new-testament

Transmission

The Egerton Fragments

Four scraps of papyrus, the smallest no larger than a thumbnail, are the remains of a codex that, for a few years in the middle of the twentieth century, was claimed to…

Transmission

The Lord’s Prayer in the Manuscripts

Almost every Christian who says the Lord’s Prayer knows that the New Testament records it twice, once in Matthew and once in Luke, and most have heard that the two versions are…

Transmission

The Aramaic Tongue

Of the languages of the ancient Near East, one has the odd distinction of having been spoken almost everywhere and written in almost nowhere, until suddenly it was written everywhere. Aramaic began…

Transmission

The Armenian Bible

Armenia had no written literature at all until the fifth century of the common era. When Mesrop Mashtots, a former royal secretary who had become a priest and then a hermit, sat…

Transmission

The Syriac New Testament

In the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a scholar lifted a palimpsest from a shelf and found beneath it the oldest surviving…

Transmission

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

On 12 January 1897, the second day of the first season of excavation at a rubbish tip outside the walls of a dead town in the Faiyum, two Oxford scholars picked up…

Scripture

The Codex Amiatinus

Of the great pandects copied by the early medieval monasteries of Latin Christendom, only one is, in a real sense, still alive on a public library shelf. It is the codex now…