| Within
a century after Jesus' execution by the Romans, a diverse group of
writers produced a small but quite assorted library of Christian
writings. Each text,
including those that would later become canonical, was written
independently by different writers in a variety of locations, and there
was no special regulation of their reproduction.
The word "manuscript," as used here, means an
ancient hand-written copy of any of the books of any of the Bibles or a
text composed of a combination of one or more books.
Every
English Bible is a translation because no biblical source wrote in
English. The biblical sources wrote their documents in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew.
None of the original documents is known to exist and,
interestingly, none is mentioned in the writings of early Christians or Jews.
Historians tell us that soon after the original documents were
produced they were copied by people who belonged to different communities.
The copies were passed
around to other groups that also made copies. Copies
of those copies were made, and then copies of those copies, a process
that continued for centuries.
The
manuscripts which have been recovered represent the oldest copies of the
books of our Bible. Professor Bart Ehrman, in his book Misquoting
Jesus (pages 88-90), discusses the challenges that scholars face
when working with these manuscripts: John
Mill, fellow of Queens College, Oxford, had access to the readings of
some one hundred Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In
addition, he carefully examined the writings of the early church fathers
to see how they quoted the texts. . . . On the basis of this intense
thirty-year effort to accumulate materials, Mill published his text with
apparatus, in which he indicated places of variation among all the
surviving materials available to him. To the shock and dismay of
many of his readers, Mill's apparatus isolated some thirty thousand
places where different manuscripts, Patristic (= church father)
citations, and versions had different readings for passages of the New
Testament. . . . Whereas
Mill knew of or examined some one hundred Greek manuscripts to uncover
his thirty thousand variations, today we know of far, far more. At
last count, more than fifty-seven hundred Greek manuscripts have been
discovered and catalogued. That's fifty-seven times as many as
Mill knew about in 1707. . . . With this abundance of evidence, what can
we say about the total number of variants known today? Scholars
differ significantly in their estimates -- some say there are 200,000
variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do
not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer
technology, no one has yet been able to count them all. Perhaps,
as I indicated earlier, it is best simply to leave the matter in
comparative terms. There are more variations among manuscripts
than there are words in the New Testament. |
