Original Sacred Scripture

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Am I correct in thinking there is a original fragment of Mark’s Gospel in the British Museum?
Also, are there any other original surviving fragments of the gospels or original whole books of the New Testament?
Are there any surviving letters of Paul, for example?
 
Hi Thistle,

There are no extent “original” manuscripts of the bible anywhere. The oldest manuscript of the New Testament seems to be a papyrus labelled p64. conserved at Oxford university an dated 2nd Century.It contains part of Matthew and Luke if you group it with p4 and p67, which are thought to be part of the same original manuscript.

See islamic-awareness.org/Bible/Text/Mss/P64.html

(This is an islamic site, but seems entirely scientific. )

Verbum
 
Does anyone know what happened to the original transcripts. I find it hard to believe that they were disposed of.
 
No, there are no autograph manuscripts of the original books of the Bible, not even fragments. But there are thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible.

There are over 5000 ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. There are 10000 ancient Latin manuscripts. And there are about 800 ancient Aramaic New Testament manuscripts. Also the are many many ancient versions such as Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, etc etc.

The oldest NT fragment is a Chester Beatty papyrus fragment that dates back to about 125AD, and it is of the Gsopel of John.

The Old Testament has many ancient witnesses too, and the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the oldest mansucripts, dating back to about 250BC.

Here is a link to some actual photocopies of the ancient manuscripts. I think you will find this very interesting! alpha.reltech.org:8080/
 
As far as I know nobody knows what has happened to the originals. There are a ton of speculations, but that is all there are is is speculations. It is hard to tell what happened to them. Hopefully one day some of them will be uncovered by an archeologist!
 
So no originals (unless they are in jars hidden away). What about copies? What are the earliest complete copies of all the NT books and who did the copies?
 
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shannin:
Does anyone know what happened to the original transcripts. I find it hard to believe that they were disposed of.
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Even under the best conditions, the original manuscripts, written on highly perishable papyrus, would have deteriorated after a very few years. The only reason we have such ancient manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls (roughly contemporary with the Gospels, give or take a coupla hundred years) is because they were preserved in ideal conditions --unhandled and in dry desert caves-- whereas the original Gospels were probably passed from community to community for several years.
 
The uncial manuscripts were put into a codex somewhere around 300AD. We have some of the earliest such as Manuscript B “Vaticanus.” Also the Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Ephriami Rescriptus, etc. But prior to those uncials were the papyrus, which were not in a codex form.
 
Having recently handled some fairly new papyrus, I am astounded that anything remains of it after 200 years let alone 2000. It is not exactly permanent storage. IMHO, the originals were passed around among believers and deteriorated quickly … very quickly … like a year of handling and it should be literal dust. The stuff just doesn’t last.
 
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