Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1171. The Chester Beatty papyri are among the earliest and most significant witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, and I want to walk through what they are, how they were found, and why they matter so much to anyone asking whether the Bible we read…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1174. The Bodmer papyri are, alongside the Chester Beatty collection, among the most significant early witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament, and together these two collections have done more than almost anything else in the last century to close the historical gap between the apostles and our earliest substantial manuscript…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01176. The Nestle-Aland text is the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament that stands behind almost every modern English translation, the ESV included, and understanding what it actually is clears up a great deal of confusion about why contemporary Bibles sometimes differ from the King James at particular verses. It is not…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1050. The Johannine Comma is the name given to a few extra words that appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James Version and nowhere in modern translations, and if you have ever noticed the difference and wondered what happened to the Trinity, you are asking exactly the right question. The King James…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from tiny papyrus fragments to complete parchment codices spanning many centuries of careful copying. No single manuscript reads identically to every other, which is exactly what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can be in the text of the New Testament sooner or later has to reckon with what these two documents actually say and where they came…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1113. Biblical manuscript materials range from stone and clay to papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and tracing what the prophets and apostles actually wrote on takes us right into the dust and workshops of the ancient world, reminding us that the eternal word of God reached us through thoroughly earthly, physical means. I find this…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1112. Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might expect, because the early church’s adoption of the codex over the scroll was one of the most striking cultural decisions the first Christians ever made….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes a source of real encouragement rather than concern about how much of the Bible has actually reached us intact. People sometimes hear that we possess…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1110. The Majority Text theory holds that the true wording of the Greek New Testament is best found by following the reading supported by the largest number of surviving Greek manuscripts, and if you have never met this idea before, it is worth understanding both its genuine strengths and its real limitations before you…