Page 69 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible revised

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Codes Sinaiticus from the early 4 Century

In 1844 Constantine von Tischendorf embarked on a journey to the Middle Ease searching for
manuscripts. While visiting the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, he noticed that the monks were
burning scraps of the Septuagint. He examined the scraps and found they were extremely old. Years
later, he presented the monastery with a gift of a copy of the Septuagint, and in return, they pulled an
old manuscript from the closet wrapped in red cloth. It turned out to be a complete uncial of the entire
New Testament that was over 1500 years old! It is called the Codex Sinaiticus and us currently on
display in the British Museum.

Around the late 9 Century, copies of the Scriptures began to incorporate a new style called minuscule
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where words were divided by spaces and lower-case letters were utilized. Below a minuscule of Luke
1:1-6 from AD 1292. We have literally thousands of copies of these texts, most dating from 1000 AD or
younger. Many are quite ornate and even utilize color.

There are no hand-copied manuscripts that are 100 percent exactly
the same. You will find hundreds of differences between
manuscripts that are directly related. Why? Because they were
hand-copied by fallible human beings.

The differences between manuscripts are called textual variants.
They may be differences in spelling between words, differences in
word order, new or omitted words or phrases of words. There are
over 200,000 variants in the New Testament alone among the over
5,300 manuscripts we have discovered. Although much care was
taken to prevent the introduction of variants, they are numerous.
Let’s see how they crept into the copies of the scripture:

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