Texts and versions
The physical aspects of New Testament texts
To establish the reliability of the text of ancient manuscripts in order to reach the text that the author originally wrote (or, rather, dictated) involves the physical aspects of the texts: collection, collation of differences or variant readings in manuscripts, and comparison in matters of dating, geographical origins, and the amount of editing or revision noted, using as many copies as are available. Textual criticism starts thus with the manuscripts themselves. Families of manuscripts may be recognized by noting similarities and differences, degrees of dependence, or stages of their transmission leading back to the earliest text, or autograph. The techniques used in textual studies of ancient manuscripts are the same whether they deal with secular, philosophical, or religious texts. New Testament textual criticism, however, operates under unique conditions because of an abundance of manuscripts and the rather short gap between the time of original writing and the extant manuscripts, shorter than that of the Old Testament.
Compared with other ancient manuscripts, the text of the New Testament is dependable and consistent, but on an absolute scale there are far more variant readings as compared with those of, for example, classical Greek authors. This is the result, on the one hand, of a great number of surviving manuscripts and extant manuscript fragments and, on the other, of the fact that the time gap between an oral phase of transmission and the written stage was far shorter than that of many other ancient Greek manuscripts. The missionary message—the kerygma (proclamation)—with reports of the Passion, death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ and collections of his deeds and sayings was, at first, oral tradition. Later it was written down in Gospel form. The letters of Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles who founded or corresponded with churches, were also collected and distributed as he had dictated them. All autographs of New Testament books have disappeared. In sharp contrast to the fact that the oldest extant full manuscript of a work by the Greek philosopher Plato (died 347 bc) is a copy written in 895—a gap of more than 1,000 years bridged by only a few papyrus texts—there was a time gap of less than 200 or 300 years between the original accounts of the New Testament events and extant manuscripts. In fact, a small (about 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches [6.4 by 8.9 centimetres]) papyrus fragment with verses from the 18th chapter of the Gospel According to John can be dated c. 120–130; this earliest known fragment of the New Testament was written 40 years or less after the presumed date of the production of that Gospel (c. 90).
Excluding papyri found preserved in the dry sands, as in Egypt (where the Gospel According to John was evidently popular judging from the large number of fragments found there), the approximate number of New Testament manuscripts dating from the 3rd to 18th centuries are: 2,000 of the four Gospels; 400 of Acts, Pauline, and Catholic letters together; 300 of Pauline letters alone; 250 of Revelation; and 2,000 lectionaries—i.e., collections of gospel (and sometimes Acts and letter) selections, or pericopes, meant to be used in public worship. Quotations from the Church Fathers—some of which are so extensive as to include almost the whole New Testament—account for more than 150,000 textual variants. Of the quotations in the Fathers, however, it is difficult to make judgments because the quotations may have been intended to be exact from some particular text traditions, but others may have been from memory, conflations, harmonizations, or allusions. Of the many New Testament manuscripts to date, however, only about 50 contain the entire 27 books of the New Testament. The majority have the four Gospels, and Revelation is the least well attested. Prior to the printing press (15th century), all copies of Bibles show textual variations.
Types of writing materials and methods
In Hellenistic times (c. 300 bc–c. ad 300), official records were often inscribed on stone or metal tablets. Literary works and detailed letters were written on parchment or papyrus, though short or temporary records were written or scratched on potsherds (ostraca) or wax tablets. Scrolls were made by gluing together papyrus sheets (made from the pith of the papyrus reed) or by sewing together parchment leaves (made from treated and scraped animal skins); they were written in columns and read by shifting the roll backward and forward from some wooden support on one or both ends. Such scrolls were used for literary or religious works and seldom exceeded 30 feet (nine metres) in length because of their weight and awkwardness in handling.
In contrast, the church used not scrolls but the codex (book) form for its literature. A codex was formed by sewing pages of papyrus or parchment of equal size one upon another and vertically down the middle, forming a quire; both sides of the pages thus formed could be written upon. In antiquity, the codex was the less honourable form of writing material, used for notes and casual records. The use of the book form testifies to the low cultural and educational status of early Christianity—and, as the church rose to prominence, it brought “the book” with it. Not until the time of the Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century, when Christianity became a state religion, were there parchment codices containing the whole New Testament.
Some very early New Testament manuscripts and fragments thereof are papyrus, but parchment, when available, became the best writing material until the advent of printing. The majority of New Testament manuscripts from the 4th to 15th centuries are parchment codices. When parchment codices occasionally were deemed no longer of use, the writing was scraped off and a new text written upon it. Such a rewritten (rescriptus) manuscript is called a palimpsest (from the Greek palin, “again,” and psaō, “I scrape”). Often the original text of a palimpsest can be discerned by photographic process.
In New Testament times there were two main types of Greek writing: majuscules (or uncials) and minuscules. Majuscules are all capital (uppercase) letters, and the word uncial (literally, 1/12 of a whole, about an inch) points to the size of their letters. Minuscules are lowercase manuscripts. Both uncials and minuscules might have ligatures making them into semi-connected cursives. In Greco-Roman times minuscules were used for the usual daily writing. In parchments from the 4th to the 9th centuries, both majuscules and minuscules were used for New Testament manuscripts, but by the 11th century all the manuscripts were minuscules.
In these early New Testament manuscripts, there were no spaces between either letters or words, rarely an indication that a word was “hyphenated,” no chapter or verse divisions, no punctuation, and no accents or breathing marks on the Greek words. There was only a continuous flow of letters. In addition, there were numerous (and sometimes variable) abbreviations marked only by a line above (e.g., IC for IHCOUC, or Jesus, and KC for kyrios, or Lord. Not until the 8th–9th century was there any indication of accents or breathing marks (both of which may make a difference in the meaning of some words); punctuation occurred sporadically at this period; but not until the Middle Ages were the texts supplied with such helps as chapters (c. 1200) and verses (c. 1550).
Occasionally, the parchment was stained (e.g., purple), and the ink was silver (e.g., Codex Argenteus, a 5th–6th-century Gothic translation). Initial letters were sometimes illuminated, often with red ink (from which comes the present English word rubric, based on the Latin for “red,” namely ruber).