Scripture
Codex Alexandrinus
On New Year’s Day 1627 a Greek Bible was carried into the presence of King Charles I and handed over by a man who had travelled thousands of miles to give it…
Archive
septuagint
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 Samaritan Pentateuch
Of all the manuscript witnesses to the Pentateuch that have survived from antiquity, none is more puzzling, more singular, and more stubbornly useful to the textual scholar than the Samaritan Pentateuch. The…
Transmission
Codex Alexandrinus and the Fifth Century Bible
Codex Alexandrinus is, in the modern inventory of biblical manuscripts, one of the four great uncial codices of the 4th and 5th centuries, and it is, on substantial points of the textual…
Transmission
Codex Vaticanus and the Oldest Large Bible
Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 is, in the modern inventory of biblical manuscripts, the manuscript that sits at the head of the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament and of substantial portions…
Transmission
Codex Sinaiticus and the Sinai Manuscript Tradition
Codex Sinaiticus is, in the modern inventory of biblical manuscripts, one of the four corner-stones of Greek New Testament textual criticism. Together with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, it…
Transmission
The Isaiah Scroll 1Q Isaiah
It is one of the longest biblical manuscripts ever found from antiquity. Written in Hebrew, on seventeen columns of leather, it contains every chapter of the book of Isaiah from the disputed…
Scripture
The Septuagint and the Letter of Aristeas
The oldest translation of any part of the Hebrew Bible is the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Torah and the rest of the Jewish scriptures produced in the Hellenistic period. The…
Transmission
The Hexapla of Origen
For nearly three centuries before Origen began the work that would make him famous, the Greek-speaking church had lived by the Septuagint. The legend of the Seventy had given it the prestige…
Scripture
The Peshitta and Its Hebrew Vorlage
Inside the climate-controlled reserve stacks of the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the rue de Richelieu, on the shelf that runs along the south wall of the département des manuscrits orientaux, a…
Scripture
The Samaritan Pentateuch
For a reader trained on the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch is at once familiar and unsettling. The five books of Moses, the same sequence, the same stories from Genesis through Deuteronomy,…
Scripture
The Nash Papyrus
For nearly half a century it carried a singular distinction: the oldest known manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Acquired in Egypt in 1902 and presented to Cambridge University Library the following year,…
Transmission
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The seven scrolls that came out of the caves in the winter of 1947 were the beginning, not the whole story. What followed was fifteen years of Bedouin and archaeological finds, a…
Reformation
The Complutensian Polyglot
On a January day in 1514 a French-born printer named Arnao Guillén de Brocar finished, in a workshop on the Plaza de San Diego in Alcalá de Henares, the first printed New…