#3 - Manuscripts of the NT

manuscript - anything written by hand.

How old are they? the older the manuscript, the closer we are to the original autograph.

Newer ones have dates on them.

Text and style differences help us to know:

Large vs. small handwriting.

letters run together or separate?

How many columns on a page?

Punctuation?

simple letters or more elaborate?

Two Types of Manuscripts

Uncials

Written in capital letters.

Miniscules

handwriting is smaller and more cursivelike in appearance.

From around 900 A.D.

Manuscripts

Over 5,000 manuscripts in existence today.

Most are not full copies of the NT.

typically a manuscript would fall into one of four categories:

The four gospels

Acts and General epistles

Paul’s writings

Revelation

Most are miniscules that date from 9th to 16th c.

Uncials number about 650.

Style of Uncials

[IMAGE] Large letters without intervening spaces and very few marks of punctuation.

How We Got the Bible Chapter 3: Manuscripts of the New Testament

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Most uncials date from the 3rd - 4th century through the 10th.

About 50 date from the 2nd - 4th century.

Earliest Copies of Scripture

Vatican

4th c. Located in the Vatican Library.

Has NT and OT in Greek with some exceptions.

Sinaitic

Discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai.

Alexandrian

From the 5th century.

Originally at the great library at Alexandria for centuries.

Came to Constantinople in 1621.

in 1627, came to the British Library.

Fragments

Many fragments of the NT texts exist from prior to 4th c codices.

P52 - John Rylands fragment of Gospel of John dates to mid-second century (approx. 150 A.D.)

Recently a fragment of the Gospel of Mark has been published that apparently dates to the end of the 1st Century A.D.

Textual Variants

Estimated that there are over 200,000 textual variants in the NT text.

Take all 5,300 available ancient manuscripts of the NT.

Any slight variation in letters or word order multiplied across that huge number of texts results in a misleading claim that the NT is full of errors.

Important to note that the NT is the best attested set of documents of the ancient world due to its large number of copies.

Types of Textual Variants

Trivial - typically words like “and,” “the,” or different forms of the same word. Word spelling or accidents of copying like transposing letters within a word.

Some are how to spell proper nouns.

Substantial variations that do not change the meaning of the text.

Scribal interpretations or additions.

After careful comparison to the majority of texts, the variants are not considered to change the meaning of the text.

Substantial variants -

Questions about parts of the text that can’t be easily answered.

Longer ending of Mark (16:9-20)

Not in Codex Vaticanus or Siniaticus (4th century)

Language and vocabulary don’t seem to fit the rest of Mark.

But - Codex Alexandria, Bezae and many other early uncials contain the longer ending.

Irenaeus (2nd century) writes about the longer ending and expresses his belief that Mark was its author.

Important to realize that the longer ending doesn’t offer any doctrinal departure.