Posted by: jeffmooney | February 6, 2008

Scholars Find an Abundance of New New Testament Manuscripts

The “Parchment Guys” gave us a heads up on a news story that will surface later this week concerning recent New Testament manuscript finds. Here is an excerpt from the post.

That’s the title of a press release that is going out this week. I’ll have to wait until the news of the location, as well as the number and significance of the manuscripts, is broken before I can say too much more. But as many of you know, these “discoveries” were made by a team from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org). The team came back with over 18,000 high-resolution digital photographs, filling one terabyte of data. Altogether, 47 manuscripts were photographed (though many of them were previously known to western scholars).

Go here for the entire story.

[ht:Parchment and Pen]

Responses

It will be interesting to see more info on these mss. The CSNTM does excellent work on the text, and it sounds like they went to great lengths to gather precise digital images of all these.

On the NT side of things, we have 5500+ mss of NT books, but the vast majority of those are from the 11th-15th centuries. It’ll be interesting to see if some of these newly discovered mss are before that time range. There’s no mention that any of them are papyrus or from Egypt so it’s extremely unlikely that any of them are pre-Constantinian. Nevertheless, sometimes later mss can preserve an earlier form of the text due to the exemplar that was used.

I, like others, look forward to hearing more about this.

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