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Fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls on display at the Archeological Museum, Amman
A Biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. The word Bible comes from the Greek biblion (book); manuscript comes from Latin manu (hand) and scriptum (written). Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures (see Tefillin) to huge polyglot codices (multi-lingual books) containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
The study of biblical manuscripts is important because handwritten copies of books contain errors. The science of textual criticism attempts to reconstruct the original text of books, especially those published prior to the invention of the printing press.
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.jpg/58px-Aleppo Codex (Deut).jpg)
A page from the Aleppo Codex, Deuteronomy.
The Aleppo Codex (c. 920) and Leningrad Codex (c. 1008) are the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Tanakh. The 1947 find at Qumran of the Dead Sea scrolls pushed the manuscript history of the Tanakh back a millennium from the two earliest complete codices (see Tanakh at Qumran). Out of the roughly 800 manuscripts found at Qumran, 220 are from the Tanakh. Every book of the Tanakh is represented except for the Book of Esther; however, most are fragmentary. Notably, there are two scrolls of the Book of Isaiah, one complete (1QIsa), and one around 75% complete (1QIsb). These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE to 70 CE.F. F. Bruce. "The Last Thirty Years". Story of the Bible. ed. Frederic G. Kenyon Retrieved June 19, 2007
Ancient Jewish scribes developed many practices to protect copies of their scriptures from error. The result produced by their methods is impressive. Significant variations among texts arise at an average rate of just under one consonant in every 1,500.Wilson 1929, p.40ff.
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Folio 65v from Codex Alexandrinus contains the Gospel of Luke with decorative tailpiece.
The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,400 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from the 2nd century up to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. The vast majority of these manuscripts date after the 10th century.
When one compares one manuscript to another, with the exception of the smallest fragments, no two copies agree completely in their wording. There has been an estimate of between 200,000 and 300,000 variations among all the manuscripts, which is more variations than words in the New Testament. The vast majority of these variations are errors made by scribes, and easily identified as such: an omitted word, a duplicate line, a misspelling, a rearrangement of words. Some variations involve apparently intentional changes, which can make it more difficult for scholars to determine whether they were corrections from better exemplars, harmonizations or ideologically motivated.Ehrman 2004, pp.480f Paleography is the study of ancient writing, and textual criticism is the study of manuscripts in order to reconstruct a probable original text.
An illustration of a European scribe at work
The New Testament books appear to have been completed within the 1st century. However, the original manuscripts of the New Testament books do not survive today. The autographs were lost or destroyed a long time ago. What survives are copies of the original. Generally speaking, these copies were made centuries after the originals from other copies rather than from the autograph. The earliest manuscript of a New Testament text is a business card sized fragment from the Gospel of John, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, which dates to the first half of the 2nd century. The first complete copies of single New Testament books appear around 200, and the earliest complete copy of the New Testament dates to the 4th century.Ehrman 2004, pp. 479-480
The task of copying manuscripts was generally taken on by scribes, trained professionals in the art of writing and bookmaking. Some manuscripts also had proofreaders, and scholars closely examining a text can make out the original and corrections found in certain manuscripts. In the 6th century, a special room devoted to the practice of manuscript writing and illumination called the scriptorium started to emerge, typically inside medieval European monasteries. Sometimes a group of scribes would copy along as one individual read from the text.Seid
An important issue with manuscripts is preservation. The earliest New Testament manuscripts were written on papyrus, a plant that grew abundantly in the Egyptian Nile Delta. This tradition continued on to as late as the 8th century.Metzger 2005, pp.3f Papyrus becomes brittle and deteriorates with age. The dry climate of Egypt allowed for some papyrus manuscripts to be partially preserved, but, with the exception of P77, no New Testament papyrus manuscript is complete, with many consisting only of a single fragmented page.Waltz However, beginning in the 4th century, parchment (also called vellum) began to be the common medium used for New Testament manuscripts.Metzger 2005, pp.3-10 It wasn\'t until the 12th century that paper, which was invented in 1st century China, began to gain popularity in biblical manuscripts.Aland 1995, p. 77
Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from Bibliothèque nationale de France
Out of the 476 non-Christian manuscripts dated to the 2nd century, 97% of the manuscripts are in the form of scrolls; however, the 8 Christian manuscripts are codices. In fact, the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts are codices. The adaptation of the codex form in non-Christian text did not become dominant until the 4th and 5th centuries, demonstrating that the Christians had an early preference to the codex when compared to non-Christian manuscripts.Seid The considerable lengths of the groupings of New Testament books (such as the Pauline epistles) did not suit the limited space available on a single scroll, where a codex could be expanded to hundreds of pages.
The beginning of the Gospel of Mark from the Book of Durrow.
The handwriting found in New Testament manuscripts varies. One way of classifying handwriting is by formality: book-hand vs. cursive. More formal, literary Greek works were often written in a distinctive style of even, capital letters called book-hand. Less formal writing consisted of cursive letters which could be written quickly. Another way of dividing handwriting is between uncial (or majuscule) and minuscule. The uncial letters were a consistent height between the baseline and the cap height, while the minuscule letters had ascenders and descenders that moved past the baseline and cap height. Generally speaking, the majuscules are earlier than the minuscules, with a dividing line roughly in the 11th century.Metzger 2005, pp. 17-18, 20
The earliest manuscripts had sparse if any punctuation or breathing marks. The manuscripts also lacked word spacing, so words, sentences, and paragraphs would be a continuous string of letters (scriptio continua), often with line breaks in the middle of words. Bookmaking was an expensive endeavor, and one way to reduce the number of pages used was to save space. Another method employed was to abbreviate frequent words, such as the nomina sacra. Yet another method involved the palimpsest, a manuscript which recycled an older manuscript. Scholars using careful examination can sometimes determine what was originally written on the material of a document before it was erased to make way for a new text (for example Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus and the Sinaitic Palimpsest).
The original New Testament books did not have titles, section headings, or verse and chapter divisions. These were developed over the years as "helps for readers". Ammonian Sections were an early system of division written in the margin of many manuscripts. The Eusebian Canon was a series of tables that grouped parallel stories among the gospels.
Manuscripts became more ornate over the centuries, which developed into a rich illuminated manuscript tradition, including the famous Irish Gospel Books, the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow.
Desiderius Erasmus compiled the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, basing his work on several manuscripts because he did not have a single complete work and because each manuscript had small errors. In the 18th century, Johann Jakob Wettstein was one of the first biblical scholars to start cataloging biblical manuscripts. He divided the manuscripts based on the writing used (uncial, minuscule) or format (lectionaries) and based on content (Gospels, Pauline letters, Acts + General epistles, and Revelation). He assigned the uncials letters and minuscules and lectionaries numbers for each grouping of content, which resulted in manuscripts being assigned the same letter or number.Aland 1995, p. 72
For manuscripts that contained the whole New Testament, such as Codex Alexandrinus (A) and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C), the letters corresponded across content groupings. However, for a significant, early manuscript such as Codex Vaticanus (B), which did not contain Revelation, the letter B was also assigned to a later 10th century manuscript of Revelation, thus creating confusion. Constantin von Tischendorf found one of the earliest, nearly complete copies of the Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, over a century after Wettstein\'s cataloging system was introduced. Because he felt the manuscript was so important, von Tischendorf assigned it the Hebrew letter Aleph (א). Eventually enough uncials were found that all the letters in the Latin alphabet had been used, and scholars moved on to first the Greek alphabet, and eventually started reusing characters by adding a superscript. Confusion also existed in the minuscules, where up to seven different manuscripts could have the same number or a single manuscript of the complete New Testament could have 4 different numbers to describe the different content groupings.Aland 1995, pp. 72-73
Hermann, Freiherr von Soden published a complex cataloging system for manuscripts in the first decade of the 20th century. He grouped the manuscripts based on content, assigning them a Greek prefix: δ for the complete New Testament, ε for the gospels, and α for the remaining parts. This grouping, however, was flawed because some manuscripts grouped in δ did not contain Revelation, and many manuscripts grouped in α contained either the general epistles or the Pauline epistles, but not both. After the Greek prefix, von Soden assigned a numeral that roughly corresponded to a date (for example δ1-δ49 were from before the 10th century, δ150-δ249 for the 11th century). This system proved to be problematic when manuscripts were re-dated, or when more manuscripts were discovered than the number of spaces allocated to a certain century.Aland 1995, pp. 40-41
Fragments of P. Chester Beatty VI showing portions of Deuteronomy
Caspar René Gregory published another cataloging system in 1908 in Die griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments, which is the system still in use today. Gregory divided the manuscripts into 4 groupings: papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries. This division is partially arbitrary. The first grouping is based on the physical material (papyrus) used in the manuscripts. The second two divisions are based on script: uncial and minuscule. The last grouping is based on content: lectionary. Most of the papyrus manuscripts and the lectionaries before the year 1000 are written in uncial script. However, there is some consistency in that the majority of the papyri are very early because parchment began to replace papyrus in the 4th century (although the latest papyri dates to the 8th century). Similarly, the majority of the uncials date to before the 11th century, and the majority of the minuscules to after.Aland 1995, pp. 73-77
Gregory assigned the papyri a prefix of P, often written in blackletter script (𝔓), with a superscript numeral. The uncials were given a prefix of the number 0, and the established letters for the major manuscripts were retained for redundancy (i.e. Codex Claromontanus is assigned both 06 and D). The minuscules were given plain numbers, and the lectionaries were prefixed with l often written in script (ℓ). Kurt Aland continued Gregory\'s cataloging work through the 1950s and beyond. Because of this, the numbering system is often referred to as "Gregory-Aland numbers". The most recent manuscripts added to each grouping are 𝔓118, 0318, 2812, and ℓ2281. Due to the cataloging heritage and because some manuscripts which were initially numbered separately were discovered to be from the same codex, there is some redundancy in the list (i.e. the Magdalen papyrus has both the numbers of 𝔓64 and 𝔓67).Aland 1995, pp. 73f
The first page of the Gothic language Codex Argenteus
The majority of New Testament textual criticism deals with Greek manuscripts because scholars believe the original books of the New Testament were written in Greek. However, the text of the New Testament is also found, both translated in manuscripts of many different languages (called versions), and quoted in manuscripts of the writings of the Church Fathers. In the critical apparatus of the Novum Testamentum Graece, a series of abbreviations and prefixes designate different language versions (it for Old Latin, lowercase letters for individual Old Latin manuscripts, vg for Vulgate, lat for Latin, sys for Sinaitic Palimpsest, syc for Curetonian Gospels, syp for the Peshitta, co for Coptic, ac for Akhmimic, bo for Bohairic, sa for Sahidic, arm for Armenian, geo for Georgian, got for Gothic, aeth for Ethiopic, and slav for Old Church Slavonic.)NA27 1996, pp. 64*-76*
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