A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. The word Bible comes from the Greek biblia (books); manuscript comes from Latin manu (hand) and scriptum (written). The original manuscript (the original parchment the author physically wrote on) is called the "autographa." Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures (see Tefillin) to huge polyglot codices (multi-lingual books) containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
The study of biblical manuscripts is important because handwritten copies of books can contain errors. The science of textual criticism attempts to reconstruct the original text of books, especially those published prior to the invention of the printing press.
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Read more about Biblical Manuscript: Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) Manuscripts, New Testament Manuscripts, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the word manuscript:
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)