Since the manuscripts contained the words of Christ, they were thought to have had a level of sanctity burning them was considered more reverent than simply throwing them into a garbage pit, which occasionally happened (as in the case of Oxyrhynchus 840). When washing was no longer an option, the second choice was burning. One notable palimpsest is the Archimedes Palimpsest. Such reused manuscripts were called palimpsests and were very common in the ancient world until the Middle Ages. The first was to simply 'wash' the manuscript and reuse it. Often, especially in monasteries, a manuscript cache was little more than a former manuscript recycling centre, where imperfect and incomplete copies of manuscripts were stored while the monastery or scriptorium decided what to do with them. 125 (the 𝔓 52 papyrus, oldest copy of John fragment) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the 15th century. The dates of these manuscripts range from c. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Nubian, and Armenian. See also: Lists of New Testament manuscripts New Testament manuscripts Folio 41v from Codex Alexandrinus contains the Gospel of Luke with decorative tailpiece. 11th century CE oldest MSS available to scholars, 16th century CEĬrosby-Schøyen Codex, British Library MS.

650–587 BCE ( amulets with the Priestly Blessing recorded in the Book of Numbers)Ĭodex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and other earlier papyriĪleppo Codex, Leningrad Codex and other, incomplete MSS Hebrew written in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabetĬ. These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE to 70 CE. Notably, there are two scrolls of the Book of Isaiah, one complete ( 1QIs a), and one around 75% complete ( 1QIs b). Every book of the Tanakh is represented except for the Book of Esther however, most are fragmentary. Out of the roughly 800 manuscripts found at Qumran, 220 are from the Tanakh. Before this discovery, the earliest extant manuscripts of the Old Testament were in Greek, in manuscripts such as the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. In 1947, the finding of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran pushed the manuscript history of the Tanakh back a millennium from such codices. 1008 CE) were once the oldest known manuscripts of the Tanakh in Hebrew. Main article: List of Hebrew Bible manuscripts A page from the Aleppo Codex, Deuteronomy

Original text of new testament