Chapter 11
The New Testament in Manuscript Form

By the year A.D. 100 all the books of the NT had been written, and the majority of them had been in existence several decades before this. This can be said with confidence today, for a fragment of John’s Gospel that circulated in Egypt prior to A.D. 125 nearly closes the gap between the autographs and our manuscripts.

A century ago critics such as F. C. Baur of Tübingen, and his school, rejected the first-century dates of some of the NT books, thereby robbing them of their apostolic authority. With this came a loss of respect for the Bible with disastrous spiritual consequences.

It must be understood, of course, that we do not have the original manuscripts of the apostolic books. These books were probably written on papyrus in ink (as 2 John 13 states), and only copies of these autographa have been preserved—most of them not earlier than the fourth century. Fortunately, our century has witnessed the discovery of some papyrus manuscripts that have pushed the text of the NT back to about A.D. 200.

The copying of the original documents must have begun as one church asked another for a letter or gospel that the latter evidently had received. The alternative to borrowing such a book from a church was to make a copy of it. It can be seen that this was actually done, for example, from the fact that Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians about the end of the first century, asks them to pay attention to Paul’s letter This means that Clement knew not only the letter that Paul had addressed to the Romans, but also the first Corinthian letter, to which he refers.¹ Paul had, in fact, encouraged the exchange of letters between churches (Col. 4:16), and this must have led to the copying of the autographa. In this way collections of copies of the original books of the apostles were being built up in the various centers of early Christianity.

Early Christian literature is completely silent about these apostolic originals. Evidently no one was perturbed about their decay or loss, since there were plenty of copies around. Copying was done for both private and public use. A person might make his own copy or else hire a professional scribe to make a copy of one or more of the sacred writings. Private copying was not supervised, and whenever anyone copies a piece of literature errors are made in transcription. Errors were made even when copies were made by professional scribes in a scriptorium. If it happens today when manuscripts are printed, with all the proofreading that printing calls for, how much more when handwritten copies are made! Not long ago an English Bible appeared in print with some apocryphal material in the Book of Leviticus, and the publisher had to recall the sold copies. (One clergyman did not bother to return it for, as he said, he didn’t read Leviticus anyway.)

Since we have thousands of copies of the NT books, we have considerable information on the shape and the form of these early copies.

I. THE CHARACTER OF NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS

A. Rolls and Codices

As for writing materials, we have noted earlier that papyrus eventually gave way to more durable material made of leather, called parchment. Some of our earliest manuscripts are of papyrus, but from about the third century on parchment or vellum was used, and this remained the standard writing material until the age of printing when paper replaced other writing materials.

Writing on papyrus or parchment was done “with pen and ink,” as John says (3 John 13). The ink was normally black or brown, although deluxe codices were at times written with silver or gold letters. Red ink was not uncommon for titles, headings, and initial letters or lines.²

The form of the NT books originally was that of a roll. A short letter such as Philemon, of course, would take no more than a sheet of papyrus. Books such as Matthew would represent about as much writing as could conveniently go on a papyrus scroll of normal length (about thirty-five feet).

The writing on such rolls was arranged in a series of columns. A reader had to use both hands, unrolling the scroll with one hand and rolling it up with the other as the reading proceeded. Finding a specific passage on a scroll is not very convenient, and so about the beginning of the second century the codex, or leaf form of book, came into use in the church. Even when the biblical books were published in codex form, the writing on each page continued to be arranged in several columns. Codex Sinaiticus, for example, has four columns on each page.

B. Styles of Writing

Two basic types of writing style were in use. The cursive or “running” hand, which could be written rapidly, with one letter being connected with the other without lifting the pen was used for everyday nonliterary kind of writing. Literary works, on the other hand,

A sample of uncial script taken from an Egyptian scriptorium. This fragment is a palimpsest and contains Matthew 26:57-65.

were written in a more formal style, and were called “uncials,” resembling somewhat our capitals³. Some of our early NT manuscripts, from the third to the sixth century, are in this kind of writing. As time went on, the running hand became dominant and a smaller script, called “minuscule”, was used in the production of books. This kind of handwriting not only increased the speed of writing but made it possible to pack much more material into one page, making books more economical. It should not surprise us that the minuscule manuscripts by far outnumber the uncials.

In the earlier manuscripts no spaces were left between words or sentences, and until about the eighth century punctuation was used sparingly. The question mark does not appear until the ninth century. This style of writing could occasionally lead to an error in reading, if one made the word division at the wrong place.

Also, the scribes developed a system of abbreviations for words that occur frequently, particularly the sacred names, such as “Jesus,” “Christ,” “God,” “Spirit,” “cross,” and the like. Often only the first and last letters were written and a line drawn over the word to alert the reader to the contraction.

Scribes, hired to prepare copies of biblical books, were paid according to the number of lines they wrote. The standard line was called a stichos. Stichometry turned out to be an aid in the accuracy of copies of manuscripts, for by counting the stichoi, one could

A sample of minuscule script This parchment is a lectionary from the monastery of St. Laurentii Escunalensis and contains the Gospel of John 1:1-12.

tell whether omissions or additions had been made. The information that has come down to us about the price charged per line for preparing official copies leads to the conclusion that few Christians could have afforded entire New Testaments, let alone whole Bibles.

C. Palimpsests

Since parchment was costly the original writing was at times scraped and washed off, the surface resmoothed, and then used for new literary material. Such books are called palimpsests (from two Greek words meaning “rescraped"). Several NT manuscripts are of this type. Codex Ephraemi had the NT text written on its pages in the fifth century, but in the twelfth this text was erased and sermons of Ephraem, a Syrian Church Father, were written over it. Fortunately it became possible to decipher the original text. Of the 250 uncial manuscripts of the NT today, fifty-two are palimpsests.⁴

D. Helps for Readers

Some manuscripts of the NT provide helps for readers. There are, for example, chapter divisions. Codex Vaticanus divides Matthew into 170 sections. One scribe divided the Book of Revelation into twenty-four sections, because of the twenty-four elders before God’s throne (Rev. 4:4). Reflecting further that these elders each had body, soul, and spirit, he subdivided the twenty-four larger sections into seventy-two (three times twenty-four). These chapter divisions bear little relation to our present chapters.

The chapter divisions were given headings, called titloi, describing the content of the chapters. Also, an ingenius system was devised by Eusebius of Caesarea to aid the reader in the locating of parallel passages in the Gospels. It must have served a useful purpose, for this system is found in a great many manuscripts.

Eventually scribes introduced prologues to the biblical books, or information about the life of the evangelists. Also, titles were added to the books of the NT themselves, and difficult words were explained in the margins of the manuscripts or between the lines (called “glosses”).

In addition to an ornamental headpiece at the beginning of a book, some manuscripts have pictures of various kinds. Portraits of Christ and his apostles or pictures of scenes from the NT are not uncommon. In deluxe codices such pictures are often painted in various colors and are a rich source for the study of early Christian art.

Following the custom of the synagogue of reading the Scriptures in the worship service, a regular system of lessons from the Gospels and the Epistles was developed. Scribes at times marked the beginning and end of the lesson for Sundays or holy days, so that the lector knew where to begin and where to stop. Lectionary manuscripts, which gave these lessons in proper sequence (beginning with Easter), were also prepared for the convenience of the reader. These manuscripts are called “lectionaries.”

With the establishment of monasteries, the copying of manuscripts was often done by monks in the scriptoria of the monasteries. This was an arduous task (for scribes stood at writing desks), and some manuscripts have footnotes or marginal comments in which the scribes express their feelings about their work. One can find expressions such as, “the end of the book; thanks be to God.” One monk complains about his stiff fingers because a snowstorm is raging outside. Another describes the physiological effects of the labor of copying: “Writing bows one’s back, thrusts the ribs into one’s stomach, and fosters a general debility of the body.”⁵ Some footnotes (called “colophons”) give the name of the scribe, and occasionally the place and date of the writing—information that is of great value today. Approximate dates for the manuscripts can also be established by the science of paleography. Experts in ancient scripts can usually tell from which period a manuscript comes by the style of the handwriting in it.

Some scribes write blessings on the readers in the footnote, others warn readers not to add or subtract from the Word of God. These and many other features make the study of manuscripts very interesting. Questions that naturally come to us when we think of the early manuscripts of the NT are, Where are these manuscripts today? How many are there? Who keeps a record of them? Let us give some answers to such questions.

II. THE CLASSIFICATION OF NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS

A. The Abundance of Manuscripts

Perhaps we can appreciate the wealth of NT manuscript material if we compare it with manuscripts of nonbiblical ancient books. For example, Caesar’s Gallic War (about 54 B.C.) is found in only nine or ten good manuscripts, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar’s day. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livey (49 B.C.-A.D. 17) only thirty-five have survived. No manuscript is older than the fourth century. Of the fourteen books of the Histories of Tacitus (C.A.D. 100) only four and a half survive; of the sixteen books of his Annals, ten survive in full, two in part; none is older than the ninth century.⁶ Of the writings of Plato the earliest manuscript available comes from a date some 1300 years after Plato; of Demosthenes no manuscript is earlier than 1200 years after he lived.

How different is the picture when we turn to the NT manuscript materials! Not including the thousands of quotations in the church fathers, we have around 5000 complete or partial manuscripts of the NT books. But this is not all, for besides these copies of the Greek NT, we have thousands of copies of translations into various languages made in the early centuries of the Christian era.

Although the number of NT manuscripts is overwhelming, the age of some of them enables scholars to see what the NT text looked like in the third and even the second centuries A.D. When one compares this with the big gap between the autographs and the available copies of classical books, the gap in the textual tradition of the NT is infinitesimal. Indeed, it is an embarrassment of riches, for the work of the textual scholar would be reduced considerably if he had less material.

B. Listing New Testament Manuscripts

Before standard lists were universally accepted, it was often difficult to know where some of the manuscripts were located. Different systems of labelling or numbering manuscripts added to the confusion.

The Swiss scholar, Johann Wettstein, took the first step in standardizing the nomenclature for manuscripts in 1751-52. The system now in general use was elaborated at the end of the nineteenth century by C. Gregory, a native of Philadelphia, who became professor at the University of Leipzig in 1889. The list was kept up to date by Ernst von Dobschuetz, who was succeeded by Walter Eltester. Today, Kurt Aland, of Muenster, Germany, is responsible for the listing of manuscripts and ascribing sigla to any newly discovered materials.

This system of listing manuscripts has now been accepted universally, so that printed Greek New Testaments, wherever they are published, use more or less the same nomenclature for the Greek manuscripts and versions in the footnotes of the text (these footnotes are called the “critical apparatus”).

The manuscripts are divided on the basis of writing material. The manuscripts made of papyrus are all listed separately from those made of parchment. The papyrus manuscripts are identified by a “P”, followed by a small superior numeral (P⁴⁵, for example, is a codex belonging to the Chester Beatty Papyri).

Moreover, the uncial manuscripts, of which there are fewer than minuscules, are commonly designated by the capital letters of the Latin and Greek alphabets. Since, however, the number of uncials came to exceed the number of letters in the Latin and Greek alphabets, they also have an Arabic number assigned to each of them, preceded by a zero. Several of the more important uncials also have names as, for example, the Alexandrinus (numbered A, 02). The minuscule manuscripts are referred to simply by Arabic numerals.

A subsidiary class of Greek manuscripts (whether uncial or minuscule) is devoted to lectionaries. These are reading selections for the ecclesiastical year. They are designated by the letter “1,” followed by an Arabic numeral.

This may be the place to say something about several of the more important manuscripts of the NT. Some manuscripts contain the entire Bible (with the OT in Greek); others again contain only parts of the NT, sometimes only fragments of single books.

III. SIGNIFICANT MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

A. Important Uncials

Heading the list is the Sinaiticus. This codex was discovered after other uncials had already been assigned letters of the alphabet, and since it would have caused confusion if the letters that had established themselves had been changed once again, Sinaiticus received the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

This codex was discovered by Constantin von Tischendorf in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is called Sinaiticus because he found it in the

SOME IMPORTANT UNCIAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. In 1844 he was in the Near East in search of biblical manuscripts. While at St. Catherine he was able to retrieve some leaves of the Septuagint version of the OT, written in early Greek uncial script. The monks had been using similar material to make fires. He warned them not to use such precious material again, and left.

In 1853 he revisited St. Catherine in the hope of finding more manuscripts. but he got nothing. In 1859 he was back under the patronage of the Czar of Russia, official head of the Greek church. Almost by accident a monk directed him to a manuscript in his cell. Tischendorf was allowed to take it to his room for the night, and he stayed up all night examining the codex, so great was his excitement. Here was a manuscript of most of the Bible from the fourth century, in excellent condition.

The next morning he tried to buy the manuscript, but to no avail. Eventually he got permission to transport it to Cairo, where he began to copy it. In the end he got it as a gift for the Czar, who rewarded the monks in Cairo and at St. Catherine. In 1862 it was published for the first time.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it became known that the Sinaiticus might be for sale. An American syndicate was greatly interested, but the manuscript went to the British Museum in 1933, for the price of a half million dollars.

The codex contains most of the OT in Greek, and all the NT with two additional books, the Shepherd of Hernias and the Epistle of Barnabas. The text is written on vellum, with four columns

Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-1874), the famous German Protestant theologian and textual critic who discovered the Codex Sinaiticus. During his lifetime he published more manuscripts and critical editions of the Greek New Testament than any other scholar.

The beginning of the Gospel of Luke in the Codex Alexandrinus. In 1624 the codex was given by Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople, to the British ambassador for presentation to James I. James died before the manuscript arrived and it was presented to Charles I in 1627.

to the page. The date is late fourth (or early fifth) century.

From the middle of the fifth century comes the Codex Alexandrinus. Today this codex lies side by side with the Sinaiticus in the British Museum. In 1627 Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople, offered this manuscript to the English ambassador to Turkey, Sir Thomas Roe, as a gift to King James I. It came to England in 1627 after King James had died. Cyril Lucar had earlier been patriarch of Alexandria and he evidently brought it to Constantinople. That explains why it is called “Alexandrinus.”

Originally it contained all of the OT (in Greek) and the NT, together with 1 and 2 Clement. Most of Matthew, however, is now missing. It has two columns per page, written on vellum with black ink. It was the first of the great uncials made accessible to scholars.

Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the fact that it has been in the Vatican library so long. Although its presence was known since 1475, the Vatican discouraged work on it. The codex was carried off to Paris by Napoleon together with other manuscripts as a prize of war. After 1815 it had to be returned, but again the Vatican kept it under wraps. Tischendorf finally got enough of its readings that he published an edition in 1867. The Vatican then published its own edition at the end of the century.

The Vaticanus comes from the fourth century, as does the Sinaiticus, and originally contained all the books of the Bible. Today some parts are missing; missing are the NT books from Hebrews 9:14 onwards (including the Pastorals).

Each page has three columns of text, written on fine vellum. Unfortunately, a corrector has spoiled it somewhat by going over the original writing. Together with the Sinaiticus it is one of the finest manuscripts of the NT.

Codex Ephraemi is the fifth-century palimpsest. Someone erased the text of the NT in the twelfth century and wrote the sermons of Ephraem, the Syrian church father, over it. It has been said, somewhat facetiously, that this is not the first nor the last time that a text of the NT was “covered up” by a sermon. Today this codex is in the National Library in Paris, but it came originally from the Near East.

Several scholars had tried to decipher the NT text behind the sermons, but with little success, In 1841 Tischendorf set himself the arduous task of deciphering the text. By 1843 he had completed the task, and in 1845 it was published. Treatment with chemicals and better photography later showed that Tischendorf had made relatively few errors.

Only sixty-four leaves of the OT in Greek are left. Of the NT there are 145 leaves, containing portions of every book of the NT except 2 Thessalonians and 2 John. The codex has only one column of text per page.

While the codices just mentioned vary in numerous details, none of them differ so much from each other as does, for example, Codex Bezae. First of all, it is a bilingual manuscript, with the Greek page on the left, facing the Latin page on the right. Moreover, the Gospels are in the so-called Western order (Matthew, John, Luke, Mark). Also, the text is written in “sense lines,” which means that some are short and others are long. It contains only the four Gospels and Acts, and the first three lines of each book are in red ink.

It was presented to Cambridge University by Theodore Beza, the successor of John Calvin at Geneva, and so it is also called “Codex Cantabrigiensis.” The codex comes from the fifth (possibly the sixth) century, and has a remarkable number of variations from what is usually taken to be the normal NT text. In Acts 19:9, for example, we are informed that Paul preached in the hall of Tyrannus “from eleven o’clock to four.” That is the time of day when not even Tyrannus (probably a nickname given to him by his students) could conduct school lessons because of the heat.

We cannot describe all the uncials and we will have to leave it at that, and make a few comments on several of the minuscules.

B. Minuscule Manuscripts

Certain minuscule manuscripts have such striking similarities of text-type as to suggest a close “family” relationship. In 1868 Professor Ferrar, of Dublin University, found several manuscripts that were very closely related. Others belonging to the same text-type have been added since, and so the entire family is called the “Ferrar” family. Since the first manuscript in this family is minuscule number 13, the family is also called “family 13.” Somewhat later (about 1902) Kirsopp Lake identified another group of minuscules that belonged to the same family. Minuscule number one stands at the head of the list and so the family is called either the “Lake family” or “family 1.” What is interesting about family 13 is that all of the manuscripts belonging to this family have the story of the adulterous woman (John 7:53-8:11) not in John’s Gospel, but after Luke 21:38.

The minuscule manuscripts now number 2,792, and are generally from a later period than the uncials. It does not follow necessarily, however, that a late manuscript always has a less trustworthy text than an early one. A late manuscript may have been copied from a very early parent manuscript and so, although the manuscript is late, the text of the manuscript is early. One such minuscule is number 33, which has received the nickname “Queen of the cursives.” It contains the entire NT except the Revelation and comes from the ninth or tenth century, but the text of the manuscript resembles that of the great uncials described earlier. It is in the National Library in Paris.

Minuscule 81 was written in the year A.D. 1044, but it has a text that resembles that of number 33, and that of the great uncials. It is now in the British Museum and is considered to be one of the most important manuscripts.

Minuscule 565, now in the public library at Leningrad, is a deluxe copy of the Gospels, written in gold letters on purple vellum during the ninth or tenth century. The text of this manuscript belongs to a different family than numbers 33 and 81. This holds true for minuscule 700, an eleventh- or twelfth-century codex of the Gospels, now in the British Museum. It has the remarkable reading in the Lucan Lord’s Prayer, “May thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us” (Luke 112), instead of “Thy kingdom come.”

Minuscules 1 and 2 are mainly of historical significance for they were the main manuscripts used for the first printing of the Greek NT. Erasmus had given minuscule 2 and several other twelfth-century manuscripts to the printer, and number 1 was used for proofreading. Minuscule 1 has a text that agrees very much with the older uncials, but Erasmus was suspicious of its supposedly erratic readings.

We cannot comment on the hundreds of minuscules available today. Quite aside from their text, some have a unique format. For example, number 16 is a copy of the four Gospels in Greek and Latin, and is written in four colors. The narrative generally is in vermillion; the words of Jesus and of angels is in crimson; OT words and words of disciples are in blue; the words of the Pharisees, the centurion, Judas Iscariot, and the devil are in black.

Although the minuscules represent the last stage of the manuscript tradition, the papyri represent the earliest, and to these we now turn.

C. Biblical Papyri

A great many secular papyri had been discovered in the sands of Egypt before any biblical texts on papyrus came to light. In 1931 Frederic Kenyon announced in the Times of London that twelve such manuscripts had been discovered in jars in a Coptic graveyard in Egypt. They were sold for a high price by Egyptian dealers to an American, Chester Beatty, who lived in Dublin. These Chester Beatty Papyri, as they are now called, pushed the text of the NT back to about 200 to 250. These papyri included also OT portions, but we are interested here only in the NT codices.

Ephesians 1:1-11 of the Chester Beatty Papyri in the collection at the University of Michigan. These papyri were important in showing that the codex form was used before the fourth century.

P⁴⁵ comprises portions of thirty leaves of a papyrus book that originally had about 220 leaves and contained all four Gospels and Acts. Matthew and John are the least well preserved in this codex. P46 comprises eighty-six leaves of the Pauline Epistles. Portions of several epistles are lacking and the Pastoral Epistles apparently were not included in the first place. P⁴⁷ comprises ten leaves of the Book of Revelation. Here, then, we have manuscripts that carry the NT text back almost 200 years beyond that of our early uncials. One can readily grasp the significance of such a discovery.

We have mentioned P⁵² , the John Rylands Fragment, earlier, not because there is much on it, but because of its age. It contains a few verses from John’s Gospel in uncial script and was in the John Rylands library at Manchester, where it was discovered in 1934. Not only does it show that John’s Gospel was circulating in Egypt not later than A.D. 125, but it also confirms the fact that the codex form of books was already in use.⁷

There is another collection of biblical papyri named after a Swiss business man, Martin Bodmer, of Geneva. In 1956 the discovery of Bodmer II, written about A.D. 200, was announced. contains a major portion of the Gospel of John. A corrector (perhaps the copyist himself) has gone over it and made numerous corrections. P72 was edited in 1959, and contains among other things, the Epistle of Jude and the two Epistles of Peter.

This Bodmer manuscript comes from the third century and has provided us with the oldest text of these epistles. Included also in this manuscript are such writings as: The Nativity of Mary, the apocryphal correspondence of Paul to the Corinthians, a Passover sermon by Melito of Sardis, and several other literary works. P75 is another early manuscript of Luke and John, dated between A.D. 175 and 225. This is then the earliest copy of the Gospel according to Luke and one of the earliest of John. At John 10:7, instead of the traditional text, “I am the gate for the sheep,” this manuscript has, “I am the shepherd of the sheep.” In the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16), the rich man is given the name Neues. The Sahidic version calls him “Nineveh,” the symbol of dissolute riches, and Neues is probably an abbreviation of Nineveh.⁸

These brief sketches of the rich collection of manuscript materials are sufficient, we believe, to demonstrate that there is no ancient book so well attested as are the books of the NT. In our next chapter we will have to say more about the textual variations found in these hundreds, indeed, thousands, of NT manuscripts, and how textual scholars handle these variant readings. And lest this should sound unsettling to any Bible reader, we should add that these thousands of variant readings in our manuscripts do not affect any basic teaching of the NT.

Chapter 11The New Testament in Manuscript Form