I’m sure we have all seen pictures of the papyri New Testament fragments. However, I have a question. How do they read these fragments and put them into the bible if there is only small bits of text left on the fragments? Please forgive me if this is a stupid question.
Not stupid at all.
First off, the Bible you have in your hands today are translated from what is called
critical texts. What happens is that a committee of scholars compare the different surviving manuscripts of the OT or the NT in order to determine which reading is most likely to be closest to the original, using a number of factors to help determine probable readings (for example, the date of the manuscripts, the likelihood of accidental or intentional corruptions, etc.)
For the New Testament, two critical texts are the
Novum Testamentum Graece, aka Nestle-Aland (NA; now in its 28th edition) and the United Bible Societies’ (UBS)
Greek New Testament. There’s no big difference between the two editions; the UBS text is geared for translators and so gives only the more meaningful or important variants, while the Nestle-Aland is more for scholars and students who wish to study the Greek itself, and thus gives a more comprehensive list of alternative readings.
There are a
lot of manuscripts of biblical books, many of which contain a complete or mostly-complete text (the bits of pieces of papyri are just a fraction of them). They don’t so reconstruct the biblical text just from the papyrus fragments as they compare them to manuscripts which preserve a more complete reading.
One way to do it AFAIK (I’m simplifying the process here) is that scholars would first choose a “base text” which they would use as a foundation, compare it to different manuscripts, weigh the evidence, and then adopt the chosen reading - which might not be necessarily the one that’s in the base text.
