Page 48 - Bible Doctrine Survey I (3)

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.

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Codes Sinaiticus from the early 4 Century

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Around the late 9 Century, copies of the Scriptures began to incorporate a new style called minuscule
where words were divided by spaces and lower case letters were utilized. Here is 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 not 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
5,800 manuscripts we have discovered, probably more. 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:

During the first 300 years of Christianity, the Church was under
terrific persecution. Many in the church had to worship

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