Page 75 - Bibliology - Textbook w videos short

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 is currently on display
in the British Museum.

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. To the right 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 5,600 manuscripts we have discovered. Although

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