Episode 2: The Right Text
The way that the Christian Bible exists today is a product of modern convenience. After the invitation of the printing press in 1440, and the availability of relatively cheap and easy book production, the Bible in a single-bound volume with all 66 books included and indexed became the norm. However, the Bible for the first few centuries of its recognition as scripture existed mostly as independent and separate scrolls and books. Although there were some very early collections of Gospels (𝔓45) and collections of the letters of Paul (𝔓46), most of the earliest copies of these books were individual documents.
Despite existing in this form, the early Christians were very eager to spread the good news of Jesus and so copied and translated the books that we now call the Bible with great speed and regularity. By the 4th century copies of the biblical books existed across the ancient world and in multiple different languages. This meant that the gospel spread very quickly, however, because of the zeal of the message not all copies were done carefully, resulting in differing readings throughout the copies.
Key Definitions
Bible – stemming from the Koinē Greek word biblia (βιβλία), meaning “books,” this is the term that became associated specifically with “the books” of Christian scripture. The term in an ancient context would have meant “scroll” and is used several times within Scripture. For example, in Revelation 5:2, an angel asks the question “Who is worthy to break the seal and open the scroll (to biblion – τὸ βιβλίον).” In our modern Protestant context, the Bible would refer explicitly to the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.
Manuscript – a word used to describe a hand-written document. The word itself comes from the medieval Latin manu (by the hand) and scriptus (written). Therefore, a manuscript is the term used for any written document that was hand-produced by a scribe or copyist.
Codex – referring to what we today would typically think of as “a book.” Although codices have been around since the third century BC, their popularity did not rise to prominence until the third century AD. By the fourth century AD, the codex began to replace the scroll as a preferred form of longer writing. Unlike scrolls, codices allowed writing on both sides of the pages and made it easy to locate and go back and forth between passages – a practice that is very hard to do when dealing with a scroll.
Papyrus – an ancient writing material made from the papyrus plant. The earliest surviving copies of the New Testament are written on this material.
Parchment – a common writing material from the 4th to 14th centuries made of animal skin. Tanners took the hides of animals, cleaned them, and scrapped them thin to produce large sheets. These sheets were folded into gatherings of parchment leaves, known as quires, which were often grouped together and bound into a codex.
Scroll – a single document written on parchment or papyrus that is rolled up. Scrolls could range in size from a few centimeters to many meters in length.
Fragment – a surviving section of an incomplete manuscript.
Septuagint – a modern term that refers to a stream of ancient translations into Greek of the Hebrew Bible and several other Jewish texts (also known by the abbreviation LXX). The translation project of the documents we now call the Septuagint took place between the third and first centuries BC. Many of the Greek quotations of the Old Testament found within the New Testament are quotations from the Septuagint.
Vulgate – a term derived from the old Latin word vulgata, meaning “common.” The Vulgate is a late fourth century AD translation of the Bible into Latin. The fourth-century theologian and linguist, Jerome, was commissioned by Damasus I, to translate the Bible out of Hebrew and Greek and into the “common language” of the people, i.e. Latin. The Latin Vulgate remained the official Bible of the Church between the fifth and 16th centuries.
Dead Sea Scrolls – a collection of 970 scrolls, dating between the third century BC and the first century AD, discovered in caves spread down the coast of the Dead Sea that exist in various stages of completeness. Although we are not entirely sure who wrote, copied, and stored all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of them are the product of the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. This collection includes all the books of the Old Testament (excluding Esther), as well as a number of Jewish books of theology and history. The preservation of these documents ranges from entire scrolls (like the Great Isaiah Scroll) to mere scraps of papyrus and parchment only millimeters in size.
Going Deeper: John 5:4 is an example of a textual variant that made its way into the text based on a scribal notation in the margin (probably in the fourth century). Do these kinds of introductions into the text of the Bible over time affect its reliability as the Word of God? Why or why not?
Further Reading:
Peter Williams, Can I Trust the Gospels?
Richard Brash, How God Preserved the Bible?
Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View
Darrell Bock, Andreas Kostenberger, Truth in a Culture of Doubt
Elijah Hixon and Peter Gurry, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism
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