Kinds of Writing Materials in the Ancient World:

1. Waxed Tablets – (Luke 1:63) “erasable” tablets of wax written on with stylus
2. Papyrus – weaved together from fine strings of plants (used until 200’s AD)
3. Parchment – animal skins, tanned leather (used by 4^th century AD)
4. Paper – invented by Chinese but not in the West till 11th century AD

Kinds of Book Forms:

1. Scroll – spindled roll from 20 glued or sewn sheets of papyrus
2. Codex – 3-4 sheets folded with ends glued or sewn together

I. Old Testament Manuscripts

At present there exist over 3,000 Hebrew manuscripts of the OT, 8,000 manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, over 1,500 manuscripts of the Septuagint, and over 65 copies of the Syriac Peshitta.  Here are the primary OT sources:

Codex Leningradensis:  The oldest complete copy of the Masoretic Text (MT), dated to a.d. 1008. Both the BHS and the BHQ follow this text.

Aleppo Codex:  The oldest, incomplete copy of the MT, dated to about a.d. 930. About one-quarter of this manuscript was burned by fire, but its text is very similar to the Codex Leningradensis. The Hebrew University Bible Project uses this text as a base.

Dead Sea Scrolls:  More than 200 biblical manuscripts dated from about 250 b.c. to a.d. 135 from the area around the Dead Sea. The largest number of these texts agree closely with the readings of the proto-MT (35 percent of manuscripts) and help confirm the accuracy of the MT.

II. New Testament Manuscripts

In comparison with the remaining manuscripts of any other ancient Greek or Latin literature, the NT suffers from an embarrassment of riches. It is almost incomprehensible to think about the disparity. When it comes to quantity of copies, the NT has no peer. More than 5,700 Greek NT manuscripts are still in existence, ranging in date from the early second century to the sixteenth century. To be sure, the earliest ones (i.e., through the 3rd century) are all fragmentary, but they cover a substantial amount of the NT. And Greek manuscripts do not tell the whole story. The NT was translated early on into a variety of languages, including Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, and Arabic. All told, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 handwritten copies of the NT in various languages. Yet if all of these were destroyed, the NT text could be reproduced almost in its entirety by quotations of it in sermons, tracts, and commentaries written by ancient teachers of the church (known as church fathers or Patristic writers). To date, over a million quotations from the NT by the church fathers have been cataloged.

How does this compare with the average classical author? The copies of the average ancient Greek or Latin author’s writings number fewer than 20 manuscripts! Thus, the NT has well over 1,000 times as many manuscripts as the works of the average classical author.

When it comes to the temporal distance of the earliest copies of the NT from the original, NT textual critics again enjoy an abundance of materials. From 10 to 15 NT manuscripts were written within the first 100 years of the completion of the NT. Within two centuries, the numbers increase to at least four dozen manuscripts. Of manuscripts produced before a.d. 400, an astounding 99 still exist—including the oldest complete NT, Codex Sinaiticus.  The gap, then, between the originals and the early manuscripts is relatively slim. By comparison, the average classical author has no copies for more than half a millennium.

Comparing the NT text to some better-known ancient authors, it still has no equal. The chart below illustrates this by comparing the copies of five Greco-Roman historians’ works with the NT. If one is skeptical about what the original NT text said, that skepticism needs to be multiplied many times over when it comes to the writings of all other ancient Greek and Latin authors. Although it is true that there are some doubts about the precise wording of the original in some places, NT textual criticism has an unparalleled abundance of materials to work with, in terms of both quantity and age of manuscripts. Nothing else comes close.

Comparison of Existing Historical Documents

Histories	Oldest Manuscripts	Number Surviving
Livy 59 b.c.–a.d. 17	4th century	27
Tacitus a.d. 56–120	9th century	3
Suetonius a.d. 69–140	9th century	200+
Thucydides 460–400 b.c.	1st century a.d.	20
Herodotus 484–425 b.c.	1st century a.d.	75
New Testament	c. 100–150	c. 5,700 (counting only Greek manuscripts) (plus more than 10,000 in Latin, more than a million quotations from the church fathers, etc.)

Major Papyri of the New Testament

Name	Date	Content
P45	250	Mt 20-21,25-26; Mk 4-9,11-12; Lk 6-7,9-14; Jn 4-5,10-11; Acts 4-17
P46	200	Ro 5-6,8-16; 1 Co; 2 Co; Gal; Eph; Php; Col; 1 Th; Heb
P47	350	Revelation 9-17
P66	200	John
P72	300	1 Peter; 2 Peter; Jude
P74	650	Acts; James; 1 Pe 1-3; 2 Pe 2-3; 1 Jo; 2 Jo; 3 Jo
P75	175-225	Luke 3-18,22-24; John 1-15

Major Parchment of the New Testament

#	Sign	Name	Date	Content
01	?	Sinaiticus	350	Gosp, Paul, Acts, CE, Rev
02	A	Alexandrinus	450	Gosp, Acts, CE, Paul, Rev
03	B	Vaticanus	350	Gosp, Acts, CE, Paul
04	C	Ephraemi	450	Gosp, Acts, Paul, Rev
05	D	Bezae	450	Gosp, Acts
032	W	Washingtonianus	450	Gospels

III. Textual Criticism

Textual criticism is the study of copies of any written work of which the written autograph is unknown, with the purpose of ascertaining the original text.  Today, any group of Christians gathered together can all read exactly the same words in their Bibles. That luxury is made possible by the invention of the movable-type printing press over five centuries ago. But such a luxury can also breed a false sense of confidence that the precise original wording of the Bible can be known. When it comes to the NT, the original 27 books disappeared long ago, probably within decades of their composition. Handwritten copies, or manuscripts, must be relied on to determine the wording of the original text. Yet no two manuscripts are exactly alike, and even the closest two early manuscripts have at least half a dozen differences per chapter (most of them inconsequential variations, however, as will be seen). The discipline known as NT textual criticism is thus needed because of these two facts: disappearance of the originals, and disagreements among the manuscripts.

The Greek NT, as it is known today, has approximately 138,000 words. The best estimate is that there are as many as 400,000 textual variants among the manuscripts. That means that, on average, for every word in the Greek NT there are almost three variants. If this were the only piece of data available, it might discourage anyone from attempting to recover the wording of the original. But the large number of variants is due to the large number of manuscripts. Hundreds of thousands of differences among the Greek manuscripts, ancient translations, and patristic commentaries exist only because tens of thousands of such documents exist. Further, the vast majority of textual alterations are accidental and trivial, and hence easy for textual critics to spot.

Reasons for Textual Variances:

1. Spelling and Nonsense Errors. Nonsense errors occur when a scribe wrote a word that makes no sense in its context, usually because of fatigue, inattentiveness, or misunderstanding of the text in front of him. Even given a strong desire to maintain an authoritative, standardized text, common copyist errors can creep in, including: confusion of similar letters, homophony (substitution of similar sounding letters or words), haplography (omission of a letter or word), dittography (doubling a letter or word), metathesis (reversal in the order of two letters or words), fusion (two words being joined as one), and fission (one word separated into two).

2. Minor changes, including synonyms and alterations.  A common variation is the use of the definite article with proper names. Greek can say, “the Barnabas,” while English translations will drop the article. The manuscripts vary in having the article or not. Word-order differences account for many of the variants.

3. Meaningful changes that are not “viable.” “Viable” means that a variant has some plausibility of reflecting the wording of the original text. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 2:9, instead of “the gospel of God” (the reading of almost all the manuscripts), a late medieval copy has “the gospel of Christ.” This is meaningful but not viable. There is little chance that one late manuscript could contain the original wording when the textual tradition is uniformly on the side of another reading.

4. Meaningful changes that are viable. These comprise less than one percent of all textual variants. “Meaningful” means that the variant changes the meaning of the text to some degree. It may not be terribly significant, but if the variant affects one’s understanding of the passage, then it is meaningful. Most of these meaningful and viable differences involve just a word or a phrase.

There are two large textual variants in the entire NT, each involving 12 verses: Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11. The earliest and best manuscripts lack these verses. In addition, these passages do not fit well with the authors’ style. Although much emotional baggage is attached to these two texts for many Christians, no essential truths are lost if these verses are not authentic.

Should the presence of textual variants, then, undermine the confidence of ordinary laypersons as they read the Bible in their own language? No—actually, the opposite is the case. The abundance of variants is the result of the very large number of remaining NT manuscripts, which itself gives a stronger, not weaker, foundation for knowing what the original manuscripts said.

In addition, modern Bible translation teams have not kept the location of major variants a secret but have indicated the ones they think to be most important in the footnotes of all “essentially literal” modern English translations, so that laypersons who read these footnotes can see where these variants are and what they say. (Textual variants are noted in the esv with a footnote that begins, “Some manuscripts . . .”) The absence of any such footnote (which is the case with far more than 99 percent of the words in the English NT) indicates that these translation teams have a high degree of confidence that the words in their English translation accurately represent the words of the NT as they were originally written.

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