The Witnesses Themselves: The Manuscript Gallery

In the last unit we met the witnesses only as a crowd — a number, five thousand strong. That number answered the skeptic, but numbers can feel abstract. So let us now walk the gallery and meet the witnesses one by one: the actual manuscripts, some no larger than a bank card, some great volumes of fine parchment, and one collection of scrolls hidden in a desert cave for nearly two thousand years. Remember what kind of evidence they give. As Unit 1 taught, they do not offer proof in the strict sense, and they cannot hand us inspiration; what they offer is corroboration — the honest confirming of a claim — and they offer it powerfully. Each of these witnesses does two things. It confirms that the text we hold was carried down faithfully and from an early date. And it answers, quietly and concretely, some specific charge that skeptics have made against the Bible. We will walk first among the New Testament witnesses — the early papyri, then the two great codices of the fourth century — and then cross to the Old Testament and its single most dramatic confirmation, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Let the witnesses speak for themselves.

Our first witness is also our smallest: a fragment of papyrus no larger than the palm of your hand, known as P52 or the Rylands fragment, now kept in Manchester. On it are a few verses of the Gospel of John, from the trial before Pilate. It is dated by the shape of its letters to about the first half of the second century — and it was found in Egypt, far from where John wrote. That small fact carries great weight. A school of skeptics had long taught that the Gospel of John was written late, well into the second century, too late to rest on the apostle's own testimony. But if a copy of John was already being read in Egypt by around AD 125, the original cannot have been written in the 160s; it must go back into the first century, within living memory of the events. The dating of the fragment is approximate, and scholars still debate the exact decade. But the point stands: the smallest manuscript in the gallery answers one of the largest claims ever made against the Gospels.

Our next witness is a book of Paul. P46, part of the Chester Beatty collection, dates from about the year 200, and it is the earliest substantial copy we have of the letters of Paul gathered together. In its surviving leaves it carries most of the Pauline corpus — Romans, the Corinthian letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians — and Hebrews among them. Think about what that means. Within roughly a hundred and fifty years of Paul's own hand, his letters were not scattered and half-forgotten; they had been gathered into a collection, copied as a set, and were circulating among the churches as a treasured body of Scripture. The words the apostle wrote to Rome and Corinth were valued and guarded and passed on early, not composed or corrupted in some later age. P46 lets us hold, in effect, the church's own working copy of Paul from a time close to the source.

Two more papyri, from the Bodmer collection, carry perhaps the most important lesson in the gallery. P66, from about the year 200, preserves nearly the whole Gospel of John. P75, a little earlier, preserves large portions of Luke and John. And here is the striking thing about P75: when scholars compared its text with that of Codex Vaticanus, one of the great manuscripts of the fourth century, they found the two remarkably close. Before this discovery, some had theorized that the careful text of Vaticanus was a polished creation of the fourth century, a scholarly edition made long after the fact. P75 dissolved that theory. The very same text was already there in the second century, reaching down to the fourth almost unchanged. This is the argument of Unit 4 made concrete and visible: across a hundred and fifty years of copying, the text did not drift. What a fourth-century scribe wrote, a second-century scribe had written before him. The Word was being preserved, and here we can watch it happen.

Now to the two crowns of the gallery, the great codices of the fourth century, written not on fragile papyrus but on fine treated parchment, each once containing a whole Bible in Greek. Codex Vaticanus has been housed for centuries in the library of the Vatican, from which it takes its name; it is among the most carefully written manuscripts we possess. Codex Sinaiticus has a story worthy of a novel: it was found in the eighteen-hundreds by the scholar Constantin von Tischendorf at the ancient monastery of Saint Catherine, at the foot of Mount Sinai, its leaves nearly lost before he recognized their worth. Together these two are complete, early, and magnificent witnesses to the whole New Testament and to the Greek Old Testament. One honest note belongs here. These early manuscripts sometimes differ, in small ways, from the later Received Text that stands behind the King James Version and the Reina-Valera. How to weigh that difference is a real and worthy question — and it is precisely the question of our next unit. Here we simply let these great witnesses stand and be seen for what they are.

We cross now to the Old Testament, and to the most dramatic confirmation in the whole gallery. In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd, searching for a lost goat among the cliffs near the Dead Sea at a place called Qumran, stumbled into a cave of clay jars — and inside them, scrolls that had lain hidden since the first century. More caves and more scrolls followed. Among them were portions of every book of the Old Testament but one, the book of Esther. And these copies were roughly a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts anyone had possessed before. The showpiece is the Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete copy of Isaiah from about 125 years before Christ. Now came the test that no one could have arranged: set that Isaiah beside the Masoretic Isaiah, copied a thousand years later, and compare them line by line. The result astonished the world. They are substantially identical. A thousand years of hand-copying had passed, and the text had held. The scribes of Unit 4 had done their work.

Let us now be honest about what the gallery has and has not shown, holding the discipline of Unit 1. What these manuscripts do not do: they do not hand us the autographs, the lost originals themselves, and they do not prove that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Inspiration is confessed on other grounds; it is not dug out of the sand. To claim these manuscripts prove more than they do would be to strain a gnat and to promise what we cannot deliver. But see what they do, and it is a very great deal. They corroborate, with the weight of real evidence, that the text we hold is early and was faithfully preserved. They answer specific and famous charges — that John was written too late, that the fourth-century text was a late invention, that the Old Testament drifted across the centuries — and they answer each one. And they turn the number of Unit 4 into faces we can name. We refuse the skeptic's camel, that the manuscripts undermine the Word; we refuse the overclaim, that they prove all things; and we stand exactly where they stand.

So the second witness has finished its testimony, given now both in the mass and one by one, and the testimony is consistent: the words you read were carried faithfully down the long centuries and are, in substance and in overwhelming detail, the words that were written. Yet along the way we have glimpsed one honest, unfinished question. The great early manuscripts we have just met sometimes differ, in a handful of places, from the later Received Text that underlies the King James and the Reina-Valera. That difference is real, and thoughtful, faithful Christians have weighed it in different ways. In the next unit we take it up directly — the Received Text and the Critical Text, what each is and how they differ — and we will find that even this in-house debate rests on solid ground. The question there is never whether we possess the Word of God. It is only, in a few places, which faithful reading to set upon the page.