Copying the Gospels?

[David_Castlen]

Hello,

I was reading Gods Fool: the story of St. Francis of Assissi and I was struck that the only book St. Francis would let one of his brothers own was a copy of the Gospels. I was thinking about how I would love to have a copy of just the Gospels, and about how I remember things better that I write down, and I thought about copying the Gospels by hand in a journal for future use.

I have already copied the first chatper of the Gospel of Matthew, and it was a wonderful experience. It forced me to read very slowly, and was a sort of meditation on the birth of Christ.

I have looked all over the internet and found some Protestant blogs about copying the entire Bible, as well as read about some of the history of the monks, but it has been very difficult to figure out what the Catholic view about copying the bible by hand is.

What do you think? Is it okay to do this?

By the way, I decided to use the New American Bible translation.

I tried it once; ran out of ink in the cartridge by the 8th Chapter of Leviticus

 

[bmonk]

I hope you realize that the Bible was copied over and over again by hand for over a thousand years before moveable type was invented and printing became inexpensive. Also, even the earliest copies in existence today are not the original documents. As you have discovered through your own experience, minor typos can easily happen. It makes me wonder how many such errors have crept into the “accepted” texts and not been corrected.

Actually, we do know of some parts that are either errors or very difficult to understand. But, on the other hand, because of the sheer number of copies we have.

Because of time and wear many of the historical documents from the ancient world have few manuscripts to which we can refer. This is specially true when we consider the secular historians and philosophers. For instance, we only have eight copies of Herodotus’s historical works, whose originals were written in 480-425 BC. Likewise, only 5 copies of Aristotle’s writings have found their way to the 20th century, while only 10 copies of the writings of Caesar, along with another 20 copies of the historian Tacitus, and 7 copies from the historian Pliny, who all originally wrote in the first century, are available today (McDowell 1972:42). These are indeed very few.

When we consider the New Testament, however, we find a completely different scenario. We have today in our possession 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, another 10,000 Latin Vulgates, and 9,300 other early versions (MSS), giving us more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today! (taken from McDowell’s Evidence That demands a Verdict, vol.1, 1972 pgs.40-48; and Time, January 23, 1995, pg.57). Though we do not have any originals, with such a wealth of documentation at our disposal with which to compare, we can delineate quite closely what those originals contained.

What’s more, a substantial number were written well before the compilation of the Qur’an. In fact, according to research done by Kurt and Barbara Aland, a total of 230 manuscript portions are currently in existence which pre-date 600 AD! These can be broken down into 192 Greek New Testament manuscripts, 5 Greek lectionaries containing scripture, and 33 translations of the Greek New Testament (Aland 1987:82-83). (Taken from the website debate.org.uk/topics/history/bib-qur/bibmanu.htm

More, as these hundreds or thousands of manuscripts are from quite widely separated areas, and because they tended to be carefully checked and corrected (consider the methods used for copying a Torah today), most errors tend to be rather minor, and often can be corrected without too much difficulty.