An aspect of scholarly study of early Christianity is the need to understand the documentary evidence we now possess. That includes more than reviewing and interpreting the content of those works, but also the process by which they came down to us. This matters, because the nature of their transmission has flavored what we read. One thing I must get out of the way immediately, Dear Reader, is the contention — common in the fundamentalist Christian community, but also widely believed by followers of other Christian sects — that the texts we have in our hands are precisely the same as what had first been penned back in the religion’s first centuries.
But this just not true. In no case do we have an original manuscript of any Christian work (and by that I mean, the very first copy of, say, 1 Corinthians as it was actually penned by Paul aka Saul of Tarsus). Especially fundamentalist Christians often compare the Bible texts to others of the classical period (they frequently cite Julius Caesar’s Gallic War) and assert that the Bible text-manuscripts are all precisely the same, from the Middle Ages on back in time to when they were first composed.
What we actually have, instead, are a few copies of copies of copies of copies … in nearly all cases, many generations removed from the originals. And they’re far from being identical to one another.
Something that must be understood is that classical scribes didn’t have printing presses with durable ink on durable paper media. Most were written on papyrus, comprised of the pith of a particular reedy plant. Stems of it would have their tough outer skins removed, with the remainder cut into long, thin strips. These would be laid on a hard surface, one beside the other and overlapping, then another layer of strips laid perpendicular over that. These would be tamped down and allowed to dry under weights, or possibly under mechanical pressure, so the strips adhered to one another (occasionally an adhesive was used to help with that). Once fully dry, these sheets would be scraped or sanded flat so as to create a surface smooth enough to write on.
The ink used was typically composed of soot (yes, literally, burnt material) which was blended with a naturally-occurring binder such as gum arabic or gelatins.
In the case of Christian texts, these were usually bound in the form of codices (singular, codex) which came in several forms, a common one being a long length of papyrus folded back on itself many times over (something like a fan) and pressed down so that it appeared like a small modern book.
While papyrus, as a medium, can last virtually forever in a dry environment (such as in Egypt), it doesn’t stand up well in more humid places, since the presence of water makes it harbor molds and other natural rotting agents. The inks were of variable quality; while some ancient inks have stood up to the passage of millennia, many texts were written with poor quality ink, fading with the passage of time.
What’s more, the papyrus plant only grew well in Egypt, which meant that Egypt was the primary source of writing media. Other materials were used, of course, including parchment or vellum (both made from treated and stretched animal skins), but not many Christian texts were composed on that. Those, too, could be very durable, but sometimes they were rooted out by pests or kept in conditions that allowed them to degrade.
In practice, this meant that manuscripts didn’t last long. They could only be preserved — over the long term — by being copied … again and again and again. Copying was also the way that one copy of a text could get to more readers or listeners. In other words, a lot of manual labor was required in order to perpetuate any given work over the centuries.
Another factor is the manner in which these works were written. Many (but not all) were composed as blocks of long, continuous text in majuscule letters, without punctuation. To get an idea of how this worked, here’s a sample paragraph:
This is a sample paragraph. I typed it out in order to illustrate how classical-era texts were typically written. For us, it’s an alien way of writing and reading, but in that time it was quite normal and any educated person was expected to handle it well.
How this same paragraph was actually penned by an ancient scribe on an ancient papyrus manuscript, would have been like this:
THISISASAMPLEPARAGRAPHITYPEDITOUTINORDE
RTOILLUSTRATEHOWCLASSICALERATEXTSWERETY
PICALLYWRITTENFORUSITSANALIENWAYOFWRITI
NGANDREADINGBUTINTHATTIMEITWASQUITENORM
ALANDANYEDUCATEDPERSONWASEXPECTEDTOHAND
LEITWELL
As noted, this wasn’t the case for all early Christian texts. Some employed a system of punctuation that had originated among Greeks in the last centuries BCE with dots, or puncti (singular punctus) placed in the text at various heights. Also, while it wasn’t common, as the centuries went by, scribes added spaces between words. By the time of St Jerome, these practices had become common.
Because many of the texts being copied were like this, and also because a lot of copies were being made from texts that had begun to fade or literally break down, one can see that duplicating them could be difficult. An additional complicating factor was that very few people in that era were literate to the degree that they could write and thus duplicate a manuscript. Scholars have a wide range of estimates for literacy in the classical world, but at best it was no better than 10% of the population and in some places could be as low as .5%. Also, some portion of that percentage were people who were merely functionally literate; that is, they could sometimes recognize particular words, but such people wouldn’t have had anything like the skill required to copy manuscripts.
Of note, the education of the era wasn’t especially consistent or good. Even those with enough of an education to be able to copy manuscripts were, to put it simply, not all that swift and weren’t necessarily very good at it. But due to the intensive labor required to perpetuate these texts, this was an “all hands on deck” operation, within each congregation, and everyone with even the most rudimentary ability could be called up to copy manuscripts.
The time it took to write out manuscripts meant that, sometimes, scribes took shortcuts. For instance, they frequently used abbreviations; in the case of Christian texts, the name Christ (χριστος or christos in Greek) was often shortened to ΧΡ (chi-rho) or ΧΣ (chi-sigma). While that could save time for the scribe writing out the text, especially in the case of long unbroken blocks of text, readers (which included the scribe reading the original of the copy they’re making) might stumble over that. While they were often marked with overlines, occasionally those weren’t used, or an overline might be over the first two letters of a three-letter abbreviation.
Moreover, all too often, outright mistakes were made. Letters or even whole words might be accidentally left out, especially with those unbroken blocks of text in which individual words aren’t immediately recognizable, especially as one is moving along and in a hurry to finish as soon as possible so as to get on with the job of making another copy.
Yes, it’s true; even in the case of sacred documents, in which one presumes a lot of care is being taken to make the best-possible copies, mistakes can be made — and we know they were. The bottom line of this is that, as one document is copied, then another copy is made of the copy, later on, then that copy is itself later copied, variations can be introduced to the text which tend to cascade forward through time.
Another factor to note, is that over the centuries, the work of copying documents, particularly Bibles and its component books, became the province of the Church. Scriptoria were established in which trained scribes, frequently monks, acted essentially as “copying factories.” The copies’ quality increased through the Middle Ages, becoming more consistent and more durable. That’s not to say that variations or even errors stopped occurring, but it does mean there were fewer of them.
Ultimately what this means for anyone studying these manuscripts, is that if enough of them are collected and compared to one another, especially over time, one can see particular “tracks” of copying. Peering back through these tracks, one might even be able to determine the origin of a particular stream of text.
Currently scholars have identified three prevailing chains of copying, along with a fourth “contender,” they’ve identified by comparing and contrasting manuscripts from the medieval period all the way back to the first centuries of Christianity:
An additional consideration here is that, by the 6th century or so and where the Bible books were concerned, within the region of Latin Christianity, the focus of copying increasingly fell on the Latin Vulgate translation by St Jerome. Here, it effectively became the sole text of the Bible that was copied. While variations did get introduced on occasion — again, even trained scriptoria scribes were only human and thus still prone to error! — it was this single textual stream that rolled forward through history.
Note, the Vulgate is a translation of the original Bible documents, so it’s not considered a text-type. It is, however, the product of both the Western text-type (due to the Vetus Latina (or Old Latin) translations Jerome started with, being based on that) and the Alexandrian (due to that text-type being the source of the Greek manuscripts he used for comparison purposes).
Once the many different text-types were discovered, which was itself a dynamic process beginning arguably with Erasmus in the 16th century and more fleshed out by German scholars in the 18th, this changed the manner in which scholars approached Bible texts. More importantly, it drove how the Bible was translated.
There was a strong desire, to whatever degree is possible, to somehow arrive at the “original” content of each of the Bible’s books. Text-type determinations helped refine the process by which scholars and translators could do this. Particularly, the Alexandrian text-type was seen as more consistent than the others.
Thus, the Alexandrian text-type is the primary basis of critical (i.e. academic) editions of the Bible, such as Novum Testamentum Graece aka the Nestle-Aland edition. In turn, most modern translations of the Bible, such as the New American Standard Bible and New International Version (both Protestant) and New American Bible (Catholic) rely on those critical editions (although good translators will also compare and contrast individual manuscripts in the process of translating). The same holds true for the more recent editions of Nestle-Aland, which at many points delves into manuscript analysis to arrive at its readings.
In hindsight, it’s notable that many earlier editions of the Bible, such as the King James Version, had been based on manuscripts from the Byzantine text-type. Erasmus’s Textus Receptus, and the Bibles printed by Stephanus based on it, had a similar foundation. Thus the New King James version, intended as it is to succeed the original KJV, is based on both the Byzantine and Alexandrian text-types (again, also modified by review of individual manuscripts).
Since we don’t have any of the true “original” copies of any Bible books, that means we only have copies of copies. The very-oldest fragment we have is called Rylands P52; it contains a brief passage from John. Scholars date this fragment to sometime in the early 2nd century, from c. 125 CE or later. It wasn’t part of the very-first gospel of John, nor (having been written 25 years or more after the original) could it have been from a first-generation copy, or a second- or even third-generation copy. In fact, it’s probably several generations removed from the first copy of John.
And that’s only the very-oldest manuscript fragment we have. Everything else is even further removed from the “original” manuscripts of the Bible books. In a lot of cases, they’re dozens of generations away from the originals.
Because of that, we don’t know what the original authors of any of these books actually wrote. One can presume these copies and copies-of-copies-many-times-over are similar to the books’ original content, but are they exactly the same? In every detail? The answer to that is an unequivocal “No!”
I’ll also repeat what I’d pointed out near the start of all of this, which is that the widely-held presumption of biblical inerrancy has no basis in reality. The many manuscripts and fragments of texts that we now have, collectively show numerous variations in how Bible books were copied. Depending on how one evaluates them, they can number in the hundreds of thousands.
Fundamentalist Christians deny all of this and wave off the many, many variants that have been found, which are absurdly obvious to anyone who actually looks at the manuscripts. It’s difficult to understand how they can do this; they may as well claim the sky is red or that the sun rises in the west. One reason they get away with it, is that virtually none of them have ever actually looked at the manuscripts or tried to understand where their Bibles come from. They have translated copies (usually, the KJV, but occasionally they’ll employ others) and that’s enough for them.
They thus miss a great deal about their faith, its history, and how they arrived at all of the beliefs they have. That’s a shame, because Christianity’s history is dynamic and at various junctures quite grand. They miss all of it, because they simply reject it out-of-hand. More’s the pity.
↵ Go back up to Early Christian History menu.