We shall conclude this series of
articles with a consideration of the discovery of ancient manuscripts of parts
or the whole of the Old or New Testament.
Have you ever had, or seen, an
old Bible that has been used so often over 30, 40, or 50 years that the pages
are badly stained from perspiring fingers, frayed and worn around the edges,
torn and falling out? If so, you can imagine what the original manuscripts
(called "autographs") of the 66 books of the Bible must have looked
like after a few decades of use. Thus, it is not surprising that none of the
original autographs are in existence today. However, thanks to the diligence
and carefulness of Hebrew and Christian scribes who painstakingly copied the
Scriptures by hand, a great many ancient manuscripts of the Old and New
Testament exist today, forming the basis for the Holy Bible as we know it.
Manuscripts of the Hebrew Old
Testament
Prior to 1947 the oldest
available Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated back only to the tenth
century A.D. But while these manuscripts are not very old (relative to when the
books of the Old Testament were first written), they are considered to be of great
authority owing to the reverence of Jewish scribes for the Word of God and the
consequent carefulness of their transcription.
The scribes had a very intricate
system for transcribing scrolls of the Scriptures, including the following
regulations:(1) A scroll must be written on the skins of clean animals and
fastened together with strings taken from clean animals; (2) every skin must
contain a certain number of columns, equal throughout the entire manuscript;
(3) the length of each column must not extend over less than 48 or more than 60
lines and the breadth must consist of 30 letters; (4) the ink must be black and
be prepared according to a definite recipe; (5) the existing copy must be
authentic, from which there must not be the least deviation by the scribe; (6)
no word or letter, not even a yod or "jot" (Matt. 5:18; the smallest
letter in the Hebrew alphabet), must be written from memory, the scribe not
having looked at the manuscript before him; (7) between every consonant the
space of a hair or thread must intervene; and (8) upon completing the
transcription of a book many checks must be carried out (such as counting the
number of times each letter of the alphabet occurs in the book and finding the
middle letter and middle word of the book) as a safeguard against mistakes. The
scrolls in which these regulations were not observed were condemned to be
buried in the ground or burned, or they were banished to the schools to be used
as reading books.
Because of such carefulness, the
scribes were so convinced they had an exact duplicate that they would give the
new copy equal authority. And thus when an older manuscript became defaced or
damaged over the course of years, it was condemned as unfit for use. Attached
to each synagogue was a cupboard in which defective manuscripts were laid
aside, and from these receptacles have been recovered some of the oldest
manuscripts still in existence.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
In 1947 a Bedouin goatherd
accidentally discovered a number of parchment scrolls in a cave in the cliffs
at the northwestern edge of the Dead Sea. Subsequently, eleven caves in the
area have been found to contain tens of thousands of manuscripts and fragments.
Some of the scrolls revealed that the discoveries are the remains of the library
of the Essenes, a Jewish sect which occupied the area from the second century
B.C. until besieged by the Romans around 68 A.D.
Of monumental importance to
biblical scholars has been the discovery of a great many manuscripts and
fragments of Old Testament books among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every Old
Testament book except Esther is represented. Among these is a complete copy of
the Book of Isaiah, dated at about 100 B.C. When this Isaiah scroll was
compared with the tenth century manuscripts—one thousand years apart—they were
found to be word for word identical in more than 95 percent of the text. The
five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and
variations in spelling.
The Septuagint
Around 250 B.C. the Pentateuch
(first five books of the Old Testament) was translated into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt. The remainder of the Old Testament was translated into Greek in the
following century. According to tradition, there were 72 translators, six from
each of the twelve tribes of Israel, thus the name Septuagint, Latin for
"70." The earliest copies of the Septuagint in existence today date
back to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. While the Septuagint was never
widely accepted as authoritative by Hebrew scholars, some of the Dead Sea
Scroll fragments of the Old Testament have been found to agree more closely
with the Septuagint translation than with the standard Hebrew text.
Manuscripts of the Greek New
Testament
New Testament documents fall into
three major categories:Manuscripts in the original Greek language, early
translations of the Greek New Testament into other languages, and quotations
from the New Testament in the voluminous writings of Christians in the second
to fourth centuries A.D.
New Testament manuscripts in the
original Greek language fall into two classes:(1) "uncials" which
were written in a capital letter script, dating from the second to the tenth
centuries and numbering about 240; and (2) "cursives" which were
written in lower case letters in a free-hand script with the letters joined
together, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries and numbering
between 4,000 and 5,000.
The earliest New Testament
manuscripts are papyri mainly found preserved in fragments in the dry sands of Egypt. Nearly all of these discoveries or acquisitions have been made since 1930. The
oldest known fragment of the New Testament is a piece of papyrus found in the
1930’s containing John 18:31-33 and 37,38 and dated in the period 100-150 A.D.
This can be found in the John Ryland Library of Manchester, England. The Bodmer Papyri, dated 150-200 A.D., contain most of the Gospel of John, and the Chester
Beatty Papyri, dated around 200 A.D., include major portions of the New
Testament The oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts in existence of
the Greek New Testament—Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and Codex
Alexandrinus—are inscribed on parchment (from animal skins) and date back to
350-400 A.D. (Note:the term "codex" refers to the manuscript being
made up of pages in book form, as distinguished from a continuous scroll.)
No doubt many interesting
stories—like that of the Dead Sea Scrolls—could be told about the discovery of
the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament. Probably the best-publicized
account of such a discovery pertains to the so-called Codex Sinaiticus— the
fourth century manuscript of the entire-New Testamentplus half of the Septuagint
version of the Old Testament found at the foot of Mount Sinai. The following is
a brief overview of the story.
Dr. Konstantin von Tischendorf
(1815-1874) was a German scholar who devoted much of his lifetime to the
discovery and study of ancient manuscripts of the Bible. He traveled all over
the East, searching every old library he could get into for the purpose. While
visiting the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery (Eastern Orthodox) at the
foot of Mount Sinai in 1844 he noticed a basket full of old parchments. The
librarian told him that two heaps of similar old documents had already been
used for the fires. Those parchments turned out to be part of a copy of the
Septuagint Old Testament, the most ancient-looking manuscript that he had ever
seen. The convent authorities allowed him to takeaway about 40 sheets. Upon his
return to Germany, his precious sheets made a great sensation in the literary
world. Meanwhile, the monks of the convent learned the value of the parchments
and could not be persuaded to part with the rest of them at any price. To make
a long story short, Tischendorf returned to the convent in 1859 with a
commission from Czar Alexander n of Russia to try to obtain the rest of the
sheets. However, he found very little of any value and made arrangements to
leave. But the very evening before he was to leave he was walking in the
grounds with the steward of the convent, and as they returned the monk asked
him into his room. There he took down a bulky bundle wrapped in red cloth and
laid it on the table. Tischendorf, to his great surprise and joy, found not
only those parchments that he had seen fifteen years before, but also other
parts of the Old Testament and the complete New Testament. At length, through
the Czar’s influence, Tischendorf succeeded in obtaining the precious
manuscript for display and study in the Library of St. Petersburg. Subsequently
it was purchased by the British Government from the Soviet Union in 1933 for
100,000 pounds and is now located in the British Museum.
But the story isn’t over yet. In
1974, workmen doing repairs at the monastery accidentally penetrated a wall and
discovered behind it a trove of some 3,000 additional manuscripts, including
some missing parts of the Old Testament portion of the Codex Sinaiticus and
other ancient biblical manuscripts.
While the Codex Sinaiticus, dated
around 350 A.D., is considered to be the oldest complete manuscript of the
Greek New Testament, there is some question among Bible scholars (see, for
example, the Preface to the Second Edition of J. N. Darby’s New Translation of
the New Testament) as to whether it is as accurate as some of the later
manuscripts. (We shall return to this issue in the concluding section of this
article.)
Early Translations of the New Testament
During the first three or four
centuries A.D. the Greek New Testament was translated into Syriac, Egyptian,
Latin and a number of other languages. The Syriac New Testament was probably in
use about 50 years after the New Testament was completed, and represented very
nearly the language of the people among whom our Lord moved. There are about
350 copies of this translation, dating back to the fifth century, in existence
today. The New Testament was first translated into Coptic (or Egyptian) in the
third century and into the Gothic and Latin languages in the fourth century.
The most familiar Latin version is known as the Vulgate, translated by Eusebius
Hieronymus, or better known today as "St. Jerome." About 8,000
ancient manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate have been discovered.
Quotations by Christian
Writers
A great many quotations from the
Greek New Testament have been found in the writings of Christian teachers(the
so-called "church fathers") of the second to fourth centuries. Ignatius
of Antioch in Syria wrote seven letters prior to his martyrdom in Rome in 108 A.D. These letters contain quotations from fifteen of the New Testament books.
Cyprian, born in Carthage, North Africa, around 200 A.D., and martyred in 258,
quoted the New Testament some 1,030 times in his writings. Tertullian (160-220
A.D.), who also lived in Carthage, quoted from the four Gospels some 3,800
times and the rest of the New Testament another 3,000 times. Origen of
Alexandria (185-254 A.D.) quoted the New Testament over 18,000 times in his
many writings. At least 36,000 citations of the New Testament by second to
fourth century Christian writers are known today. J. H. Greenlee in
Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism states that these quotations by
the early Christian writers "are so extensive that the New Testament could
virtually be reconstructed from them without the use of New Testament
manuscripts."
Putting It All Together
In summary, there exist in
libraries around the world some 5,000 copies of ancient manuscripts of the
Greek New Testament, 9,000 copies of early translations of the New Testament
into other languages, and over 30,000 quotations of the New Testament by the
early church fathers. The wealth of manuscript material for the New Testament
exceeds by a factor of twenty or more the amount of material available for any
other ancient literary text (such as Homer’s Iliad and Caesar’s Gallic War).
Also the copies of New Testament manuscripts available to us are much older,
that is, closer to the date of original composition, than is the case with the
writings of the classical Greek and Roman writers.
The value of having such a wealth
of manuscripts available lies in the ability, by comparison of manuscripts, to
identify copying errors and thus reconstruct the original autograph. This is
done by constructing a "family tree" of manuscripts. Clearly this is
a tremendous undertaking, and it appears to this editor that this work so far
has been limited to perhaps 50 uncial manuscripts, a handful of cursives, and a
few of the early translations (see the Introductory Notice to J. N. Darby’s New
Translation of the New Testament).
William Pickering in The Identity
of the New Testament Text (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1980) writes, "Not
only are we presently unable to specify the precise wording of the original
text, but it will require considerable time and effort before we can be in a
position to do so.. ..The lnstitut fur Neutestamentlich Textforschung in Munster, Germany has a collection of microfilms of some 4,500 of the extant Greek
manuscripts (around 80% of them) and scholars connected with the Institut are
collating selected ones…. It is the availability of sophisticated computers
and programs that seems to me to hold the key. It is now feasible to collate
the manuscripts in Munster and set up a computer program such that we can find
out anything we want to know about the interrelationships of the manuscripts.
In this way it should be possible to identify and trace the pure stream of
transmission of the text and to declare with confidence, based on objective
criteria, the precise wording of the original text! It will take dedicated,
competent persons and money—plenty of both—but will it not be worth it? May God
burden His servants!"
It is true that a number of
substantial variations exist among the multitude of existing manuscripts of the
New Testament. Three examples of these variations that are often discussed are
whether Mark 16:9-20 should be included or excluded, whether John 7:53-8:11
should be in or out, and whether John 1:18 should read "only-begotten
God" or "only-begotten Son." The New International Version,
based heavily on the oldest manuscripts such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex
Vaticanus, differs from the King James Version with respect to all three of
these variations. Some scholars today are questioning whether
"oldest" is "best." The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1987
edition, states insightfully, "It is not always age that matters. Older
manuscripts may be corrupt, and a reading in a later manuscript may in reality
be ancient."
In conclusion, we can take
comfort in the following perspective provided by Frederic Kenyon, an authority
in the field of New Testament textual criticism:"No fundamental doctrine
of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading. Constant references to mistakes
and divergences of reading … might give rise to the doubt whether the
substance, as well as the language, of the Bible is not open to question. It
cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is
certain."
(The material in this article was
abstracted from J. McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, H. F. Vos,
An Introduction to Bible Archaeology, J. P. Smyth, How We Got Our
Bible, R. K. Harrison, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and The New
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1987 edition, in addition to the works referenced
in the text.)