ANCIENT TEXTS AND ARTIFACTS
Early New Testament manuscripts belong to three main types: papyri (written in capital letters on papyrus paper), uncials (also in capital letters), and minuscules (in small, running or connected letters). The early Christians transitioned away from the ancient Jewish custom of using papyrus scrolls for their sacred texts in favor of papyrus, vellum, and parchment manuscripts bound in book format (codices). The convenience of the codex, as well as a desire to distinguish themselves from their non-Christian Jewish counterparts, might have prompted that change, especially after Claudius (AD 49–54) expelled the Jews from Rome, the Jews executed James in AD 62 AD, the Romans persecuted Christians as scapegoats for the great fire in Rome (AD 64–68), Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70, and the Jews included in the Eighteen Benedictions a curse upon the Christians, expelling them from their synagogues (by AD 80).
As a result, we have relatively few scrolls of the New Testament. Besides, scrolls were more difficult to handle and care for than books. In fact, no autographs (original copies) survived from antiquity, and it is more likely that when Paul recommended that his letters should be circulated to the churches (Col. 4:16), Christian scribes made copies for that purpose. Estimates for the number of extant manuscripts vary since new finds continuously add to their numbers. We can speak of nearly 6,000 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts in Latin, and about 9,300 copies of early versions of the Bible in languages other than Greek and Latin. Among the Greek manuscripts, only about 100 are papyri, cataloged under the letter P, followed by a superscript number. The oldest confirmed New Testament papyrus is P
As for the vellum and parchment uncials, the most important New Testament manuscripts, scholars generally catalog them under letters and numbers, and they are far more numerous, totaling a few hundred copies, 34 of which are bilingual, mainly Greek and Latin or Coptic. The fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus (א read “aleph”), discovered by Tischendorf in 1844 and containing almost half of the LXX (an early Greek translation of the Old Testament) and the entire New Testament (except for Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:58–8:11), is generally agreed to be the most important early New Testament text.
Another fourth-century uncial highly regarded by the specialists is Codex Vaticanus (B), containing most of the LXX and almost the entire New Testament. Unfortunately, this important early New Testament manuscript lacks all that comes after Hebrews 9:14 as well as Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53–8:11. According to Augustine, some copyists removed the story of the woman caught in adultery in case their wives decided that it gave them a license to sin. However, the earliest papyri mentioned above also omit this story (P
Codex Alexandrinus, dating to the early fifth century, contains the entire LXX and the New Testament, except for a few missing chapters or verses in Genesis, 1 Samuel, Psalms, Matthew, John, and 2 Corinthians. Copyists sometimes reused uncial parchments by scraping off the original text and writing a new one. A few dozen Christian palimpsests (“rewritten manuscripts”) survive from Antiquity, a good example of which is Ephraemi Rescriptus (C), dating to the mid-fifth century. In the ninth century, it gradually became the norm for copyists to produce minuscule manuscripts, employing parchment and paper, almost 3,000 of which remain in existence. The text they used goes back to a text-type known as Byzantine (also called the Majority Text), which developed in the fourth or fifth century and became the official ecclesiastical text of the subsequent period. For that reason, its readings are smooth and refined but with many conflations, expansions, and harmonizations.
Scholars often classify New Testament manuscripts according to certain major text-types or families. A family is a group of texts with a common ancestor since the errors made in copying a text generally survived in later copies. A family is not represented, however, by the entire manuscript because the ancient practice was to copy New Testament books or book segments, not the whole New Testament. Thus several families of texts may be represented in a single manuscript. New Testament Greek manuscripts are generally classified into one of four text-types: (1) Alexandrian (a very early family of New Testament manuscripts from Egypt), (2) Byzantine (a later text-type from Constantinople, which received a great deal of embellishment and was widely used in minuscule manuscripts), (3) Western(represented by Codex Bezae, a freer text that was not preserved well, even though the Church Fathers and Latin and Syriac translators often used it), and (4) Caesarean (a mixture of Alexandrian and Western text-types).
New Testament textual evidence also comes from lectionaries, which are New Testament portions written for liturgical use regardless of the script (upper or lower case letters) or writing material employed. To ascertain as much as possible what was the original wording of a given verse of the New Testament, the field of textual criticism has established several “canons” or rules by which the reliability of a given manuscript may be evaluated (e.g., the earlier manuscripts and shorter, more difficult readings usually are to be preferred). From a close comparison of hundreds of manuscripts, the papyri and uncials of the Alexandrian family have been considered to surpass minuscule manuscripts and lectionaries because of their antiquity and general reliability.
Thiede and d’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus.
Parker, An Introduction to New Testament Manuscripts and their Texts.
Epp, “Textual Criticism in the Exegesis of the New Testament,” 45-98.
Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins.
Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography and Textual Criticism.