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How Useful Are Our Earliest New Testament Manuscripts?

It is interesting that as recently as twenty years ago almost *no one* outside a small cohort of textual geeks (like me) had much interest at all in the actual manuscripts of the New Testament.  Even the majority of NT scholars (a very *large* majority) just weren't interested.  And most non-NT scholars had never heard that there was even an issue / problem.  That has changed a lot.  Now it's something people seem to want to talk to me about all the time. I've long thought about the issues that are involved (starting when I was 17!  Seriously).  Here are some reflections that I made some time ago, which I ran across again recently and thought summed up one of the big problems rather neatly. ****************************** It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around the irony of our early manuscripts (the term means: "hand-written copies," i.e., *all* the copies before the invention of printing).  To reconstruct the “original” text of the New Testament – by which, for my purposes here, I mean the text [...]

2022-09-18T16:18:59-04:00October 1st, 2022|New Testament Manuscripts|

The Irony of our Earliest Manuscripts

                It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around the irony of our early manuscripts, as I was alluding to in my earlier post.   To reconstruct the “original” text of the New Testament – by which, for my purposes here, I mean the text that the author himself produced and put into the public sphere by “publishing” (or sending) it – we would love to have lots of early manuscripts to look at.  Unfortunately, we don’t have lots of early manuscripts.  94% of our manuscripts are 800 years after the fact.  We have only a handful of manuscripts, at best, that can plausibly be dated to the second century.   These are all *highly* fragmentary (the oldest is just a scrap with a few verses on it).  And even these are decades after the authors were all dead and buried. The problem is that every time a manuscript gets copied, mistakes – either intentional or accidental – are introduced.   And then when that manuscript serves as an exemplar for the next scribe, its mistakes are [...]

2020-04-03T19:45:17-04:00May 2nd, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|
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