As we all know, the vatican has the original text for the bible, but my question is, how old are these text?
Ive googled and binged and cant find the age of the original texts.
If you know and have a link of the info, that would be most helpful
God bless
dolphy
Let me chime in here.
No, the Vatican does not have THE original text of the Bible, if by “original text” you mean the remaining scraps of papyrus containing the actual handwriting of St. John or the bits of clay tablets where Moses or some other ancient Israelite inscribed the Torah. If they existed, you should have seen it on the presses under the headline “
Vatican suppresses original autographs of the Bible” or something.
No, the Vatican does not have the original texts of the Bible, Old or New, in the sense of the actual autographs. No one has that. What it does have is
a nearly-complete codex of the Bible in Greek from the 4th century, as well as
a few other manuscripts of later date (other examples
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here), as well as
one 2nd-3rd century papyrus, but that’s about it. No secret climate controlled chambers where St. Mark’s Papyrus or that sort of thing is kept. Most older fragments of NT manuscripts (as well as other manuscripts) can be found in other places in the world; there are actually quite a number of them
kept in the US alone.
Generally, the dates of manuscripts of the New Testament range from somewhere around the 2nd century - the generally-accepted earliest extant fragment dates from circa AD 125 (
P52 kept in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, containing John 18:31-33 and 18:37-38)* - to the introduction of printing in Germany in the 15th century. The vast majority of these manuscripts date after the 10th century. All in all, there are over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. The two earliest and (nearly) complete Greek NT manuscripts are Codex Vaticanus and
Codex Sinaiticus, respectively (both circa 4th century).
- The late Carsten Peter Thiede once claimed the disputed Magdalen papyri from Egypt (kept in Magdalen College, Oxford), usually dated as being from the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD, as dating from the latter half of the 1st century, but his re-dating has generally been viewed with skepticism by established Biblical scholars. For the record, he also claimed along with Fr. José O’Callaghan Martínez, SJ that a tiny Greek fragment found in Qumran - 7Q5 - was actually a fragment of Mark, but this identification is it also now virtually universally rejected.
As for the Old Testament, the oldest surviving fragments as of now are, as you may know, found in Qumran as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls (dating from a period around the 2nd century BC up to AD 70), as well as in other places in the Judean Desert such as Masada, Wadi al-Murabba’at, and Naḥal Ḥever. Every book of the OT is represented in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, except for Esther and Nehemiah. The most numerous found was that of the Psalms (a total of 39/40 manuscripts from Qumran, Masada and Naḥal Ḥever) followed by Deuteronomy (a total of 33), Genesis (23/24), Isaiah (22), and Exodus (18). in that order. The
Aleppo Codex (circa AD 920) and
Leningrad Codex (AD 1008-9) are the oldest Hebrew language manuscripts of the OT; Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are the oldest Greek ones.
That being said, the earliest attestation of a Biblical passage known are found near Jerusalem
in two amulets dating from around the 7th-6th centuries BC at the earliest, each of which contained a rolled-up silver sheet upon which was inscribed Numbers 6:24-26 (aka the
Priestly Blessing).
For the record, the Aleppo Codex, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Ketef Hinnom amulets are presently found in
Israel Museum in Jerusalem; the DSS and the Aleppo Codex are currently housed in a uniquely designed building on the museum grounds known as the
Shrine of the Book. The Leningrad Codex, meanwhile, is in the
National Library of Russia in Moscow.
