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Dorthea Seate
A manuscript is a hand-written document. The word has its origin in Latin: manu (hand) and scriptum (written). There are approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In addition, there are 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in other languages. The New Testament autographa, the manuscripts written by the original authors, are unavailable, but manuscripts have been discovered that are dated as early as the 2nd century.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and is the most complete of the DeadSea Scrolls found in the Qumran Caves. The scroll was written on seventeen sheets of parchment, connected into a scroll. Differences between this scroll and the later Masoretic text are mostly grammatical and spelling differences.
Codex Leningradensis is the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament. This codex was found in Egypt and is now at The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad).
The early Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowel pointings, chapters, or verses. A group of scribes called the Masoretes, who worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the 5th and 10th centuries, added vocalizations (vowels), accents, and a textual apparatus to the Hebrew text. The version was finalized by Hebrew scribe Aaron ben Asher in the early 10th century.
Manuscripts can be dated by the style of script used. The earliest New Testament manuscripts were in scripto continuo, a style of writing without spaces in between words. (continuous script). Uncial, a script with majuscule (capital) letters which was more curved than earlier Greek writing styles, was used during the 4th-8th centuries. Cursive is a script where the author was able to write with fewer lifts of the pen. Miniscule, script with smaller letters which take less space and time, began to be used in the 9th-10th centuries. There are over 2500 miniscule New Testament manuscripts.
Along with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important manuscripts of both the Greek Old and New Testaments. It was written by three different scribes and was corrected later thousands of times, making it one of the most corrected manuscripts in history. It is the earliest complete Greek New Testament as well as the only four-column New Testament manuscript that has survived.
There are four great uncial codices: Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. Codex Alexandrinus was the first of the great uncial codices to be utilized for textual criticism and is considered one of the most reliable witnesses to Revelation. This edition was printed in 1860. The editor added spaces between words and verse numbers. Codex Alexandrinus was brought to England by Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucar in 1621, and is now in the British Library.
Printer Robert Estienne, known by his Latin name Stephanus, printed four editions of the Greek New Testament. This third edition became normative for most biblical translations into the twentieth century.
Daniel Mace was a Presbyterian minister who created the first English and Greek diglot Bible. His Greek New Testament is one of the first to depart in a significant way from the Textus Receptus and create a text-critical edition. His text-critical method of handling the biblical manuscripts anticipated modern scholarship by one hundred years. His English translation also departs from the traditional English translations and uses colloquial expressions like in Luke 7:40, which can be seen on display.
This is a Sahidic Coptic translation of the Septuagint on parchment. The Bible was being translated into Coptic as early as the second century. Coptic was the last stage of the Egyptian language dialect before the Islamic conquest. Though the word Coptic originally referred to Egyptians in general, after the Islamic conquest, the term came to refer specifically to Egyptian Christians, a minority in Egypt who often suffer persecution today.
Sahidic Coptic was the language of the southern part of Egypt. A translation of both the Greek Old Testament and the New Testament was created for the Jewish and Christian population that lived there. Today, about 10% of Egyptians identify themselves as Coptic Christians, and many still use the Coptic language for their liturgy.
The study of the Septuagint is important in that it is the primary Old Testament text from which many of the New Testament authors quote, and it is helpful in textual criticism in comparing with Hebrew manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Codex Leningradensis.
Testament come from testamentum, the word by which the Latin ecclesiastical writers translated the Greek diatheke. With the profane authors this latter term means always, one passage of Aristophanes perhaps excepted, the legal disposition a man makes of his goods for after his death. However, at an early date, the Alexandrian translators of the Scripture, known as the Septuagint, employed the word as the equivalent of the Hebrew berith, which means a pact, an alliance, more especially the alliance of Yahweh with Israel. In St. Paul (I Cor., xi, 25) Jesus Christ uses the words "new testament" as meaning the alliance established by Himself between God and the world, and this is called "new" as opposed to that of which Moses was the mediator. Later on, the name of testament was given to the collection of sacred texts containing the history and the doctrine of the two alliances; here again and for the same reason we meet the distinction between the Old and New Testaments. In this meaning the expression Old Testament (he palaia diatheke) is found for the first time in Melito of Sardis, towards the year 170. There are reasons for thinking that at this date the corresponding word "testamentum" was already in use amongst the Latins. In any case it was common in the time of Tertullian.
The New Testament, as usually received in the Christian Churches, is made up of twenty-seven different books attributed to eight different authors, six of whom are numbered among the Apostles (Matthew, John, Paul, James, Peter, Jude) and two among their immediate disciples (Mark, Luke). If we consider only the contents and the literary form of these writings they may be divided into historical books (Gospels and Acts), didactic books (Epistles), a prophetical book (Apocalypse). Before the name of the New Testament had come into use the writers of the latter half of the second century used to say "Gospel and Apostolic writings" or simply "the Gospel and the Apostle", meaning the Apostle St. Paul. The Gospels are subdivided into two groups, those which are commonly called synoptic (Matthew, Mark, Luke), because their narratives are parallel, and the fourth Gospel (that of St. John), which to a certain extent completes the first three. They relate to the life and personal teaching of Jesus Christ. The Acts of the Apostles, as is sufficiently indicated by the title, relates the preaching and the labours of the Apostles. It narrates the foundation of the Churches of Palestine and Syria only; in it mention is made of Peter, John, James, Paul, and Barnabas; afterwards, the author devotes sixteen chapters out of the twenty-eight to the missions of St. Paul to the Greco-Romans. There are thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, and perhaps fourteen, if, with the Council of Trent, we consider him the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. They are, with the exception of this last-mentioned, addressed to particular Churches (Rom.; I, II Cor.; Gal.; Ephes.; Philip.; Colos.; I, II Thess.) or to individuals (I, II Tim.; Tit.; Philem.). The seven Epistles that follow (James; I, II Peter; I, II, III John; Jude) are called "Catholic", because most of them are addressed to the faithful in general. The Apocalypse addressed to the seven Churches of Asia Minor (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamus, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea) resembles in some ways a collective letter. It contains a vision which St. John had at Patmos concerning the interior state of the above-mentioned communities, the struggle of the Church with pagan Rome, and the final destiny of the New Jerusalem.
The New Testament was not written all at once. The books that compose it appeared one after another in the space of fifty years, i.e. in the second half of the first century. Written in different and distant countries and addressed to particular Churches, they took some time to spread throughout the whole of Christendom, and a much longer time to become accepted. The unification of the canon was not accomplished without much controversy (see CANON OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES). Still it can be said that from the third century, or perhaps earlier, the existence of all the books that to-day form our New Testament was everywhere known, although they were not all universally admitted, at least as certainly canonical. However, uniformity existed in the West from the fourth century. The East had to await the seventh century to see an end to all doubts on the subject. In early times the questions of canonicity and authenticity were not discussed separately and independently of each other, the latter being readily brought forward as a reason for the former; but in the fourth century, the canonicity was held, especially by St. Jerome, on account of ecclesiastical prescription and, by the fact, the authenticity of the contested books became of minor importance. We have to come down to the sixteenth century to hear the question repeated, whether the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, or the Epistles called Catholic were in reality composed by the Apostles whose names they bear. Some Humanists, as Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan, revived the objections mentioned by St. Jerome, and which are based on the style of these writings. To this Luther added the inadmissibility of the doctrine, as regards the Epistle of St. James. However, it was practically the Lutherans alone who sought to diminish the traditional Canon, which the Council of Trent was to define in 1546.
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