Biblical manuscript

A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. The word Bible comes from the Greek biblion (book); manuscript comes from Latin manu (hand) and scriptum (written). The original manuscript (the original parchment the author physically wrote on) is called the "autographa." Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures (see Tefillin) to huge polyglot codices (multi-lingual books) containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
The study of biblical manuscripts is important because handwritten copies of books can contain errors. The science of textual criticism attempts to reconstruct the original text of books, especially those published prior to the invention of the printing press.
==Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) manuscripts==
The Aleppo Codex (c. 920 CE) and Leningrad Codex (c. 1008 CE) are the oldest Hebrew language manuscripts of the Tanakh. The 1947 find at Qumran of the Dead Sea scrolls pushed the manuscript history of the Tanakh back a millennium from the two earliest complete codices (see Tanakh at Qumran). Before this discovery, the earliest extant manuscripts of the Old Testament were in Greek in manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Out of the roughly 800 manuscripts found at Qumran, 220 are from the Tanakh. Every book of the Tanakh is represented except for the Book of Esther; however, most are fragmentary. Notably, there are two scrolls of the Book of Isaiah, one complete (1QIsa), and one around 75% complete (1QIsb). These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE to 70 CE.F. F. Bruce. "The Last Thirty Years". Story of the Bible. ed. Frederic G. Kenyon Retrieved June 19, 2007
Ancient Jewish scribes developed many practices to protect copies of their scriptures from error. Their methods resulted in significant variations among texts arising at an average rate of just under one consonant in every 1,500.Wilson 1929, p.40ff.
===Extant Tanakh manuscripts===
 	 	 	 	
Manuscript 	Examples 	Language 	Date of Composition	Oldest Copy
Dead Sea Scrolls 	Tanakh at Qumran 	Hebrew, Paleo Hebrew and Greek(Septuagint)	c. 150 BCE - 70 CE 	c. 150 BCE - 70 CE
 	 	 	 	
Septuagint 	Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and other earlier papyri	Greek 	300-100 BCE 	2nd century BCE(fragments)4th century CE(complete)
 	 	 	 	
Peshitta 	 	Syriac 	 	early 5th century CE
 	 	 	 	
Vulgate 	 	Latin 	 	early 5th century CE
 	 	 	 	
Masoretic 	Aleppo Codex, Leningrad Codex and other incomplete mss 	Hebrew 	ca. 100 CE 	10th century CE
 	 	 	 	
Samaritan Pentateuch	 	Samaritan alphabet 	200-100 BCE 	Oldest extant mss c.11th century CE, oldest mss available to scholars 16th century CE
 	 	 	 	
Targum 	 	Aramaic 	500-1000 CE 	5th century CE
 	 	 	 	
==New Testament manuscripts==
The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from circa 125 (the John Ryland's manuscript, P52; oldest copy of John fragments) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the 15th century. The vast majority of these manuscripts date after the 10th century. Because there are more New Testament manuscripts than any other ancient writing (e.g., we only have 10 copies of Julius Caesar's 'The Gallic Wars'), Christian apologists such as Josh Mcdowell and Norman Geisler assert that by literary standards, the New Testament is a reliable witness to the original text.The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict: Evidence I & II Fully Updated In One Volume To Answer Questions Challenging Christians In The 21st Century, Josh McDowell pp. 34-38David Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Comparative Worldview and Apologetics Curriculum (Manitou Springs: Summit 2006) p. 293Christian Apologetics, N. Geisler, p. 305 Textual scholar Bart Ehrman disagrees: "It is true, of course, that the New Testament is abundantly attested in the manuscripts produced through the ages, but most of these manuscripts are many centuries removed from the originals, and none of them perfectly accurate. They all contain mistakes - altogether many thousands of mistakes. It is not an easy task to reconstruct the original words of the New Testament...Whether or not any of these ancient authors said anything that was true is another question, one we cannot answer simply by appealing to the number of surviving manuscripts that preserve their writings..."The New Testament: An Historical Introduction To The Early Christian Writings, Bart Ehrman p. 449 Bruce Metzger wrote: "Lest, however, the wrong impression be conveyed from the statistics given above regarding the total number of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, it should be pointed out that most of the papyri are relatively fragmentary and that only about fifty manuscripts (of which the Codex Sinaiticus is the only Uncial manuscript) contain the entire New Testament."The Text Of The New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption & Restoration, 1992, Third Enlarged Edition, Bruce Metzger, p. 34
Every year, several New Testament manuscripts handwritten in the original Greek format are discovered. The latest substantial find was in 2008, when 47 new manuscripts were discovered in Albania; at least 17 of them unknown to Western scholars.http://www.christiantoday.com/article/nt.scholar.on.discovery.of.giant.trove.of.bible.manuscripts/18204.htm
When comparing one manuscript to another, with the exception of the smallest fragments, no two copies agree completely throughout. Note, however, that a single difference prevents agreement. There has been an estimate of between 400,000 variations among all these manuscripts (from the 2nd to 15th century) which is more than there are words in the New Testament. This means less significant than may appear since it is a comparison across linguistic boundaries. More important estimates focus on comparing texts within languages. Those variations are considerably fewer. The vast majority of these are accidental errors made by scribes, and are easily identified as such: an omitted word, a duplicate line, a misspelling, a rearrangement of words. Some variations involve apparently intentional changes, which often make more difficult a determination of whether they were corrections from better exemplars, harmonizations between readings, or ideologically motivated.Ehrman 2004, pp.480f Palaeography is the study of ancient writing, and textual criticism is the study of manuscripts in order to reconstruct a probable original text.
The difficulty in all of this, though, is in where the manuscripts are coming from. Often, especially in monasteries, a manuscript cache is little more than a former manuscript recycling center where imperfect and incomplete copies of manuscripts were stored while the monastery or scriptorium decided what to do with them.Ehrman 2005 There were several options. The first was to simply "wash" the manuscript and reuse it. This was very common in the ancient world and even up into the Middle Ages; such reused manuscripts are called palimpsests. The most famous palimpsest is probably the Archimedes Palimpsest. If this was not done within a short period of time after the papyri was made, then washing it was less likely since the papyri might deteriorate and thus be unusable. When washing was no longer an option, then the second and third choices were either burning (since they contained the words of Christ and the apostles, prophets, and saints, and were thought to have had a higher level of sanctity than secular literature ). Burning them was considered more reverent than simply throwing them into the nearby garbage pit, although that was not unheard of as in the case of Oxyrhynchus 840). The third option was simply to leave them in what has become known as a manuscript gravesite. When scholars come across manuscript caches]], for example that at Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai (source of the Codex Sinaiticus), or Saint Sabbas Monastery outside Bethlehem, they are not finding libraries, but storehouses of rejected texts Ehrman 2005 Sometimes, oddly, kept in boxes or back shelves in libraries due to space constraints) which are unacceptable because of their scribal errors and contain corrections inside the lines http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/ possibly evidence of scribes at the monastery were comparing it to what had to have been a master text. In addition, texts thought complete and correct but which had deteriorated due to heavy usage and/or had missing folios would also be placed in these caches. Once in a cache, insects and dampness would often continue deterioration.
Complete and correctly copied texts would usually be immediately placed in use and thus usually wear out fairly quickly which would require repeated recopying. Further, because manuscript copying was highly costly when it required a scribe's attention for extended periods, a manuscript might only be made when commissioned, in which case the size of the parchment, script used, any illustrations (thus raising the effective cost), whether it was one book or a collection of several, etc. would be determined by the one commissioning the work. The idea of stocking extra copies would probably have been considered at best wasteful and unnecessary since the form and a manuscript was more often than not customized to the aesthetic tastes of the buyer. This is part of the reason why scholars are more likely to find incomplete, and at times conflicting, segments of manuscripts rather than complete and largely consistent works.
Distribution of Greek manuscripts by century Aland, p 81
 	New Testament Manuscripts	New Testament Manuscripts	New Testament Manuscripts	Lectionaries	Lectionaries
Century 	Papyri 	Uncials 	Minuscules 	Uncials 	Minuscules
2nd 	2 	- 	- 	- 	-
c. 200 	4 	- 	- 	- 	-
2nd/3rd 	1 	1 	- 	- 	-
3rd 	28 	2 	- 	- 	-
3rd/4th 	8 	2 	- 	- 	-
4th 	14 	14 	- 	1 	-
4th/5th 	8 	8 	- 	- 	-
5th 	2 	36 	- 	1 	-
5th/6th 	4 	10 	- 	- 	-
6th 	7 	51 	- 	3 	-
6th/7th 	5 	5 	- 	1 	-
7th 	8 	28 	- 	4 	-
7th/8th 	3 	4 	- 	- 	-
8th 	2 	29 	- 	22 	-
8th/9th 	- 	4 	- 	5 	-
9th 	- 	53 	13 	113 	5
9th/10th 	- 	1 	4 	- 	1
10th 	- 	17 	124 	108 	38
10th/11th	- 	3 	8 	3 	4
11th 	- 	1 	429 	15 	227
11th/12th	- 	- 	33 	- 	13
12th 	- 	- 	555 	6 	486
12th/13th	- 	- 	26 	- 	17
13th 	- 	- 	547 	4 	394
13th/14th	- 	- 	28 	- 	17
14th 	- 	- 	511 	- 	308
14th/15th	- 	- 	8 	- 	2
15th 	- 	- 	241 	- 	171
15th/16th	- 	- 	4 	- 	2
16th 	- 	- 	136 	- 	194
===Transmission===
The task of copying manuscripts was generally done by scribes who were trained professionals in the arts of writing and bookmaking. Some manuscripts were also proofread, and scholars closely examining a text can sometimes find the original and corrections found in certain manuscripts. In the 6th century, a special room devoted to the practice of manuscript writing and illumination called the scriptorium came into use, typically inside medieval European monasteries. Sometimes a group of scribes would make copies at the same time as one individual read from the text.Seid
===Manuscript construction===
An important issue with manuscripts is preservation. The earliest New Testament manuscripts were written on papyrus, made from a reed that grew abundantly in the Egyptian Nile Delta. This tradition continued as late as the 8th century.Metzger 2005, pp.3f Papyrus eventually becomes brittle and deteriorates with age. The dry climate of Egypt allowed some papyrus manuscripts to be partially preserved, but, with the exception of P77, no New Testament papyrus manuscript is complete; many consist only of a single fragmented page.Waltz However, beginning in the 4th century, parchment (also called vellum) began to be a common medium for New Testament manuscripts.Metzger 2005, pp.3-10 It wasn't until the 12th century that paper (made from cotton or plant fibers0, which was invented in 1st century China, began to gain popularity in biblical manuscripts.Aland 1995, p. 77 
Of the 476 non-Christian manuscripts dated to the 2nd century, 97% of the manuscripts are in the form of scrolls; however, the 8 Christian manuscripts are codices. In fact, most New Testament manuscripts are codices. The adaptation of the codex form in non-Christian text did not become dominant until the 4th and 5th centuries, showing a preference for that form amongst early Christians.Seid The considerable length of some New Testament books (such as the Pauline epistles), and the New Testament itself, was not suited to the limited space available on a single scroll; in contrast a codex could be expanded to hundreds of pages.
===Script and other features===
The handwriting found in New Testament manuscripts varies. One way of classifying handwriting is by formality: book-hand vs. cursive. More formal, literary Greek works were often written in a distinctive style of even, capital letters called book-hand. Less formal writing consisted of cursive letters which could be written quickly. Another way of dividing handwriting is between uncial (or majuscule) and minuscule. The uncial letters were a consistent height between the baseline and the cap height, while the minuscule letters had ascenders and descenders that moved past the baseline and cap height. Generally speaking, the majuscules are earlier than the minuscules, with a dividing line roughly in the 11th century.Metzger 2005, pp. 17-18, 20 
The earliest manuscripts had hardly, if any, punctuation or breathing marks. The manuscripts also lacked word spacing, so words, sentences, and paragraphs would be a continuous string of letters (scriptio continua), often with line breaks in the middle of words. Bookmaking was an expensive endeavor, and one way to reduce the number of pages used was to save space. Another method employed was to abbreviate frequent words, such as the nomina sacra. Yet another method involved the palimpsest, a manuscript which recycled an older manuscript. Scholars using careful examination can sometimes determine what was originally written on the material of a document before it was erased to make way for a new text (for example Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus and the Sinaitic Palimpsest).
The original New Testament books did not have titles, section headings, or verse and chapter divisions. These were developed over the years as "helps for readers". The Ammonian Sections were an early system of division written in the margin of many manuscripts. The Eusebian Canons was a series of tables that grouped parallel stories among the gospels. After 400 were used κεφαλαια. 
Manuscripts became more ornate over the centuries, which developed into a rich illuminated manuscript tradition, including the famous Irish Gospel Books, the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow.
===Cataloging===
Desiderius Erasmus compiled the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, basing his work on several manuscripts because he did not have a single complete work and because each manuscript had small errors. In the 18th century, Johann Jakob Wettstein was one of the first biblical scholars to start cataloging biblical manuscripts. He divided the manuscripts based on the writing used (uncial, minuscule) or format (lectionaries) and based on content (Gospels, Pauline letters, Acts + General epistles, and Revelation). He assigned the uncials letters and minuscules and lectionaries numbers for each grouping of content, which resulted in manuscripts being assigned the same letter or number.Aland 1995, p. 72
For manuscripts that contained the whole New Testament, such as Codex Alexandrinus (A) and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C), the letters corresponded across content groupings. However, for a significant, early manuscript such as Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 (B), which did not contain Revelation, the letter B was also assigned to a later 10th century manuscript of Revelation, thus creating confusion. Constantin von Tischendorf found one of the earliest, nearly complete copies of the Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, over a century after Wettstein's cataloging system was introduced. Because he felt the manuscript was so important, Von Tischendorf assigned it the Hebrew letter aleph (א). Eventually enough uncials were found that all the letters in the Latin alphabet had been used, and scholars moved on to first the Greek alphabet, and eventually started reusing characters by adding a superscript. Confusion also existed in the minuscules, where up to seven different manuscripts could have the same number or a single manuscript of the complete New Testament could have 4 different numbers to describe the different content groupings.Aland 1995, pp. 72-73
====Von Soden====
Hermann, Freiherr von Soden published a complex cataloging system for manuscripts in 1902-10.Hermann von Soden, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Textgestalt hergestellt auf Grund ihrer Textgeschichte 4 vols., Berlin: Glaue, 1902-1910. He grouped the manuscripts based on content, assigning them a Greek prefix: δ for the complete New Testament, ε for the Gospels, and α for the remaining parts. This grouping, however, was flawed because some manuscripts grouped in δ did not contain Revelation, and many manuscripts grouped in α contained either the general epistles or the Pauline epistles, but not both. After the Greek prefix, Von Soden assigned a numeral that roughly corresponded to a date (for example δ1-δ49 were from before the 10th century, δ150-δ249 for the 11th century). This system proved to be problematic when manuscripts were re-dated, or when more manuscripts were discovered than the number of spaces allocated to a certain century.Aland 1995, pp. 40-41
====Gregory-Aland====
Caspar René Gregory published another cataloging system in 1908 in Die griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments, which is the system still in use today. Gregory divided the manuscripts into 4 groupings: papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries. This division is partially arbitrary. The first grouping is based on the physical material (papyrus) used in the manuscripts. The second two divisions are based on script: uncial and minuscule. The last grouping is based on content: lectionary. Most of the papyrus manuscripts and the lectionaries before the year 1000 are written in uncial script. However, there is some consistency in that the majority of the papyri are very early because parchment began to replace papyrus in the 4th century (although the latest papyri dates to the 8th century). Similarly, the majority of the uncials date to before the 11th century, and the majority of the minuscules to after.Aland 1995, pp. 73-77 
Gregory assigned the papyri a prefix of P, often written in blackletter script (\mathfrak{P}n), with a superscript numeral. The uncials were given a prefix of the number 0, and the established letters for the major manuscripts were retained for redundancy (i.e. Codex Claromontanus is assigned both 06 and D). The minuscules were given plain numbers, and the lectionaries were prefixed with l often written in script (ℓ). Kurt Aland continued Gregory's cataloging work through the 1950s and beyond. Because of this, the numbering system is often referred to as "Gregory-Aland numbers". The most recent manuscripts added to each grouping are \mathfrak{P}124, 0318, 2882, and ℓ 2281. Due to the cataloging heritage and because some manuscripts which were initially numbered separately were discovered to be from the same codex, there is some redundancy in the list (i.e. the Magdalen papyrus has both the numbers of \mathfrak{P}64 and \mathfrak{P}67).Aland 1995, pp. 73f
The majority of New Testament textual criticism deals with Greek manuscripts because scholars believe the original books of the New Testament were written in Greek. However, the text of the New Testament is also found, both translated in manuscripts of many different languages (called versions), and quoted in manuscripts of the writings of the Church Fathers. In the critical apparatus of the Novum Testamentum Graece, a series of abbreviations and prefixes designate different language versions (it for Old Latin, lowercase letters for individual Old Latin manuscripts, vg for Vulgate, lat for Latin, sys for Sinaitic Palimpsest, syc for Curetonian Gospels, syp for the Peshitta, co for Coptic, ac for Akhmimic, bo for Bohairic, sa for Sahidic, arm for Armenian, geo for Georgian, got for Gothic, aeth for Ethiopic, and slav for Old Church Slavonic.)NA27 1996, pp. 64*-76*
===Dating the New Testament manuscripts===
The New Testament books appear to have been completed within the 1st century. However, the original manuscripts of the New Testament books do not survive today. The autographs were lost or destroyed a long time ago. What survives are copies of the original. Generally speaking, these copies were made centuries after the originals from other copies rather than from the autograph. Paleography, a science of dating manuscripts by typological analysis of their scripts, is the most precise and objective means known for determining the age of a manuscript. Script groups belong typologically to their generation; and changes can be noted with great accuracy over relatively short periods of time. Dating of manuscript material by a radiocarbon dating test requires that a small part of the material be destroyed in the process; it is less accurate than dating from paleography.Britannica Online: Types of manuscript errors It must be noted that both radiocarbon and paleographical dating only give a range of possible dates, and it's still debated just how narrow this range might be. Dates established by radiocarbon dating can present a range of 10 to over 100 years. Similarly, dates established by paleography can present a range of 25 to over 125 years.Egypt on the Pentateuch's Ideological Map By F. V. Greifenhagen 
;Earliest extant manuscripts 
The earliest manuscript of a New Testament text is a business card sized fragment from the Gospel of John, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, which dates to the first half of the 2nd century. The first complete copies of single New Testament books appear around 200, and the earliest complete copy of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus dates to the 4th century.Ehrman 2004, pp. 479-480 The following table lists the earliest extant manuscript witnesses for the books of the New Testament.
Book	
Earliest Extant Manuscript	
Date	
Condition
Matthew	
P64, P67, P104	
c. 200	
Fragments
Mark	
P45	
c. 250	
Large Fragments
Luke	
P4, P75	
c. 200	
Fragment
John	
P52	
c. 125-160	
Fragment
Acts	
P38	
early 3rd cent.Philip W. Comfort and David P. Barrett. The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers Incorporated, 2001, p. 65.	
Fragment
Romans	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
1 Corinthians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
2 Corinthians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
Galatians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
Ephesians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
Philippians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
Colossians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
1 Thessalonians	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
2 Thessalonians	
P92	
3rd/4th cent.	
Fragment
1 Timothy	
א	
c. 350	
Complete
2 Timothy	
א	
c. 350	
Complete
Titus	
P32	
c. 200	
Fragment
Philemon	
P87	
3rd cent.	
Fragment
Hebrews	
P46	
c. 175-225	
Fragments
James	
P23, P20	
3rd cent.	
Fragment
1 Peter	
P72	
3rd/4th cent.	
Fragments
2 Peter	
P72	
3rd/4th cent.	
Fragments
1 John	
P9	
3rd cent.	
Fragment
2 John	
0232	
3rd/4th cent.	
Fragment
3 John	
א	
c. 350	
Complete
Jude	
P72	
3rd/4th cent.	
Fragments
Revelation	
P98, P115	
c. 275	
Fragment
===Textual criticism===
The necessity of applying textual criticism to the books of the New Testament arises from two circumstances: none of the original documents is extant, and the existing copies differ from one another. The textual critic seeks to ascertain from the divergent copies which form of the text should be regarded as most nearly conforming to the original.Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. The New Testament has been preserved in three major manuscript traditions: the 4th century AD Alexandrian text-type; the Western text-type, also very early but prone to paraphrase and other corruptions; and the Byzantine text-type, which makes above 80% of all manuscripts, the majority comparatively very late in the tradition.
Since the mid-19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no a priori bias to a single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the New Testament (currently, the United Bible Society, 4th ed. and Nestle-Aland, 27th ed.). In textual criticism, eclecticism is the practice of examining a wide number of text witnesses and selecting the variant that seems best. The result of the process is a text with readings drawn from many witnesses. In a purely eclectic approach, no single witness is theoretically favored. Instead, the critic forms opinions about individual witnesses, relying on both external and internal evidence. Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of the Alexandrian text-type, are the most favored, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition. Aland, B. 1994: 138 Modern translations of the New Testament are based on these copies.
===Listings===
*List of New Testament papyri
*List of New Testament uncials
*List of New Testament minuscules
*List of New Testament lectionaries
*List of New Testament Latin manuscripts
== Gallery ==
 Image:Deadseascrolls.jpg|Fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls on display at the Archeological Museum, Amman
 Image:P52 recto.jpg|\mathfrak{P}52 is the oldest known manuscript fragment of the New Testament.
 Image:P46.jpg|\mathfrak{P}46 is the earliest (nearly) complete manuscript of the Epistles written by Paul in the new testament.
 Image:P. Chester Beatty I, folio 13-14, recto.jpg|\mathfrak{P}45 is a manuscript of Gospels and Acts. It contains the earliest known text of Mark. Scholars find it hard to read it because of its fragmentary state.
 Image:Fragmento filemon.jpg|\mathfrak{P}87 is the earliest known manuscript of Philemon.
 Image:Papyrus 37 - verso.jpg|\mathfrak{P}37
 Image:Papyrus1.JPG|\mathfrak{P}1
 Image:Sinaiticus text.jpg|Codex Sinaiticus(c. 350) contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, as well as the Greek Old Testament, known as the Septuagint 
 Image:Codex Vaticanus B, 2Thess. 3,11-18, Hebr. 1,1-2,2.jpg|Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209
 Image:P. Chester Beatty VI fragments, recto.jpg|P. Chester Beatty VI showing portions of Deuteronomy 
 Image:Uncial 0308 POxy 4500 recto.jpg| Uncial 0308 
Image:Codex Argenteus.jpg|The first page of the Gothic language Codex Argenteus 
 Image:CodxAmiatinusFolio5rEzra.jpg|folio 5r of the Codex Amiatinus, manuscript of Vulgate 
== See also ==
*Dating the Bible
*Biblical criticism
*Textual criticism
*Higher Criticism
*Categories of New Testament manuscripts
** Alexandrian text-type
** Byzantine text-type
** Caesarean text-type
** Western text-type
*Manuscript culture
*Nag Hammadi library
==Notes==
==References==
*
*
*Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-516667-1
*Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece rv. 27 (2006) Hendrickson Publishers, ISBN 1-59856-172-3
*
*
*Wilson, Robert Dick. (1929) 'The Textual Criticism of the Old Testament', The Princeton Theological Review 27: pp. 40f.
== External links ==
* N.T. Ancient Manuscripts: Partial New Testament Papyri
* Michael D. Marlowe's Bible Research site
* TextCrit.com: Eusebian Canon in Codex A
* Biblical Manuscripts Project
* Fragment of Psalms at the Heidelberger Papyrus-Sammlung 
*