How Old are Ancient Manuscripts?

 He rummaged in the library of the monastery of Santa Catalina, at the foot of Mount Sinai (Egypt), where he was visiting, the biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf in 1844 parchments found exceptional. Due to their knowledge of palaeography could identify them as pages of the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. " "I've never seen anything that could be considered as old how are you Sinaitic pages," he wrote.

Those scrolls were part of what became known as the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates back to the fourth century of the Common Era (CE). This codex is just one of thousands of ancientmanuscripts of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures which constitute a vast field of research for practitioners.

A Benedictine monk named Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741) laid the foundation for the systematic study of the Greek manuscripts. In time, other scholars have added their two cents. For example, Tischendorf took the enormous task of making a list of the oldest manuscripts of the Bible scattered in European libraries. Also conducted several trips to the Middle East, examined hundreds of documents and published its findings.

In the twentieth century, had paleographers them new tools, such as Marcel developed a list that included Richard in the catalogs that describe 55,000 900 Greek manuscripts, both biblical and secular, belonging to 820 libraries or private collections. This vast amount of information is very useful to translators and helps to date the manuscripts paleographers more accurately.

 Imagine you are cleaning the attic of an old house and found an undated letter, handwritten on a paper that over time has been responsible for yellow. "How old?" We wonder. Then we see another card. The style, handwriting, punctuation and other aspects are similar to those of the first, but to our delight, this is dated. We now have a clear indication to calculate the time when he wrote the first letter, but we can not ensure the year.

Well, most of the scribes not dated copies of biblical manuscripts. Therefore, in order to determine the approximate time they were made, experts collated the text with other works, including extra-biblical documents whose dates are known, and come to conclusions based on writing, punctuation, abbreviations, etc.. However, it has hundreds of Greek manuscripts dating, which range between 510 and 1593.

The old divide paleographers Greek alphabet into two general categories: writing libraries, formal and elegant, and italics, linked strokes used in non-literary documents. Greek scribes used different styles of letters, which are classified as capital, uncial (a variant of the above), italics and lowercase letters. One way of writing shared library, the uncial, was used from the fourth century before the Common Era (BCE) to the eighth or ninth century of the common era. Tiny writing, a form of writing shared library smaller, was used from the eighth or ninth century until the mid fifteenth century when Europe was invented movable type. Tiny writing was more compact and written more quickly, saving time and space.

Paleographers all have their preferred methods of dating when the manuscripts. In general, tend to have a look at writing for an overview and then go on to analyze in greater detail each of the letters. Since major changes in writing normally occur over a long period of time, a thorough review, while useful, provides only evidence of the time it was written.

Fortunately, there are other ways to make a more accurate dating, including recognizing and determine when they began using certain techniques of writing. For example, from 900 AD, scribes most commonly used ligatures (two or more letters bound) in the Greek texts. Besides writing began using a sublinear (Greek letters placed below the words) as well as signs that marked the aspiration of the vowels, called spirits.

The handwriting of a person usually remains unchanged throughout his life, which is why we can not determine the date of writing of the text with a margin of error of less than fifty years. To make matters worse, the scribes sometimes used as a model earlier manuscripts, which made it seem older copies. Despite many drawbacks, a number of important Bible manuscripts have been dated.

 The Codex Alexandrinus, preserved in the British Library was the first important biblical manuscript which was made available to scholars. This codex, written in uncial of vellum, a very thin parchment, contains most of the Bible. The experts from the early V century, mainly due to changes that occurred in the script uncial between the V and VI, as evidenced by the document dated Vienna Dioscorides.

Another important manuscript that scholars can consult the Codex Sinaiticus, which was acquired by Tischendorf in the monastery of Santa Catalina. Uncial This scroll contains the Hebrew Scriptures from the Greek version of the Septuagint and the Christian Greek Scriptures complete. 43 folios are kept in Leipzig (Germany), 347 in the British Library in London and three other fragments of folios in St. Petersburg (Russia). The manuscript has been dated to the second half of the fourth century being based on the marginal tables, or fees, introduced in the Gospel by Eusebius of Caesarea, a historian of the fourth century.
A third key work is the Codex Vaticanus 1209, which originally contained the whole Bible in Greek. First appeared in the catalog of the Vatican Library in 1475. Its 759 pages are written on vellum uncial and contain almost the entire Bible, just missing a large part of Genesis, part of the Psalms and parts of the Christian Greek Scriptures. The experts say dates from the first half of the fourth century. How do I reach that conclusion? The writing is similar to that of the Codex Sinaiticus, which is of the same century. However, the Vatican Codex is considered generally a little older, among other reasons because it lacks references conceived Eusebio.

 In 1920, the John Rylands Library of Manchester (England) acquired large numbers of papyri recently unearthed from an old landfill Egyptian. In reviewing the documents, among which there were letters, invoices and surveys, the researcher Colin Roberts acknowledged the words on one of the fragments, it was a few verses of chapter 18 of John ... The oldest Christian text that was known at that time!

The piece became known as the Rylands Papyrus 457, designated internationally as P52. It was written in Greek uncial and dates from the early second century, only a few decades of the date on which he wrote the Gospel of John. Note that the text almost entirely coincides with that found in late manuscripts.

 In his book The Bible and Archaeology, British textual critic Sir Frederic Kenyon wrote concerning the Christian Greek Scriptures: "Both the authenticity and general integrity of the

books of the New Testament can give finally established." Similarly, as to the accuracy of the Hebrew Scriptures, the scholar H. G. said: "One can say with certainty that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted."

These comments remind us of the apostle Peter, "All flesh is as grass, and all their glory is like a flower of the grass, the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the saying of the Lord endures forever" (1 Peter 1:24, 25).