In June 2023, my colleague and I headed over to Egypt. While there we visited key sites where biblical and apocryphal manuscripts were discovered, along with getting to see a few particularly noteworthy manuscripts up close and personal…

If you look at your modern translation of the Bible you’ll notice that at the end of John 7 the text is often sectioned out or bracketed off with the citation note that reads something to the effect of: “The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53-8:11.” Part of the trickiness of the conversation regarding this text, which records the story of the woman caught in adultery, is that it is not found in any of the earliest Greek texts in the manuscript tradition.

Our earliest copies of both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament did not come with chapter and verse divisions. So where did they come from?

The final form of the Gospel of Thomas, in Coptic as it is found in the Nag Hammadi Library, is one of, if not the, earliest extant non-canonical Gospel accounts. Earlier fragmentary versions of the Gospel of Thomas exist in P.Oxy. 1, P.Oxy. 654, and P.Oxy. 655. These other three are Greek, and their text make up roughly 20% of the of the Nag Hammadi version and all show development over time within the text.

This is Manuscript 2649, it contains parts of Leviticus and dates to the 2nd century. It is the oldest Greek fragment of this part of the Bible. It would have originally contained 27 chapters of Leviticus and had about 74 papyrus pages. Containing sections from Lev. 10:15 - 11:3; 11:12 - 47; 12:8 - 13:6; 23:20 - 30; 25:30 - 40.

The Elephantine Passover Papyrus is the earliest non-biblical reference to Passover. Discovered in 1907-1908, it belonged to a communal Jewish archive, owned by a Yedaniah ben Gemariah.It is written in Aramaic and dated to 419 BC…

Byzantine art within manuscripts generally focused on full-page portraits of the Gospel writers and decorative headpieces. As Annemarie Weyl Carr, Professor Emerita of Art History at Southern Methodist University noted, “Byzantine New Testament illumination stands out for its inventive deployment of the author portrait” (Carr, “New Testament Imagery,” in A Companion to Byzantine Illustrated Manuscripts, ed. Tsamakda, pp. 263–64).

This is GA 2561, a copy of the Gospel of John from the 11th century. GA 2561 is written in minuscule Greek and contains numerous scenes painted on the parchment depicting the life of Jesus. These sorts of images in ancient copies of scripture show the unified testimony of what Christians have confessed over the last two millennia…

This is P.Heid IV. 292, a 2nd or 3rd century papyrus that preserves nine fragmentary lines from an early Christian Easter hymn celebrating the resurrection of Christ with an antiphonal refrain…

Palimpsests contain an important contribution to our understanding of the history of the biblical text. It has been estimated that as much as 20% of ancient New Testament manuscripts are palimpsests.* 

Yet every time we discover these secret and hidden texts they never radically alter our understanding of the biblical text, but instead, work to time and time again confirm what we thought the words of scripture said all along.

This is P.Fay. 91, dated to the year 99 AD. This papyrus document was an employment contract for a woman named Thenetkoueis, where the Greek term ἀρραβὼν is used to refer to a down-payment of 16 drachma (approx. $872 USD) with the contractual promise of further payment.

Codex Sassoon has been in the news a lot lately due to its recent addition to the auction floor at Sotheby’s auction house.

Expected to fetch somewhere between $30-50 million, it’s being described as “the oldest and most complete Hebrew Bible.” But is the hype warranted? Let’s clear up a few details together.

Just before my 12 birthday, back in 2003, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down. 

Told by doctors that my chances of walking were extremely rare due to the speed at which the inflammation on my spinal cord happened.

Nimrod, was an ancient Mesopotamian King mentioned a couple times in the Bible. Apart from these two passages in scripture the name “Nimrod” in Hebrew(נִמְרוֹד), or any other Ancient Near Eastern language for that matter, appears in no other place in or outside of the Bible. His identity, details of his life or influence on Ancient Near Eastern culture are a complete mystery.

This is the Ein-Gedi scroll, a 2nd or 3rd century manuscript that holds the charred remains of a section of Leviticus. Although it was discovered in 1970, the technology in order to ascertain the contents was not available until 2016.

This is 4Q521, a series of fragments originally from a scroll of the Dead Sea Scroll collection. It dates to the 2nd or 1st century BC, and gives a description of the Jewish Messiah from the perspective of the Jewish Essene Qumran community.

The textual differences in the manuscript tradition of the Bible are numerous. There could be as many as 600 000 differences between all of the hand-written copies of the New Testament. However, when it comes to these differences it isn’t so much the number that counts as it is the nature of the variances.

Housed in the British Library, Codex Alexandrinus (aka GA 02) includes a 1500 year-old near complete Bible. It’s missing portions are due to damage and lost pages. Nonetheless, it is one of our oldest Genesis to Revelation copies of the Christian scriptures in one volume.

Growing up I was taught that the date of Christmas, December 25th, was a borrowed pagan festival. I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where, but I remember being told (more than a few times) that there were a myriad of ancient pagan festivals like Sol Invictus, Saturnalia, Brumalia, and European feasts like Yule, that also took place on the 25th of December.