church organization was at an early stage of development. Itinerant apostles and prophets are important, serving as "chief priests" and possibly celebrating the Eucharist. Meanwhile, local bishops and deacons also have authority and seem to be taking the place of the itinerant ministry. The Didache is considered the first example of the genre of Church Orders. The Didache reveals how Jewish Christians saw themselves and how they adapted their practice for Gentile Christians The Didache is similar in several ways to the Gospel of Matthew, perhaps because both texts originated in similar communities. The opening chapters, which also appear in other early Christian texts, are likely derived from an earlier Jewish source. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Didache is considered part of the group of second-generation Christian writings known as the Apostolic Fathers. The work was considered by some Church Fathers to be a part of the New Testament, while being rejected by others as spurious or non-canonical. In the end, it was not accepted into the New Testament canon. However, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church "broader canon" includes the Didascalia, a work which draws on the Didache. Lost for centuries, a Greek manuscript of the Didache was rediscovered in 1873 by Philotheos Bryennios, Metropolitan of Nicomedia, in the Codex Hierosolymitanus. A Latin version of the first five chapters was discovered in 1900.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (modern el-Bahnasa). The manuscripts date from the time of the Ptolemaic (3rd century BC) and Roman periods of Egyptian history (from 32 BC to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640 AD).

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri have provided the most numerous sub-group of the earliest copies of the New Testament. These are surviving portions of codices (books) written in Greek uncial letters on papyrus. Of the 127 registered New Testament papyri, 52 (41 percent) are from Oxyrhynchus. The earliest of the papyri are dated to the middle of the 2nd century, so were copied within about a century of the writing of the original New Testament documents. Grenfell and Hunt discovered the first New Testament papyrus, on only the second day of excavation, in the winter of 1896–7. This, together with the other early discoveries, was published in 1898, in the first volume of the now 70-volume work, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

Since 1898 academics have puzzled together and transcribed over 5,000 documents from what were originally hundreds of boxes of papyrus fragments the size of large cornflakes. This is thought to represent only 1 to 2 percent of what is estimated to be at least half a million papyri still remaining to be conserved, transcribed, deciphered and catalogued. Oxyrhynchus Papyri are currently housed in institutions all over the world. A substantial number are housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. There is an on-line table of contents briefly listing the type of contents of each papyrus or fragment.

The Oxyrhynchus were excavated in ancient trash heaps in Egypt. Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Since the cache’s discovery the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and generations of papyrologists have been engaged in the painstaking work of identifying, editing, and publishing the fragments. The papyri shed light on every aspect of ancient life — commerce, friendship, lawsuits, romantic relationships, and shopping habits — and also transmit works by ancient authors that had previously been lost in the sands of time. Among them were a number of early Christian texts, some of them previously known and others that were previously undiscovered. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, August 31, 2023]

Texts in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection

Only around 10 percent of texts in the Oxyrhynchus collection are literary in nature. The lion’s share of the papyri found seem to consist mainly of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters. Although most of the papyri were written in Greek, some texts written in Egyptian (Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, mostly Coptic), Latin and Arabic were also found. Texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Pahlavi have so far represented only a small percentage of the total.

Among the Christian texts found at Oxyrhynchus, were fragments of early non-canonical Gospels, Oxyrhynchus 840 (3rd century AD) and Oxyrhynchus 1224 (4th century AD). Other Oxyrhynchus texts preserve parts of Matthew 1 (3rd century: P2 and P401), 11–12 and 19 (3rd to 4th century: P2384, 2385); Mark 10–11 (5th to 6th century: P3); John 1 and 20 (3rd century: P208); Romans 1 (4th century: P209); the First Epistle of John (4th-5th century: P402); the Apocalypse of Baruch (chapters 12–14; 4th or 5th century: P403); the Gospel according to the Hebrews (3rd century AD: P655); The Shepherd of Hermas (3rd or 4th century: P404), and a work of Irenaeus, (3rd century: P405). There are many parts of other canonical books as well as many early Christian hymns, prayers, and letters also found among them.

All manuscripts classified as "theological" in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are listed below. A few manuscripts that belong to multiple genres, or genres that are inconsistently treated in the volumes of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, are also included. For example, the quotation from Psalm 90 (P. Oxy. XVI 1928) associated with an amulet, is classified according to its primary genre as a magic text in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri; however, it is included here among witnesses to the Old Testament text. In each volume that contains theological manuscripts, they are listed first, according to an English tradition of academic precedence (see Doctor of Divinity).

Christian Oxyrhynchus Fragment Dated the A.D. 2nd Century

Oxyrhynchus Papyri from AD 113

In 2023, papyrologists published a Christian Oxyrhynchus fragment dated the A.D. 2nd century — making it one of the earliest examples of Christian writing, predating the formation of the New Testament. Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast For all of Christianity’s influence today, the archeological evidence for the first two centuries of the religion’s existence is notoriously thin. This is why the publication of a previously unknown second-century fragment of early Christian writing this week is so significant. Written before the formation of a New Testament or even the widespread recognition of a collection of Christian sacred scripture, this fragmentary page from a small ancient book offers a rare glimpse into the minds of early Christians. The contents show that, much like us, early Christians were plagued by life’s worries. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, August 31, 2023]

The significance of the fragment lies in its date and contents. In conjunction with distinguished papyrologist and paleographer Ben Henry, the editors — Jeffrey Fish, Daniel Wallace, and Michael Holmes — date the fragment to the second century CE. This is important because, as Dr. Fish told me, “Only a few gospel papyri can be securely dated to the second or beginning of the third century.” This is the earliest period from which we have Christian manuscripts. “What is so significant about this papyrus,” continued Fish, “is that it contains sayings of Jesus which correspond partly to canonical gospels (Matthew and Luke) and partly to sayings we know only from the Gospel of Thomas. It is as early or earlier than any of our papyri of the Gospel of Thomas [our earliest non-canonical Gospel],” including other fragments of the Gospel of Thomas found at Oxyrhynchus.

Dating manuscripts is a challenge. Because the papyri were found in a trash heap the archaeological context is of limited value for determining a date. Instead, the date is ascertained by comparing the handwriting of the fragment (paleography) with that of other manuscripts. In this case, Fish told me, the new papyrus was compared to two dated documents and to another non-canonical manuscript (LX 4009). The other non-canonical Christian manuscript, which was edited by a different team including the renowned papyrologist Peter Parsons, was tentatively dated to the second century. The date, Holmes told me, is “as secure as the limitations of paleography allow.” Other scholars will be sure to weigh in on the reliability of this date, but any second-century Christian manuscript is priceless.

Contents of the 2nd Century Oxyrhynchus Fragment: Sayings of Jesus?

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast Then there are the contents of the papyrus. Although the fragment does not include the phrase “Jesus said,” it appears to be a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. As the fragment is so short, it is difficult to determine exactly what kind of text it was. There is no narrative content, but the fragment might have been part of a previously unknown Gospel or instead part of a text by an early Christian writer that quoted sayings of Jesus. To support the second possibility, there are similarities with a text written by the second-century Christian philosopher Justin Martyr. Taking the most historically cautious approach, the editors of the fragment have wisely titled it “Sayings of Jesus.” [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, August 31, 2023]

For historians investigating both what the historical Jesus said and how early Christians wrote their Gospels, the fragment brims with promise. For those interested in Jesus’s words, it represents an intriguing new resource. There is a scholarly consensus that stories about Jesus and the memories of what he said circulated orally for decades among his followers. For several centuries, scholars have speculated that when people first began to commit these words to paper, they collected his sayings together first. We have an example of this kind of collection in the Gospel of Thomas, which is one reason that some scholars date the Gospel of Thomas so early. It is clear from reading the canonical Gospels that Matthew (ca. 80-90 C.E.) and Luke (ca. 80-120 C.E.) shared written material. All scholars agree that they had copies of Mark (ca. 70 C.E.) and many speculate that they also had another source comprised almost entirely of sayings that is enigmatically called Q. (It’s a hypothetical document, we don’t have any copies of it.)

When I asked Jeffrey Fish and Michael Holmes if they had discovered Q, they were clear that they had not. “Q,” said Holmes “is commonly defined as material deriving from Matthew and Luke.” This fragment also includes sections shared with the Gospels of Thomas and departs from Matthew and Luke in small but important ways. It is, however, a sayings source. Fish tentatively raised the possibility that it may represent material used by the author of the Gospel of Thomas and, thus, present another line of early Christian thought and written tradition.

What is certain is that this text was at least partly concerned with the problem of worries of the world, or as ancient philosophers would put it, the care of the soul. The contents parallel passages of both canonical and non-canonical Gospels around this theme: specifically, an instruction not to worry about your life, food, or clothing (Matthew 6:25; Luke 12:22; Gospel of Thomas 27; 36); to emulate birds and their lack of cares (portions of Matt. 6:26–33; Luke 12:24–29); and a saying in the Gospel of Thomas that cautions people that even a rich man who amassed wealth still met death (saying 63). You cannot plan your way out of mortality. All life, like grass “is dried up and thrown in the oven” in the end.

Codex Siniaticus

Codex Siniaticus

The A.D. 4th century Codex Siniaticus is the oldest Codex of the New Testament but not the oldest written fragment. According to codexsinaiticus.org: The “Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.”

The Codex Sinaiticus, or "Sinai Bible", is one of the four great uncial codices, ancient, handwritten copies of the Greek Bible. A celebrated historical treasure, the codex is an Alexandrian text-type manuscript written in the 4th century in uncial letters on parchment. Scholarship considers the Codex Sinaiticus to be one of the best Greek texts of the New Testament,, along with the Codex Vaticanus. Until the discovery by Constantin von Tischendorf of the Sinaiticus text, the Codex Vaticanus was unrivaled. [Source: Wikipedia]

Since its discovery, study of the Codex Sinaiticus has proven to be useful to scholars for critical studies of biblical text. While large portions of the Old Testament are missing, it is assumed that the codex originally contained the whole of both Testaments. About half of the Greek Old Testament (or Septuagint) survived, along with a complete New Testament, the entire Deuterocanonical books, the Epistle of Barnabas and portions of The Shepherd of Hermas.

Discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus

The Codex Sinaiticus came to the attention of scholars in the 19th century at Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, with further material discovered in the 20th and 21st centuries. Although parts of the codex are scattered across four libraries around the world, most of the manuscript today is in the British Library in London, where it is on public display.

In 1844, Konstantin von Tischendorf, a German scholar, made a long, dangerous journey through Egypt’s Sinai desert to the world’s oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery, St. Catherine’s.Robert Draper wrote in National Geographic: There he encountered “the most precious biblical treasure in existence.” It was a codex — an ancient text in book form instead of a scroll — dating to the mid-fourth century. Known today as the Codex Sinaiticus, it’s one of the two oldest Christian Bibles surviving from antiquity, and the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. “The discovery made Tischendorf “the most famous and most infamous textual scholar in history,” notes biographer Stanley Porter. According to his own account of events, Tischendorf first spotted some pages from the codex in a basket of old parchment the monks planned to burn. He rescued the pages and requested permission to take the entire codex back to Europe for study. The monks, alerted to its value by the foreign scholar’s excitement, would part with only a few dozen pages. [Source: Robert Draper, National Geographic, December, 2018]

“Tischendorf made the arduous trek back to St. Catherine’s in 1853 but left with little to show for it. He returned a third and final time in 1859 after securing the sponsorship of the Russian tsar, considered the “defender and protector” of the Eastern Orthodox Church, to which the Sinai monastery belongs. This time Tischendorf’s doggedness paid off. After signing a pledge to return the codex once he’d made exact copies, he delivered it to his royal patron in St. Petersburg.

“From there the chain of events becomes tangled in controversy and accusations of imperialist power plays. The monks eventually “donated” the codex to the tsar, but whether they did so willingly or under pressure is still debated. In any event, the priceless Bible remained in St. Petersburg until 1933, when Joseph Stalin’s government, facing financial crisis and famine, sold it to the British Museum for the equivalent of nearly half a million U.S. dollars.

Dating the Oldest New Testament Manuscripts

Peter van Minnen at the Duke University Library wrote: The New Testament text we read in our English Bibles is based on the original Greek text. We know this text, albeit imperfectly, through a large number of ancient manuscripts. All these manuscripts are mere copies, and the great majority of them are copies of copies, yet ultimately they all derive from the originals. In the process of copying, however, scribal errors are bound to occur. There is not a single copy wholly free from mistakes. A science called textual criticism deals systematically with these mistakes to eliminate as many of them as possible. The most important tools for textual critics are the manuscripts themselves. [Source: Peter van Minnen, library.duke.edu/rubenstein]

In the 19th century within a fairly short period, a number of manuscripts of superior quality became available, mainly thanks to the work of the German scholar Constantin Tischendorf. These manuscripts dated from the fourth and fifth centuries and presented a text that was at least free from the accretions of a later age. Tischendorf himself and the British scholars Westcott and Hort produced two rival editions of the Greek text. They believed that their text reflected the original as well as possible, even if it was based on manuscripts dating from at least three centuries after the New Testament was written. In the 30's and 60's of the twentieth century a number of other, very important manuscripts have become available. We owe this to the efforts of two wealthy book collectors, Chester Beatty and Martin Bodmer. These manuscripts are written on papyrus and date from well before the fourth century. The earliest papyrus manuscripts come very close to the time when the New Testament was written.

How do we know these manuscripts are so very early? How do we know their dates for certain? Some of you may think "scientific" tests on the physical structure of the papyrus may yield such dates. In fact they cannot, because such tests are very inaccurate. No, we can date papyrus manuscripts, any manuscript for that matter, simply by looking at the way it is written. Handwriting is a product of human culture and as such it is always developing. Differences in handwriting are bound to appear within one generation. Just compare the handwriting of your parents with your own. Or look at your own scribblings of a few years ago. It is the same handwriting as today but an expert, a paleographer, can distinguish not unimportant differences. He cannot establish the exact date but he can confidently place one handwriting in the 30's and another in the 80's. Even printed texts can easily be dated according to the outward appearance of the type or font used by the printer.

For such an ancient period as that between A.D. 100 and 300 it is of course much more difficult to be confident about the date of a manuscript. There is infinitely less comparative material. Nevertheless we are now in a fairly comfortable position to date papyrus manuscripts according to their handwriting. We do not have to rely on manuscripts of the New Testament only. We have hundreds of papyrus manuscripts of Greek pagan literary texts from this period and again hundreds of carefully written papyrus documents that show the same types of handwriting. These documents are very important for paleographers because they are often exactly dated. As a rule New Testament manuscripts on papyrus are not. A careful comparison of the papyrus documents and manuscripts of the second and third centuries has established beyond doubt that about forty Greek papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament date from this very period. Unfortunately only six of them are extensively preserved.

Oldest New Testament Manuscripts

Peter van Minnen at the Duke University Library wrote: Even within the period that runs from c. A.D. 100-300 it is possible for paleographers to be more specific on the relative date of the papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament. For about sixty years now a tiny papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John has been the oldest "manuscript" of the New Testament. This manuscript (P52) has generally been dated to ca. A.D. 125. This fact alone proved that the original Gospel of John was written earlier, viz. in the first century A.D., as had always been upheld by conservative scholars. [Source: Peter van Minnen, library.duke.edu/rubenstein]

We now have early and very early evidence for the text of the New Testament. A classified list of the most important manuscripts will make this clear. Numbers preceded by a P refer to papyri, the letters refer to parchment manuscripts.
ca. A.D.— 200 — 250 — 300 — 350 — 450
Matthew — nothing — nothing — P45 — B — Sin.
Mark — nothing — P45 — B — Sin.— A
Luke — nothing — P4,P45,P75 — B — Sin. — A
John — P66 — P45,P75 — B — Sin. — A
Acts — nothing — P45 — B — Sin. — A
Romans-Hebrews — nothing — P46 — B — Sin. — A
James-Jude — nothing — — nothing — P72,B — Sin. — A
Apocalypse — nothing — P47 — nothing — Sin. — A

As you can see, from the fourth century onwards the material base for establishing the text of the Greek New Testament is very good indeed. The manuscripts Sin. (Sinaiticus), A (Alexandrinus) and B (Vaticanus) are almost complete parchment manuscripts. With the help of the earlier papyrus manuscripts we have been able to establish that the text of these three great manuscripts is to a large extent reliable. The papyrus manuscript P75 was the latest to be published, but it showed a virtually identical text to manuscript B. This settled the vexed question whether we have in the parchment manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries a safe guide to the original text of the New Testament. We have.

That is not to say that we can dispense with later manuscripts of the New Testament. With the exception of Sin. the oldest manuscripts are not complete. Moreover they contain scribal errors of all sorts. P46 is a case in point: it is the manuscript with the largest percentage of blunders on record! Most of this kind of errors can, however, be removed by comparing the readings of the oldest manuscripts. The remaining puzzles can only be solved by taking later manuscripts into account. Most of the work in textual criticism in the past forty years has been done by Kurt Aland in Münster and Bruce Metzger in Princeton. The latest translations of the New Testament are based on their work.

British Library Pays $14.3 Million of a 7th Century Gospel

St Cuthbert Gospel of John

In 2012, The British Library paid $14.3 million for the St. Cuthbert Gospel, a remarkably well-preserved seventh-century manuscript described by the library as the oldest European book to survive fully intact. Associated Press reported: “The palm-sized book, a manuscript copy of the Gospel of John in Latin, was bought from the British branch of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), the library said Tuesday. The book measures 96 mm (3.8 inches) by 136 mm (5.4 inches) and has an elaborately tooled red leather cover. It comes from the time of St. Cuthbert, who died in 687, and it was discovered inside his coffin when it was opened in 1104 at Durham Cathedral. [Source: Associated Press, April 16, 2012 +++]

“The British Library said the artifact is one of the world's most important books. "To look at this small and intensely beautiful treasure from the Anglo-Saxon period is to see it exactly as those who created it in the seventh century would have seen it," said the library's chief executive, Lynne Brindley. "The exquisite binding, the pages, even the sewing structure survive intact, offering us a direct connection with our forebears 1300 years ago," she added. +++

“Cuthbert's coffin arrived in Durham after monks had removed it from the island of Lindisfarne, 330 miles (530 kilometers) north of London, to protect the remains from Viking raiders in the ninth and 10th centuries.” The book has been displayed at the British Library in London and in Durham, northeast England.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except Bible Development Timelines, Relevancy 22 and New Testament Canon, Bible Diagrams

Text Sources: Frontline, PBS, Wikipedia, BBC, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Live Science, Encyclopedia.com, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider, AFP, Library of Congress, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024