The Transmission of the Greek New Testament

Papyri, Uncials, and Miniscules

The first thing that needs to be realized is that during the period when the New Testament was written, ordinary writing was done on pressed sheets of papyrus fibers. This plant was commonly used in Egypt and around the Mediterranean Sea for writing purposes...and it was inexpensive. Most literature from the period was collected into scrolls which could be rolled up into a bundle and would be unrolled when the time came to read them. OT manuscripts, written on leather parchment, were bundled this way. However, for reasons still unknown to us, the New Testament writings are not found in the scroll format, but in codex or book form. That is, sheets of papyrus would be arranged into a book, which was sewed together similar to the way modern books are made. It may be that blank codices were easy to come by.

By the fourth century, parchments made from animal hide came into widespread use. Parchement was far more durable than papyrus but had some obvious drawbacks: to transcribe the entire NT onto parchment would require the killing of a good sized flock of sheep or goats! Therefore, parchment manuscripts could only be commissioned by those who were very wealthy. In later centuries (IX on), paper came into use, eliminating the need to slaughter animals for parchment.

All of the Greek New Testament originals were written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS with no spaces and probably no punctuation, and all of the earlier manuscripts are in this style, whether on parchment or papyrus. This is because the Greek alphabet did not have punctuation until at least the II century, and there were no minscule (lower case) letters until much later. The surviving manuscripts on papyrus are classed by themselves: papyri. The parchment manuscripts written in all capitals are called uncials, and those written later (IX century on) using upper and lower case letters are called miniscules. Various commonly written words were often abbreviated. This are mistakenly called nomina sacra, "sacred names," but it is not only special names and titled which were abbreviated this way.

Examples (for Older and Newer Browsers)

The Development of Text Types

As far as we can tell, most or all of the earliest copies were done in what is called a "free" style. People copied liberally, perhaps correcting what they saw as mistakes, and even adding comments in the margin. Some copies are called "normal" because they are not exactly free, but then again they do not appear to fall into the third category of "strict" copies. Strict copies, like their name suggests, have little or no paraphrasing, comments, etc..; the copyist was trying to preserve the exemplar exactly. Strict copying would become more common as time passed.

Copying freely and then more strictly tended to produce local variations in the text. As more copies were made, as time passed, the text of the New Testament came to settle down into roughly two or three Text Types. Each text type preserves certain variants in the text, and as even more time passed, manuscripts which are partly of one text type and partly of another would appear. The formation of Text Types is generally assigned to the fourth century. After this time, it became more common to make multiple copies from a single exemplar in scriptoria. Aland writes: "Until the beginning of the fourth century the text of the New Testament developed freely. It was a 'living text' in the Greek literary tradition, unlike the text of the Hebrew Old Testament, which was subject to strict controls..." [i.e., on account of Rabbi Aqiba's masoreh process]. He remarks that to an extent, within their text types, the text remained "living" throughout the centuries.

The Alexandrian Text Type seems to have largely developed around Egypt. It is the general scholarly consensus that the Alexandrian type often preserves the original reading. The typical Alexandrian manuscript is older than the typical manuscript of the other major type. Codex Sinaticus, Codex Vaticanus (B), and quite a few other uncials and miniscules follow this type.

The Byzantine Text Type seems to have developed in the area of Syria. Some call this the Koine type or (when they all agree) the Majority Text. The vast majority of late miniscule manuscripts belong to the Byzantine type, including those which were used in making early translations from Greek into English. The earliest extant manuscript of the Byzantine type is Codex Q, of the fifth century.

The D Type may have developed in Egypt also, although it was once called "Western." The champion of the D Type manscripts is Codex Bezae Catabrigiensis (D 05). Some people once believed that wherever the D Type reading was shorter, it represented the original reading. This is now known not to be true. However, the D Type often preserves unique readings, some of which may be the original. Some alterations in the D Type are regarded as intentional.

Note: Of the manuscripts known as of 1989, the earliest manuscript is of the style that would become the D Type dates to the III century. The Byzantine influence probably began in the IV century. As Latin became the major world language, the demand for Greek manuscripts declined. By the time the lower case alphabet came into widespread use, the majority of manuscripts being copies in Greek were from areas where the Byzantine text type was dominant. There is still some debate as to whether the Byzantine type preserves the original readings.

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