|
 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.
The words of modern English New
Testaments are translated from ancient Greek manuscripts and composite
manuscripts created by scholars. There
are a large number of ancient manuscripts and fragments that have been
found.
What
do survive are copies made over the course of centuries, or more
accurately, copies of copies of the copies, some 5,366 of them in the
Greek language alone, that date from the second century down to the
sixteenth. Strikingly, with
the exception of the smallest fragments, no two of these copies are
exactly alike in all their particulars.
No one knows how many differences, or variant readings, occur
among the surviving witnesses, but they must number in the hundreds of
thousands. (The Orthodox Corruption of Scriptures by Bart D.
Ehrman p. 27)
Until the nineteenth century New Testament scholars and
translators were aware of only a very small number of manuscripts.
Within a fairly short period scholars discovered a large number
of manuscripts. One of the
most important manuscripts was discovered by German scholar Constantin
Tischendorf. Some of the
oldest of the manuscripts were copied during the fourth and fifth
centuries CE. From then
until now scholars have found thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts of
the New Testament. The
problem created by their existence is, as Ehrman stated above, " no
two of these copies are exactly alike."
The ancient manuscripts may have
been written in any of the following languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
Syriac, Armenian, or Coptic. The
manuscripts are divided into two categories: papyrus and vellum.
Papyrus Manuscripts
Papyrus manuscripts are made of
strips of pith taken from the stem of papyrus, the Egyptian water-plant.
Papyrus is very fragile and becomes brittle in air.
Over time these manuscripts crumbled with use and could not
resist the damage caused by moisture.
Therefore, the majority of surviving papyrus have been discovered
in very dry locations, like those of Upper and Middle Egypt.
Papyrus was the common writing material of the
Roman Empire
.
Vellum Manuscripts
Papyrus scrolls were used in
Egypt
until after the eighth century AD. Vellum
had been used before the time of Jesus, but in the third century it
began to gain more popularity than papyrus.
In the early part of the fourth century vellum and the codex
(book-form vs scroll), gained complete victory over papyrus and the
roll-form. Roman Emperor
Constantine ordered Eusebius to have fifty manuscripts of the Bible made
on vellum for use in the churches of
Byzantium
.
Vellum was a much more durable material than papyrus, therefore,
our greatest collection of the
earliest extant Biblical manuscripts of anything but fragmentary size
were copied in the fourth century AD.
Some of the most important vellum
manuscripts are called "palimpsests," which means
"scraped again." These
are manuscripts that were long ago scraped a second time with
pumice-stone (erased) so that another message could be written.
Using modern technology we can now retrieve the original message
in many cases.
In
their book The Text of The New Testament Kurt and Barbara Aland
provide us with insight about the how the ancient manuscripts were
created.
The
text... was revised not so much with a concern for establishing or
restoring the original text as for determining the `best'
text from a particular editorial perspective.... The circulation
of a document began either from its place (or church province) of its
origin, where the author wrote it, or from the place to which it was
addressed... Copies of the original would be made for use in neighboring
churches. The circulation of
a book would be like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond, spreading
out in all directions at once. When
a book was shared by repeated copying throughout a whole diocese or
metropolitan area, the close ties between the diocese would carry it
from one district to another, where the process was repeated....
At this point the history of the New Testament canon is significant.
If the founder of a church did not supply a manuscript, a copy
would have to be made from his exemplar or from a borrowed one.
In the early period copies were made privately: there were no
scriptoria (professional copying centers) before 200 C.E. at the
earliest. In the course of
time the private copying of texts produced a teeming variety of small
textual families (mother manuscripts and their children) within larger
diocesan groupings... The more loosely organized a diocese, or the
greater the differences between its constituent churches, the more
likely different text types would coexist (as in early
Egypt
).
The more uniform the organization, the more likely there would be
only a single text type, as exemplified by the Byzantine Imperial text
type..." |
