New Testament manuscripts

Papyrus 64, aka the Magdalen papyrus.

Disclaimer: I am not a Bible scholar. I have not even been to Bible school. This post merely presents my current understanding. A work in progress!

There are well over 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, handwritten copies of the whole New Testament or just parts (or sometimes just ragged bits of a page), made between roughly the year 100 and 1500.

The Critical Text is the scholarly reconstruction of what the original New Testament must have been, a best guess based on comparing thousands of manuscripts. The latest, greatest reconstruction, as I write this, is the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland that came out in 2012.

Text type: The thousands of manuscripts can be arranged into a vast family tree, showing who copied who. The main branches are called text types. There are three main ones:

• Byzantine: from Antioch by way of Constantinople. This seems to be a mix of yet older text types.
• Alexandrian: from Egypt, mainly Alexandria. Alexandrian texts tend to have more polished Greek.
• Western: from Rome and other points west. Not many of these since the West mainly used Latin translations, not the original Greek. Also, Western texts tend to throw in explanatory verses that were not part of the original.

Many manuscripts are a mix thereof.

The history goes roughly like this:

• 100-400: Alexandria is the biggest city of Greek-speaking Christendom. It produces the most manuscripts.
• 400-1500: Constantinople is biggest city of Greek-speaking Christendom. It produces the most manuscripts.
• 1500s: Western scholars (Erasmus, Stephanus and Beza) reconstruct the Greek New Testament based on available manuscripts, which are nearly all Byzantine texts of the past 500 years or so. This reconstruction is called the Textus Receptus.
• 1600s: The King James or Authorized Version (KJV/AV) of the Bible translates the Textus Receptus.
• 1800s: Western scholars find older manuscripts, especially in Egypt, thanks to its dry climate. Scholars Wescott and Hort favour the older readings of the Alexandrian texts in their reconstruction, which comes out in 1881. Jesus no longer rises from the dead at the end of Mark (Mark 16:9-20), nor does he save a woman caught in adultery from stoning (John 7:53-8:11). Among other things.
• 1900s: Most new Catholic and Protestant translations into English are based on Westcott and Hort or the newer, more up-to-date Nestle-Aland reconstruction. Eastern Orthodox translations favour the Byzantine text.

So, by 2016, the Lord’s Prayer in Luke (Luke 11:2-4) gets cut back from this in the King James (using Jesus Seminar style colouring to make them easier to compare):

Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins;
for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.

To this in the ESV:

Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread
and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• ESV – has a list of many of the verses that have been deleted or changed.
• Luke 4:4 – a brief history – an example of the above
• The Lord’s Prayer in English through time – the version in Matthew, which is more constant through time.
• The Jesus Seminar
• Bible
  • Authorized Version
  • New Testament canon – how the books of the New Testamrnt were chosen
• Bloom on translating Plato

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