Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1171 When people ask how we can be sure the New Testament has been handed down faithfully, the answer rests in large part on the manuscripts that survive. Among the most important of these are the Chester Beatty papyri, a collection that gave scholars some of their earliest direct windows into the text of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1104 When New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, the wording sometimes differs from what we find in our Old Testament. Does this mean there are errors in Scripture? If the Bible is inerrant, should we not expect quotations to match exactly? The Nature of the Question Anyone who reads Scripture carefully notices that…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1111 When people learn that we possess over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, they often wonder why so many of these early witnesses survive only as fragments. Why do we have pieces of papyrus with just a few verses rather than complete books? The answer takes us into the ancient world of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1112 If you could visit a first-century synagogue or a wealthy Roman’s library, you would see something quite different from our modern books. Scrolls dominated the ancient world, rolled up and stored in jars or on shelves. Yet remarkably, Christians adopted a different format almost from the beginning: the codex, the ancestor of our…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01168 The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus are two of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Christian Bible in existence. Both date from the fourth century AD, making them several centuries older than the manuscripts Erasmus used to compile the Textus Receptus in 1516. Their existence and content lie at the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01169 The New Testament has been transmitted in over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, along with thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and other ancient languages. This remarkable abundance of manuscript evidence is one of the strongest arguments for the New Testament’s textual reliability compared to any other work of antiquity. But not all…