#ORIGINAL OLD TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS ARCHIVE#

A leather manuscript might involve scores of animal skins, each of which had to be carefully prepared. However, for manuscripts either papyrus had to be obtained from Egypt or animals had to die. Of course people also wrote in other ways, including inscriptions and graffiti on hard surfaces, ink writing on broken pottery, and even on reusable wooden tablets covered with beeswax. At the time of the New Testament there were two main materials for manuscripts: leather and papyrus. The reason for making palimpsests is that until very recently, writing material was rather expensive.

There are many hundreds of ancient palimpsests which survive today and are still awaiting study. Similarly, in English we have sym-pathy and syn-drome, like palim-psest and palin-drome.Ī palimpsest is a reused manuscript where one layer of writing has been scraped or rubbed or washed off and another has been put on top. The final n in palin changes to m before p, but not before d. The word palimpsest comes ultimately from the Greek word for something ‘scraped again’: palin ‘again’ and psestos ‘scraped’. Important manuscripts can often lie overlooked in university and monastery collections like these, and there’s one particular sort of manuscript which is likely to provide particular fruit for the future.

#ORIGINAL OLD TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS ARCHIVE#

As claims of important discoveries from this collection in recent years have proved, it is reasonable to believe that there may be valuable texts still to be discovered within the archive boxes. Despite being discovered between 18 the collection is still being examined, transcribed and published today. It contains over 500,000 text fragments from the third century BC to the seventh century AD. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection, held at the University of Oxford, is one example. ‘The best place to look for ancient manuscripts is in a library’, says leading New Testament textual critic, Dr Peter Head, formerly of Tyndale House, now tutor at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. The most obvious leads for manuscript discovery have been explored and monasteries have access to global expertise to help identify the treasures in their collection. Though there are now ethical questions to be asked of the circumstances of many of these manuscript discoveries, there is no doubt that the combination of explorers, excavators, antiquities dealers, and publicly and privately funded collectors brought to light a mass of manuscript material which revolutionised our knowledge of the transmission of the Bible and our ability to study the ancient world.īut such discoveries are far less likely today. Alongside the famous discovery of Codex Sinaiticus at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai by Constantin von Tischendorf, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judaean Desert from 1946 onwards, there were numerous less famous but really significant discoveries of manuscripts. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were great times for the discovery of biblical manuscripts.

Original old testament manuscripts