Because some manuscripts are very similar to one another, we can assume they are related to one another and we can, in theory, build a kind of family tree.Īnd so here is the problem. In the course of preparing materials, I wanted to find digitalized copies of different Greek Old Testament manuscripts (mss). And so, to use the example from yesterday’s post, some manuscripts include the story in John 8 of the woman taken in adultery, and others lack it some manuscripts have the last twelve verses of Mark and others do not. An even earlier text of the New Testament is a small bit of papyrus containing a few verses from Johns Gospel dating to about AD 125 that resides in the John. That is to say, some of the manuscripts agree a lot with each other but not with other manuscripts. These various manuscripts – the thousands of them – can be grouped together based on their textual similarities. But some of them are early – with fragments going back to the second century and full manuscripts going back to the fourth. Over 94% of these manuscripts come to us from after the ninth Christian century – so 800 years or more after the books of the New Testament were first written and placed in circulation. We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament – at last count, somewhere around 5600 manuscripts in Greek alone (that includes everything from small fragments the size of a credit card with just a few letters written on them to massive volumes with the entire New Testament from beginning to end). I continued to be interested in the problem for a long time, and it ended up being the subject of the Masters’ thesis I wrote under the direction of Bruce Metzger. But when I was first introduced to the problem I learned there were two sides that were being taken, and I wrote a paper about it (my first year in college). For the past hundred years or so the vast majority of experts have been convinced by a solution to the problem, but the solution was slow in coming, for all sorts of reasons. 948 13thirteenth century 35eleventh century 1739c. 400 Codex Claromontanus (06)sixth century Majuscules 032 (The Freer Gospels)fifth century 041ninth century Minuscules 1twelfth century 1582c. In addition, the entire Old Testament was translated into Greek in the second century BC in a work known as the Septuagint. Early on in my study of textual criticism I came to realize one of the major issues confronting scholars in the field – an issue that scholars have been contending with since the eighteenth century. Original biblical text lies under later addition (a palimpsest) Codex Bezae (05)c. The first full Old Testament manuscript in Hebrew, the Leningrad Codex (dated 1008), is over 1,000 years old.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |