How We Got the New Testament (in 22 minutes)

           A new video that I've prepared is at YouTube:  How We Got the New Testament.  It's  a slide-show presentation that covers the basics of the history of the transmission of the books of the New Testament from their initial distribution to the present day.  Viewers are introduced to papyrus copies, parchment copies, majuscule (uncial) script, and minuscule script.  They are also informed of a few developments the New Testament went through in the Middle Ages.   

          Pages of Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Bezae. and Codex Cyprius are shown, and early versions are also featured, such as the Vulgate and the Peshitta.   Viewers are then informed of a few developments the New Testament text went through in the Middle Ages, such as the recycling of parchment, and illumination.

Tyndale at the stake

         When a person asks, "How did we get the New Testament?" the identity of the "we" affects the answer.  After all, some people-groups still don't have the New Testament in their native language.  After the first nine minutes, the focus is on how the English-speaking church got the New Testament.  Viewers are briefly introduced to Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus, William Tyndale, and other individuals from the Renaissance and Reformation era.   Early English versions are described, up to and including the King James Version, before the era of modern textual criticism is covered:  the contributions of Bengel, Griesbach, Scholz, Tregelles, Tischendorf, and Westcott and Hort are briefly described.

          The last five minutes focus on the spread of the New Testament in what is (for better or worse) English as it is spoken today. and developments subsequent to Westcott and Hort (such as the papyrus discoveries at Oxyrhynchus.  

        How We Got the New Testament is suitable for church-viewing and Bible-study groups.  

    

Production-Dates: How Do We Get Them?

           Sometimes when first-time observers read about the production-dates of New Testament manuscripts, one of the first things they notice is that most of the dates are not very precise.  Several factors contribute to establishing the approximate production-date of a manuscript.  Let’s look at some of them today:   colophons, script, content, material, special factors, and radiocarbon dating.

          COLOPHONS.  Notes written by a scribe, or scribes, involved in the production of the manuscript – sometimes state when the manuscript was made.  Such notes, or colophons, immediately simplify the task of assigning a production-date.  Medieval scribes who wrote colophons with dates typically used calendars in which the first year of the earth was 5509.  Sometimes the production-date was given in terms of the reign of a particular Byzantine Emperor.  Robert Waltz has provided a detailed explanation of how production-dates mentioned in colophons should be interpreted.  Rarely, dates are given in terms of the number of years A.D. (Anno Domini, “the year of the Lord”).  

          SCRIPT.  Usually, there is no colophon, so analysts attempting to determine a manuscript’s production-date must resort to a study of the handwriting displayed in the manuscript.  This involves the field of paleography (or “palæography”), the study of ancient writing.   The method of Greek handwriting changed over time – from the majuscule, or uncial, lettering of the early copies (and formal and informal variations), to the minuscule lettering of later copies (with variations such as Perlschrift, Bouletée, and “Ace of Spades” minuscule).

Bernard de Montfaucon
(1655-1741)

The first systematic study of Greek palaeography was made by Bernard de Montfaucon, a Benedictine monk, in 1708.   Almost instantly, paleography grew into a scientific field of study.  In 1912, Edward Maunde Thompson published An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography, a book which remains useful today.  American scholar Bruce Metzger focused on Biblical writings in his 1981 book Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography.  Recently, Timothy Janz has written Greek Paleography From Antiquity to the Renaissance, which is available to read at the Vatican Library’s website.   With just a few hours of effort, readers of Janz’s introduction can gain plenty of information about palaeography (and view the specific scripts in manuscripts at the Vatican Library).

      Manuscripts’ production-dates assigned on the basis of paleography tend to have an unavoidable range of about 100 years, because we have no way of knowing whether an anonymous scribe was just beginning his (or her) career – in which, hopefully, he would continue for 50 years – or whether his career was approaching its end.  If a scribe continued using the script he possessed when he first learned to write, then that script could endure throughout his whole career.  (Theoretically a scribe could adjust his own handwriting over time, but there is not much to go on to suggest that such a thing was normal.)        

          CONTENT.  A manuscript cannot, of course, be written before the events that are recorded in the manuscript.  Some New Testament manuscripts – more than you might expect – mention  historical events (especially in lectionary-calendars accompanying the Biblical text) that provide a solid basis for discerning the limits of when a manuscript was made.  For example, if a lectionary calendar mentions the feast-day for Cosmas the Hymnographer, bishop of Maiuma, and Andrew of Crete, it must have been produced after the mid-700s.  If a lectionary-calendar mentions Lazarus the Wonder-worker, its production-date must be later than the period when Lazarus the Wonder-worker was active in the 900s.

          (The Latin term for the earliest possible production-date is the terminus a quo.   The Latin term for the latest possible production-date is the terminus ad quem.)

          MATERIAL.  All New Testament manuscripts are made of papyrus or parchment or paper.  (There is a small class of witnesses, which used to be represented by the letter “T” in a Fraktur-style font, which can include other material such as very small manuscripts, amulets, and inscriptions.)  Characteristics of these materials can influence the dating of a manuscript – especially when the paper features a watermark, which can narrow down not only the production-date of a manuscript but also its provenance (where it comes from).

          SPECIAL FACTORS.  Sometimes the provenance of a manuscript helps define the limits of its production-date.  For example, the manuscript known as GA 0212 (which technically should not be in the list of continuous-text New Testament manuscripts, because it is not a continuous-text New Testament manuscript) was found in the ruins of Dura-Europos, a place which was beseiged and destroyed by a Roman army in 257.  Thus 0212’s terminus ad quem cannot be later than 257.

          Even after taking all of the above into consideration, specialists sometimes get production-dates wrong.  One example is found in the 27^th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, where the editors assigned GA 2427 a production-date of “XIV?” (p. 711), and ranked it as a “consistently cited witness of the first order” in Mark (See the Nestle-Aland Introduction, p. 47* and p. 58*).  GA 2427 is indeed cited very frequently throughout Mark in NA27’s textual apparatus. 

          But in NA28, GA 2427 is gone.  In 2006, Wieland Willker already described 2427 as a fake, and, as Willker reported, Stephen Carlson demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that 2427 is a forgery, based primarily on Philip Buttmann’s 1860 Greek New Testament (as he explains in an article at the SBL Forum Archive).  Tommy Wasserman gives additional details about the exposure of 2427 in a 2009 post at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.  Margaret Mitchell of the University of Chicago (now retired) gave a lecture in 2012 which will leave viewers with no reason to imagine that GA 2427 was made no earlier than 1860.             

          So, experts can be fooled, at least temporarily, by well-made forgeries – even with careful consideration of colophons, script, material, and special factors.  Which brings us to the last resort:
          RADIOCARBON ANALYSIS.   A small amount of parchment that undergoes carbon-14 tests can yield an approximate production-date for the material.  (The date when the material was used may be later.)  This is usually not done (because the carbon-14 tests involve the destruction of the things they test).  But sometimes it is.  For instance the Ethiopian Garima Gospels, initially assigned a production-date in the 1000s, was suspected by Jacques Mercier of being much earlier.  Mercier submitted small sample fragments of the manuscript to radiocarbon tests, which gave one fragment a date of  330-540, and another fragment a date of 430-650 (as reported in 2011 in the journal of Kenyon College).  And just like that, the Garima Gospels went from being a minor witness to the Ethiopic Version to being confirmed as a contender (with the Rabbula Gospels of 586) to be the oldest illustrated manuscript of the Gospels.  Perhaps what is presently a last resort should in the future be the first resort, where parchment is involved, and when the requisite amount of material can be spared, and the cost of radiocarbon analysis is not prohibitive.  Rare is the parchment New Testament manuscript that does not have a blank border that could be removed without appreciable loss.

                                              

News: Ancient Byzantine Gospels at Mount Sinai!

Georgian NF 19, 57v -
reconstructed lower writing.

       Last month, I briefly described many of the manuscripts in a collection of palimpsests (recycled manuscripts) that are being studied by the Sinai Palimpsests Project – including 15 Greek manuscripts of New Testament books.  Today, let’s take a closer look at parts of two specific manuscripts in the collection:  Georgian NF 19 and Georgian 49.  (NF = New Finds.) 
            The upper (i.e., most recent) writing in Georgian NF 19 is a copy of a book of hymns, or chants, in the Georgian language – the Iadgari of Mikael Modrekili.  It was produced in 980.  The parchment on which this copy of the Iadgari was written previously held text from at least 13 other compositions.
            Eight of those compositions are in the Palestinian Aramaic language.  The remaining seven are in Greek – including (1) a leaf from the Gospel of Matthew (containing Matthew 21:32-41), (2) a leaf from the Gospel of John (containing John 9:17-26), and (3) a leaf from the Gospel of Luke (containing Luke 8:12-20).

           These pages are clustered together and probably came from the same manuscript of the four Gospels, which has been assigned to the 500s.  All three are written in uncial script, formatted in two narrow columns per page, with 22 lines per column.  At the Sinai Palimpsests Project website, in the lower writing of Georgian NF 19, the text from Matthew is on fol. 56, the text from Luke is on fol. 57, and the text from John is on fol. 54.

            The text of the Gospels-manuscript that was recycled to provide parchment for the Georgian chant-book was essentially Byzantine.  Taking a close look at the text from Luke, for example, the only deviations from the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform are minor variants such as ακουοντες instead of ακουσαντες and συνπνιγονται instead of συμπνιγονται in verse 14. 

            The same textual character is present in Matthew:  in Matthew 21:35-41, the text of this manuscript is practically identical to the Byzantine Text.  Its text of John 9:17-31 is also very strongly Byzantine.

            Initial letters are enlarged and reverse-indented at the beginnings of verses 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19.  The Eusebian section-number ΠΒ (82) stands in the margin near the beginning of Luke 8:19, showing that these pages were once part of a manuscript that contained all four Gospels.

            Another manuscript in the collection, Georgian 49, contains five leaves that were recycled from a Greek copy of the Gospel of Mark (fol. 25, 26, 28, 29, and 30), and a leaf that was recycled from a Greek copy of the Gospel of John – but not the same Gospels-codex that was recycled to provide writing-material for Georgian NF 19.

            The text of Mark that appears in the lower writing of Georgian 49 was also formatted in two columns per page, but in columns of 25 lines, rather than 22.  A comparison of its text of Mark 10:46-47 and 10:49-51 reveals the following readings:

The Gospels-text in the lower writing
of Georgian NF 19 is unmistakably
Byzantine.

● v. 46:  the non-inclusion of ὁ after ἱκανοῦ.

● v. 46:  the Byzantine word-order and wording in the second half of the verse.

● v. 47:  the non-inclusion of ΙΥ (the customary contraction of Jesus’ name, Ἰησοῦ) after ΔΑΔ (the customary contraction of David’s name).  This might be the earliest Greek manuscript with this reading.  (Notice, however, the dots above ΔΑΔ which may represent a proof-reader’s expression of the detection of a scribal error; a correction may have been in the left margin.)

● v. 50:  αναστας (agreeing with Byz) instead of αναπηδήσας (the reading of B À L D).

● v. 51:  the Alexandrian non-inclusion of λέγει and inclusion of ειπεν.

● v. 51:  the Alexandrian word-order Τί σοι θέλεις ποιήσω.

            It would appear that the manuscript of Mark that was recycled to make Georgian 49 had a much higher amount of Alexandrian readings than the Gospels-manuscript that was used to make Georgian NF 19.  The text of John 11:29b-31a on fol. 54r in Georgian 49, however, contains only one significant variant-unit; it agrees with the Byzantine Text, and disagrees with the Alexandrian Text, via the non-inclusion of ετι in verse 30.

            This is just a sample of the harvest of textual data that is yet to come from the Sinai Palimpsests Project.  A guide to navigating the website is planned; in the meantime, allow me to walk you through it in the course of the next few paragraphs.

Byzantine readings continue
to dominate in the text of John
in Georgian NF 19.

            The manuscripts can be viewed, once one has been admitted entrance to the image-gallery by the stewards of the Sinai Palimpsests Project website.  Viewers should agree to the Terms of Use.  Once in the gallery, visitors will have the ability to browse through a list of the manuscripts, complete with descriptions of the texts in the lower writing and their locations.  You might want to have a pen and paper handy to jot down which compositions are in the lower writing of which pages of which manuscripts.

            When a specific page-view is accessed, some basic imaging-tools are available:  visitors have the ability to zoom in on details (in a no-nonsense, intuitive method), and to adjust the brightness, contrast, and color-saturation of the photograph; there are also options to rotate the page-view, to switch from full-color to grayscale, and to invert colors.  There is also a digital ruler; if you do not feel like measuring any of the letters in the manuscripts you can use the menu in the upper right corner to select “Hide ruler” and it will hide.

            In the same sub-menu in the upper right corner of each page-view, readers are given the option of switching from page view mode (which displays a single page in the main window but allows page-selection via a virtual rolodex below the main image) to gallery view mode (in which all of the manuscript’s pages are displayed in a grid of thumbnail-views).  (In page view mode, you might need to move the whole window north a bit to access the virtual rolodex’s controls.)

            More useful than all of these remarkable features, however, are the multi-spectral images of the pages, which can be accessed by selecting the three horizontal lines which appear in the menu in the upper left corner:  “Toggle the side panel,” a pop-up note will say when you do so.  (A special page is dedicated to explaining the use of different wavelengths and other technological aspects of multi-spectral imaging, including the special book cradle at Saint Catherine’s monastery.)

            After the side-menu appears and gobbles up the far-left fifth of your screen, another menu will appear which gives you the options of “Index” and “Layers.”  “Index” does nothing, as far as I can tell (no doubt something awesome is planned to go there eventually), so select “Layers.”  A series of images – all multi-spectral images of the same page, each one at a different wavelength – will appear.

            Viewers will need to check a little box to select specific wavelengths.  Some experimenting has shown that the most useful wavelengths for reading the lower writing in the palimpsests are toward the top (above the “raking light” setting); the ones toward the bottom are useful for getting an idea of what the page would look like without any writing on it.  Once a wavelength or multiple wavelengths are selected, the enhanced view can be digitally manipulated (by changing the contrast, brightness, etc.) so as to allow – though usually still requiring some effort – a much clearer look at the lower writing than would otherwise be possible.

            To the people of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and to the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, gratitude and congratulations are offered for making possible these exciting new discoveries about the text of the Bible, patristic compositions, the Byzantine liturgy, and other historically significant writings!

Sinaipalimpsests.org is a publication of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai in collaboration with EMEL and UCLA.

All images courtesy St. Catherine's Monastery of the Sinai.  

Used with permission.