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Glossary

New Testament manuscripts uncials, minuscules, palimpsests and all that stuff

By Darrell Hannah

Every literary work put into writing before 1456, when Gutenberg’s Latin Bible rolled off the presses, had to be copied by hand. With long works, such as the Bible, this was not only a tedious process, it also resulted in many variations (of greater and lesser degree) in the text. Today, well over 5,000 of these hand-copied manuscripts of part or all of the Greek New Testament survive, not to mention over 10,000 manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate New Testament. Much as an archaeologist removes layers of a tell, carefully considering every scrap of evidence, a textual critic “digs” […]

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Footnotes

1.

B.C.E. and C.E. are the scholarly, religiously neutral designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D. They stand for “Before the common Era” and “Common Era.”

Endnotes

1.

Y. K. Kim. “Palaeographical Daring of ¸46 to the Later First Century,” Biblica 69:2 (1988), pp. 248–257.

2.

Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 40–41.

3.

Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans 1987) pp. 101–102; and Metzger, p. 6.

4.

Cf. Metzger, p. 9.

5.

The most up-to-date numbering of each class of manuscripts is found in Aland p. 74.

6.

Metzger; p. 4.

7.

Metzger; p. 63.