Scholars Find Treasure Trove of Greek NT Manuscripts
Normally, two or three New Testament manuscripts handwritten in the original Greek are discovered each year. But Jeremy Reynalds of Assist News Service is reporting that last summer the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) made a stunning discovery of previously unknown documents during a trip to Albania.
For decades, scholars have attempted to access the National Archive in Tirana with little success, partly because Albania is a former police state. Until now, only two manuscripts of the 13 there known to western scholars had been photographed, and that was many years ago with microfilm.
CSNTM Director Dr. Daniel B. Wallace recently received permission to send a team of four men to Albania to photograph the manuscripts with state-of-the-art digital equipment. By the end of their first day in Tirana in July, they realized there were far more than 13 manuscripts.
"When the news came back across the Atlantic, I was stunned," Wallace said in a news release.
The catalog at the National Archive listed 47 New Testament manuscripts, and at least 17 were unknown to western scholars. Evidence suggests that some of the other manuscripts had been presumed lost elsewhere in Albania, but a final assessment has yet to be made.
The oldest manuscript in the collection is Codex Beratinus, written in the sixth century. It contains only the Gospels of Matthew and Mark today. The codex is the ancestor of the modern book form, replacing the scrolls and wax tablets of earlier times. Early Christians popularized the codex, adopting it for their scriptures and other writings.
According to CSNTM, among the other finds were four manuscripts, dating from the 11th century on, that provided more information on a familiar biblical controversy. The story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 is included in most Bibles today, but some scholars doubt its authenticity. These four manuscripts either have the story at the end of John or lack it altogether, suggesting it is something of an add-on.
Wallace said that no foundational teaching of the Bible -- such as the virgin birth and the deity of Christ -- has been compromised by such study, but that some of the particulars have been brought into question.
CSNTM said that when studying these manuscripts, the age is important, but so is the pedigree -- which previous manuscript it was copied from. Experts like Wallace, also a Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, try to trace the antecedents of a Biblical manuscript much like an expert in genealogy would reconstruct a family tree.
"It is like working on a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing," Wallace said in the news release. "But with the discovery of new manuscripts, more of the pieces make sense. And the result is we are getting closer to reconstructing the original wording of the New Testament in the few places where there still is question."
In its five years of existence, CSNTM has photographed manuscripts in places that include Istanbul, Turkey; Patmos, Greece; and Muenster, Germany at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research.
The Institute is the clearinghouse for original manuscripts. When a "new" manuscript comes to light, it is assigned a unique number -- certifying the "discovery." To date, some 5,700 manuscripts containing about 1.3 million pages have been catalogued.
CSNTM Press Release: Greek New Testament Manuscripts in Albania
For more information on the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, visit http://www.csntm.org/.
For more of the scholarly debate over archaeological discoveries check out the "Airing Differences" section on Biblical Archaeology Review.
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