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Manuscirpts continued...
I will begin to write about Bible manuscripts but I would like to add a few points to my last posting, one think I forgot to tell from the last posting, first pay attention to the first few verses of the gospel of Luke, the prologue to the Gospel in which Luke says very clearly that he is relying on eyewitness testimony as the source of his Gospel, so Luke relies upon oral tradition, so in many instances we have a reliance on the oral tradition. One other thing I would like to add are a few terms that are used to describe the unwritten sayings of the Lord, since not everything the Lord said was written down, one that is very famous but it ended up being preserved accidentally, by St. Luke and that saying is, "It is better to give, than to receive." A very famous statement, that is not found in any Gospel, and how do we know it came from the Lord? Because in the book of Acts St. Paul quotes the Lord saying this, this is an example of how in the early Church, oral tradition and how the sayings of the Lord were passed down orally, unfortunately not all were preserved in written form in the Gospel. No one I'm sure imagined at that time that more Gospels needed to be written down to be preserved, since they expected the Lord to return at anytime, so it wasn't a high priority. The oral sayings of the Lord were passed along for about 200 years before being written down, so well into the 2nd century and even into the 3rd century. Oral tradition that were not written down are found in various places, mostly found in the writings of the fathers, especially the earlier fathers they are agrapha, or the unwritten word, they are also called floating logia, which is the plural, this is just Biblical studies terminology which you might like to know.
Manuscripts
First their was an oral tradition until many of these things were written down, so silently and often forgotten, beneath our neatly printed modern Bibles are thousands of different manuscripts, now we us the word today in the everyday language to mean an unpublished book but in Biblical studies or in any study that is the study of antiquity a manuscript means a handmade copy of a book or a scroll, all books were hand copied until the invention of the printing press, and that's why their called manuscripts because manu comes from the Latin word for hand, and script meaning writing, so manuscript means handwritten document. Now the cheapest and most common material in the first couple of centuries of Christianity was papyrus, which is how we get the word paper. Papyrus was a reed that grew in the rivers and it was cut down and smashed Flatt and laid together being laid vertically, the other reeds would be laid horizontally on top, and then be smashed, the fibers stuck together, and when it dried it was very flexible. It was used for everyday documents, and they have discovered quite a few early documents from the 1st century, 2nd century in Egypt, and they have found stuff like contracts, wills, recites for purchases, so this was the ordinary paper of the time. Our earliest Bible manuscripts are on papyrus, not a lot of hole books simple because they weren't all gathered yet. At that time they wrote with a reed pen it was hallow like a straw, they cut one end to make a point, pour the ink in and squeeze it until the ink came down to the point, so you can imagine what kind of skill it took to manipulate a pen like that, the ink was made from soot or charcoal mixed with water, which was typically what the Jews used, The Greeks used ink that was taken from the ink sacks of squid, I don't thinks the Jews would have done this because squid and other shellfish are considered unclean, so they wouldn't have used it for Biblical manuscripts. After a couple hundred years they began to write on something that would last longer and that was parchment. when we think of parchment today we think of fancy artistic paper, but back then parchment was animal skin. They would take the skin of an animal stretch it, scrape off hair and the flesh, bleach it and dry it, and then cut it into sheets, it was more durable than papyrus. Vellum was very fine parchment it was extreamly thin because it was taken from baby animals or even animals that had been in utero, and that was much more expensive.
In the beginning all books were in scroll form and the scrolls could be very long, the ones that the Jews used could be 20 to 30 ft long, and both ends were attached to a rod, and turn the ends. But scrolls were very cumbersome, so at one point someone put page on top of page and stitched them together, in antiquity this is called a codex, the precursor to a book. This became very popular among Christians, and they were the ones who popularized the invention of the book, because Christians were the ones that used codexs, the Jews continued to use scrolls, even today in the synagogue they use scrolls. Now since everything hand to be hand copied this task was done by scribes, they were experts in the copying of texts, these are not the same scribes that Jesus is talking to in the Gospels when he says "to you scribes and Pharisees," that's a specific group of people in 1st century Judaism who are called scribes but they are experts in the laws of Moses, at this point when I say scribe I mean a copyist. One thing to add is the manuscript abbreviation, and that is MS, or in lowercase letters. Now the only way a book could survive in antiquity was if someone copied it by hand since its written once by the original author, and if anyone liked it they would copy it, if no one liked it then no one copied it. The number of copies that exist for a particular book usually indicate its importance, the largest number of manuscripts that we have are for the Gospels; for Biblical books, the smallest number were the book of Revelation because it was the least important book, in the New Testament it wasn't read in church (I'll Dive deeper in this latter).
Their are 60,000 Greek manuscripts throughout the world, just simple ancient Greek manuscripts, of all different kinds of witting in ancient Greek, of those 12% or about 7,300 Greek Manuscripts are Biblical manuscripts, I know that sounds small but its the largest proportion of those Greek manuscripts no other either Christian or prechristian books begin to approach that number. The remaining 88% of the ancient Greek manuscripts are the works of over 2,100 ancient authors, from philosophers, playwrights, mathematicians, all exist in a manuscript someplace, you also have the fathers of the church; so 600 pagan authors, and about 1,500 Christian authors, so the remaining 88% is spread out amoung the many authors. So the manuscripts of the Bible are by far the most copied of the ancient Greek manuscripts. Now manuscripts of the Bible are found all over the world, preserved in various libraries and collections throughout the world, in about 380 different libraries so no one could acquire all of them. The largest holdings of Greek Biblical manuscripts are found in Mt. Athos, a peninsula in northern Greece were their is a grouping of monasteries, the second largest is St. Cathrine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai, then the national library in Athens, Biblio Tech national in Paris, St. Petersburg library, Vatican library, British library, and then from their it goes into the university library collections like Harvard, and of course also the private collection.
Biblical manuscripts preserve a far greater number of copies per book or author than any other, most ancient Greek works exist in only 1 to 10 copies, like the works of Aristotle, Plato, exist in just a few copies, the only exception to this is Homer, the Iliad exists in 109 copies, the Odyssey exists in 80 copies, but those of Christian witters like St. John Chrysostom, St. John of the Ladder exist in many hundreds of copies, along with Liturgical books, the lectionary. So the Bible without question is the greatest book in the world also in terms of the richness of its manuscript tradition. The Bible contains the oldest readable books in the world, because the theory is the Torah was written down in the year 1000 B.C. which is then followed by Homer which was sometime after that. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible of the Jewish Scriptures (Not what you find today in your OT). The Septuagint is the oldest translated book in the world, that was translated in the year 250 B.C. the Septuagint is also the oldest and most extensive surviving text written in the demotic Greek language, which was the everyday language before Christ. The Septuigent is the largest written work before Christ ironic because its the Hebrew Bible in Greek.
Now the Translation of the Bible has been very, very important in creating an alphabet for a great many, did not have an alphabet so they didn't have any writings. The ancient missionaries when they came to an area they often had to create a written language for the people there for the translation of the Bible, this is the oldest work in existence, but that is how you get a written language for the Germans, Syrians, Armenians, Ethiopians, Persians, Georgians, Slavs, and Aleuts. Thats tells how the ancients thought it should spread throughout the world.
The Christians when they would copy their books they kept the older copy, and we have a great many copies of Biblical books that go back to the first millennium, which is the first 1000 years of Christianity, many copies; compare that to other ancient texts the works of Homer and all other authors before or after Christ exist in manuscripts dating from 9th to the 17th century, that means we do not have the ancient manuscripts of Homer or any other Greek author for that matter, except for Aristotle, but their are 280 Bible manuscripts that are older than the 9th century, it again shows you the importance of these copies, and how they were preserved.
The Oldest fragments of the Bible that we have come from chapter 26 in Mathews Gospel which is under dispute some date it to the year 70, if it is that's remarkable. Their are fragments of John's Gospel from chapter 18 which date till about the year 100; the oldest manuscript in the world of a complete book is a 2nd century copy of St. John's Gospel on Papyrus called Bogmar 2 located in Dublin, Ireland, anything older than that is just fragments.The oldest complete collection of volumes are the Codex Vaticanus, because its held by the Vatican Library, its written in 340 it has the Old and the New Testament, in 5 volumes, then the 4rth century codex which is believed to be the same age as the Codex Vaticanus, that is the Codex Sinaiticus, it was discoved in St. Cathrine's monastery on Mt. Sinai it contains both the Old and the New Testament, but usually we don't have the whole thing, you just have one book of the Bible, or a collection. The Codex Sinaiticus is located in the British Museum in London, and you can see it, right next to the original plays of Shakespeare, and writings of the Beatles, I think you can figure out which one gets more attention. Most Bible manuscripts that are still with us are from the 4rth century, the reasons becuase Christianity was legalized in 313, prior to that Christian Scriptures were burned, by Roman authorities, during the last great wave of persecution before Constantine legalized Christianity, you hear about the Saints that were myartered during this time. These persecutions began with the ceasing of the books, Emperor Diocletian realized that these books were important, so he burned them, the books were not kept by the Priest of the time but by the Reader (One of the few in the Church who could actually read), this was before Constantine came to power and legalized Christianity in 313. When it came to old copies they were just recopied by the Christians and used until they wore out and fell to pieces, and because during this time no one really took special care to preserve these documents we don't have any of the originals, we don't have any of the original writings of St. Paul or autographs, and if they exist we don't know, since we don't know what St. Paul's handwriting looks like so we wouldn't know if they were the autographs. But it was reported throughout the ages that people had seen them, like the Christian writer Orgein. The oldest existing autograph of any ancient document, only goes back to the 12th century A.D., and that is the precedences of a Senate held in Constantinople, in 1166.
Now the Jews do not have thousands of copies of ancient Torahs, its the Christians that copied their works, several times and kept the original, the Jews would and still do bury theirs they have a ritual for burying old copies, so their are no books of the Old testament in Hebrew that are no were near as old as the Christian scriptures, before the Dead Sea scrolls they only went back a thousand years; if you wish to know more of the Dead Sea scrolls look to my blog, I will continue more on manuscripts in the next one.
Manuscripts
First their was an oral tradition until many of these things were written down, so silently and often forgotten, beneath our neatly printed modern Bibles are thousands of different manuscripts, now we us the word today in the everyday language to mean an unpublished book but in Biblical studies or in any study that is the study of antiquity a manuscript means a handmade copy of a book or a scroll, all books were hand copied until the invention of the printing press, and that's why their called manuscripts because manu comes from the Latin word for hand, and script meaning writing, so manuscript means handwritten document. Now the cheapest and most common material in the first couple of centuries of Christianity was papyrus, which is how we get the word paper. Papyrus was a reed that grew in the rivers and it was cut down and smashed Flatt and laid together being laid vertically, the other reeds would be laid horizontally on top, and then be smashed, the fibers stuck together, and when it dried it was very flexible. It was used for everyday documents, and they have discovered quite a few early documents from the 1st century, 2nd century in Egypt, and they have found stuff like contracts, wills, recites for purchases, so this was the ordinary paper of the time. Our earliest Bible manuscripts are on papyrus, not a lot of hole books simple because they weren't all gathered yet. At that time they wrote with a reed pen it was hallow like a straw, they cut one end to make a point, pour the ink in and squeeze it until the ink came down to the point, so you can imagine what kind of skill it took to manipulate a pen like that, the ink was made from soot or charcoal mixed with water, which was typically what the Jews used, The Greeks used ink that was taken from the ink sacks of squid, I don't thinks the Jews would have done this because squid and other shellfish are considered unclean, so they wouldn't have used it for Biblical manuscripts. After a couple hundred years they began to write on something that would last longer and that was parchment. when we think of parchment today we think of fancy artistic paper, but back then parchment was animal skin. They would take the skin of an animal stretch it, scrape off hair and the flesh, bleach it and dry it, and then cut it into sheets, it was more durable than papyrus. Vellum was very fine parchment it was extreamly thin because it was taken from baby animals or even animals that had been in utero, and that was much more expensive.
In the beginning all books were in scroll form and the scrolls could be very long, the ones that the Jews used could be 20 to 30 ft long, and both ends were attached to a rod, and turn the ends. But scrolls were very cumbersome, so at one point someone put page on top of page and stitched them together, in antiquity this is called a codex, the precursor to a book. This became very popular among Christians, and they were the ones who popularized the invention of the book, because Christians were the ones that used codexs, the Jews continued to use scrolls, even today in the synagogue they use scrolls. Now since everything hand to be hand copied this task was done by scribes, they were experts in the copying of texts, these are not the same scribes that Jesus is talking to in the Gospels when he says "to you scribes and Pharisees," that's a specific group of people in 1st century Judaism who are called scribes but they are experts in the laws of Moses, at this point when I say scribe I mean a copyist. One thing to add is the manuscript abbreviation, and that is MS, or in lowercase letters. Now the only way a book could survive in antiquity was if someone copied it by hand since its written once by the original author, and if anyone liked it they would copy it, if no one liked it then no one copied it. The number of copies that exist for a particular book usually indicate its importance, the largest number of manuscripts that we have are for the Gospels; for Biblical books, the smallest number were the book of Revelation because it was the least important book, in the New Testament it wasn't read in church (I'll Dive deeper in this latter).
Their are 60,000 Greek manuscripts throughout the world, just simple ancient Greek manuscripts, of all different kinds of witting in ancient Greek, of those 12% or about 7,300 Greek Manuscripts are Biblical manuscripts, I know that sounds small but its the largest proportion of those Greek manuscripts no other either Christian or prechristian books begin to approach that number. The remaining 88% of the ancient Greek manuscripts are the works of over 2,100 ancient authors, from philosophers, playwrights, mathematicians, all exist in a manuscript someplace, you also have the fathers of the church; so 600 pagan authors, and about 1,500 Christian authors, so the remaining 88% is spread out amoung the many authors. So the manuscripts of the Bible are by far the most copied of the ancient Greek manuscripts. Now manuscripts of the Bible are found all over the world, preserved in various libraries and collections throughout the world, in about 380 different libraries so no one could acquire all of them. The largest holdings of Greek Biblical manuscripts are found in Mt. Athos, a peninsula in northern Greece were their is a grouping of monasteries, the second largest is St. Cathrine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai, then the national library in Athens, Biblio Tech national in Paris, St. Petersburg library, Vatican library, British library, and then from their it goes into the university library collections like Harvard, and of course also the private collection.
Biblical manuscripts preserve a far greater number of copies per book or author than any other, most ancient Greek works exist in only 1 to 10 copies, like the works of Aristotle, Plato, exist in just a few copies, the only exception to this is Homer, the Iliad exists in 109 copies, the Odyssey exists in 80 copies, but those of Christian witters like St. John Chrysostom, St. John of the Ladder exist in many hundreds of copies, along with Liturgical books, the lectionary. So the Bible without question is the greatest book in the world also in terms of the richness of its manuscript tradition. The Bible contains the oldest readable books in the world, because the theory is the Torah was written down in the year 1000 B.C. which is then followed by Homer which was sometime after that. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible of the Jewish Scriptures (Not what you find today in your OT). The Septuagint is the oldest translated book in the world, that was translated in the year 250 B.C. the Septuagint is also the oldest and most extensive surviving text written in the demotic Greek language, which was the everyday language before Christ. The Septuigent is the largest written work before Christ ironic because its the Hebrew Bible in Greek.
Now the Translation of the Bible has been very, very important in creating an alphabet for a great many, did not have an alphabet so they didn't have any writings. The ancient missionaries when they came to an area they often had to create a written language for the people there for the translation of the Bible, this is the oldest work in existence, but that is how you get a written language for the Germans, Syrians, Armenians, Ethiopians, Persians, Georgians, Slavs, and Aleuts. Thats tells how the ancients thought it should spread throughout the world.
The Christians when they would copy their books they kept the older copy, and we have a great many copies of Biblical books that go back to the first millennium, which is the first 1000 years of Christianity, many copies; compare that to other ancient texts the works of Homer and all other authors before or after Christ exist in manuscripts dating from 9th to the 17th century, that means we do not have the ancient manuscripts of Homer or any other Greek author for that matter, except for Aristotle, but their are 280 Bible manuscripts that are older than the 9th century, it again shows you the importance of these copies, and how they were preserved.
The Oldest fragments of the Bible that we have come from chapter 26 in Mathews Gospel which is under dispute some date it to the year 70, if it is that's remarkable. Their are fragments of John's Gospel from chapter 18 which date till about the year 100; the oldest manuscript in the world of a complete book is a 2nd century copy of St. John's Gospel on Papyrus called Bogmar 2 located in Dublin, Ireland, anything older than that is just fragments.The oldest complete collection of volumes are the Codex Vaticanus, because its held by the Vatican Library, its written in 340 it has the Old and the New Testament, in 5 volumes, then the 4rth century codex which is believed to be the same age as the Codex Vaticanus, that is the Codex Sinaiticus, it was discoved in St. Cathrine's monastery on Mt. Sinai it contains both the Old and the New Testament, but usually we don't have the whole thing, you just have one book of the Bible, or a collection. The Codex Sinaiticus is located in the British Museum in London, and you can see it, right next to the original plays of Shakespeare, and writings of the Beatles, I think you can figure out which one gets more attention. Most Bible manuscripts that are still with us are from the 4rth century, the reasons becuase Christianity was legalized in 313, prior to that Christian Scriptures were burned, by Roman authorities, during the last great wave of persecution before Constantine legalized Christianity, you hear about the Saints that were myartered during this time. These persecutions began with the ceasing of the books, Emperor Diocletian realized that these books were important, so he burned them, the books were not kept by the Priest of the time but by the Reader (One of the few in the Church who could actually read), this was before Constantine came to power and legalized Christianity in 313. When it came to old copies they were just recopied by the Christians and used until they wore out and fell to pieces, and because during this time no one really took special care to preserve these documents we don't have any of the originals, we don't have any of the original writings of St. Paul or autographs, and if they exist we don't know, since we don't know what St. Paul's handwriting looks like so we wouldn't know if they were the autographs. But it was reported throughout the ages that people had seen them, like the Christian writer Orgein. The oldest existing autograph of any ancient document, only goes back to the 12th century A.D., and that is the precedences of a Senate held in Constantinople, in 1166.
Now the Jews do not have thousands of copies of ancient Torahs, its the Christians that copied their works, several times and kept the original, the Jews would and still do bury theirs they have a ritual for burying old copies, so their are no books of the Old testament in Hebrew that are no were near as old as the Christian scriptures, before the Dead Sea scrolls they only went back a thousand years; if you wish to know more of the Dead Sea scrolls look to my blog, I will continue more on manuscripts in the next one.
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