New Testament - Early Manuscripts

Early Manuscripts

Like other literature from antiquity, the text of the New Testament was (prior to the advent of the printing press) preserved and transmitted in manuscripts. Manuscripts containing at least a part of the New Testament number in the thousands. The earliest of these (like manuscripts containing other literature) are often very fragmentarily preserved. Some of these fragments have even been thought to date as early as the 2nd century (i.e., Papyrus 90, Papyrus 98, Papyrus 104, and famously Rylands Library Papyrus P52, though the early date of the latter has recently been called into question). For each subsequent century, more and more manuscripts survive that contain a portion or all of the books that were held to be part of the New Testament at that time (for example, the New Testament of the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, once a complete Bible, contains the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas), though occasionally these manuscripts contain other works as well (e.g., Papyrus 72 and the Crosby-Schøyen Codex). The date at which a manuscript was written, however, does not necessarily reflect the date of the form of text it contains. That is, later manuscripts can, and occasionally do, contain older forms of text or older readings.

Some of the more important manuscripts containing an early text of books of the New Testament are:

• The Chester Beatty Papyri (Greek; the New Testament portions of which were copied in the 3rd century)
• The Bodmer Papyri (Greek and Coptic; the New Testament portions of which were copied in the 3rd and 4th centuries)
• Codex Bobiensis (Latin; copied in the 4th century, but containing at least a 3rd-century form of text)
• Uncial 0171 (Greek; copied in the late-third or early 4th century)
• Syriac Sinaiticus (Syriac; copied in the 4th century)
• Schøyen Manuscript 2560 (Coptic; copied in the 4th century)
• Codex Vaticanus (Greek; copied in the 4th century)
• Codex Sinaiticus (Greek; copied in the 4th century)
• Codex Vercellensis (Latin; copied in the 4th century)
• Curetonian Gospels (Syriac; copied in the 5th century)