The Bible is not a single work but rather an anthology of 66 books written by approximately 40 authors over a 1,400-year period that ended nearly 2,000 years ago. As such, the original copies of these works have not lasted to today, though a large number of early copies allow us to reconstruct the text as it stood in its earliest form.

The Rylands fragment of the Gospel of John is the oldest manuscript of the Christian Greek Scriptures ever found. An Ancient Scroll “Unwrapped” In 1970 archaeologists unearthed a charred scroll in Israel.
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A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible.Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures (see Tefillin) to huge polyglot codices (multi-lingual books) containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works. The study of biblical manuscripts is.

For example, the Old Testament was written from the time of Moses (approximately 1400 BC) until the time of Ezra (approximately 400 BC). Copies of most Old Testament books have been preserved from as early as the second century BC in the finds of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Numerous Old Testament books have also been preserved in the ancient Cairo Geniza from the first century AD. Codex Cairensis includes the Prophets and is dated 895. The Aleppo Codex includes most of the Old Testament and dates from the 930s. The first full Old Testament manuscript in Hebrew, the Leningrad Codex (dated 1008), is over 1,000 years old.

The manuscript subject falls outside of the Aims and Scope of the selected journal or is not likely to be of interest to the readership of the selected journal. The English is inadequate for peer review. The manuscript is scientifically incomplete and/or lacks a significant, novel contribution to the field.

In addition, the entire Old Testament was translated into Greek in the second century BC in a work known as the Septuagint. It is clear from this translation that the complete Old Testament had been compiled prior to this time and that the text is essentially the same as it stood during this period 2,200 years ago, just 200 years after the completion of the final Old Testament book!

Manuscript Photosrejected Scriptures Book

The New Testament includes even more textual evidence to support its accuracy. Its 27 books were composed between the AD 40s-90s. A fragment of the Gospel of John exists from approximately AD 125. More than 5,000 Greek manuscripts exist of New Testament writings, enabling comparison to allow a comprehensive reconstruction of the earliest text. The first complete New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus, dates to the mid fourth century (325-360) and reveals that the New Testament writings had been in circulation as a group long before this time.
Further, early church leaders frequently quoted the New Testament's writings in their own works. Clement of Rome, for example, wrote in the late first century and cites many of the Gospels and Paul's writings. A harmony of the four Gospels existed in the second century.
In summary, while the original manuscripts of Scripture are no longer in existence, ample copies from early times exist to provide confidence that the text that exists today is what was originally composed.

All of the books of the New Testament were written within a lifetime of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Not so the so-called “other gospels,” which were pseudepigraphical Gnostic works written 100-300 years later. To date we have over 5800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, with an astounding 2.6 million pages of biblical text.¹ While some of these manuscripts are small and fragmentary, the average size of a New Testament manuscript is 450 pages.² Add to this the ancient manuscripts in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, etc. which number in the tens of thousands,³ and you realize that there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to New Testament manuscripts. No other ancient text can compare with the New Testament when it comes to the sheer volume of manuscripts, nor when we consider how close the earliest manuscripts are to the originals.

So what are the earliest New Testament manuscripts?

Papayri P90 and P104

Housed in the Sackler Library Papyrology Room at the University of Oxford, England are two of the earliest New Testament manuscripts.

P90 (P. Oxy. 3523), is a small fragment of papyrus with portions of the Gospel of John (18:36-19:7) on both sides in Greek. It has been dated paleographically to the second century A.D.⁴ This text is part of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, a group of manuscripts discovered in the ancient garbage dump near Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.
Papayrus P104 (P. Oxy. 4404) is a second-century papyrus fragment that contains Matt. 21:34-37 on the front, and traces of verses 43 and 45 on the back.⁵ This manuscript is 6.35 cm by 9.5cm in size.

Scholars date the writing of Matthew’s gospel to the late 50’s or early 60’s in the first century. This is due in part to a comment by the church father Irenaeus that “Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church.”⁶ John’s gospel is dated to the late first century, after the composition of the other gospels. Again, Irenaeus, writing near the end of the second century states, “Afterward, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.”⁷ Early church history records that John lived the final years of his life in Ephesus, dying as an old man sometime near the end of the first century. This means that these two manuscripts date to within 100-150 years of the original autographs. For comparison, Pliny the Elder wrote his encyclopedia, Natural History, in the first century and the earliest manuscript we have is from the 5th century – a gap of about 400 years.⁸

Papyrus P98

Papyrus P98 (P. IFAO inv. 237b [+a]) is a manuscript fragment that contains verses from the first chapter of the book of Revelation. It was copied circa A.D. 100-200, likely in Egypt.⁹ The manuscript was first published by Guy Wagner in 1971, who dated it to the second century. He did not recognize that it was a biblical text, however, and it wasn’t until 20 years later that Dieter Hagedorn identified it as coming from Rev. 1:13-20. The manuscript is in the collection of L’Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) in Cairo, Egypt.

In about A.D. 185, Irenaus wrote that the book of revelation was composed, “almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign.”¹⁰ Domitian reigned from A.D. 81-96, which is one of the reasons many scholars believe the book of Revelation was written by the Apostle John sometime in the 90’s. Thus, P98 was likely copied within about 100 years of the original autograph.

Papyrus P52

The earliest and most famous Greek New Testament manuscript is the Ryland Papyrus P52, currently on display at the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, UK. It was purchased in 1920 by Bernard Grenfell on the Egyptian antiquities market. However, it wasn’t really “discovered” until 1934 when it was translated by C.