What are the origins of the Bible? – 04/27/2023 – Science

More than 2 billion Christians worldwide base their faith on the New Testament, one of the most influential written works in history. Thus, each new discovery about the text has the potential to be a great sensation.

Grigory Kessel, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science, must have felt exactly that when he discovered a 1,750-year-old translation of the New Testament – ​​one of the oldest known. The medieval history expert found the text using ultraviolet photography on scanned images of manuscripts preserved in the Vatican Library.

The small fragment of a Syriac translation from Greek, written in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century, had been erased and covered over by other manuscripts. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic that emerged during the 1st century AD. Along with Greek, it was the most important language in the religious literature of the first centuries of the Christian era.

This is one more piece in the complicated puzzle of the biblical story. Translations like this help to understand how the book has evolved over the centuries, on its way to becoming the most widely read book in human history.

The origin of the newly discovered fragment

Syriac translations of the Bible are the oldest in existence. “The oldest with the complete text dates from the 5th century”, says Kessel. There are hundreds of manuscripts of this complete version, which the researcher used to compare with the fragment found in the Vatican Library.

“The differences are clear: there are phrases and words that indicate that the translation was older”, reports Kessel. According to him, the newly discovered fragment was probably composed in a region that was part of Persia, and today is in northern Iraq.

The official religion of the Persian empire was Zoroastrianism, an Indo-Iranian monotheistic belief, and Christianity was a minority religion, whose adherents were partly tolerated, partly persecuted. Syriac Christianity was the main stream of religion in the Middle East.

How are ancient manuscripts dated

There are several methods for dating ancient manuscripts, an important process for understanding who copied them, when and where. The materials they are made of, for example, can tell a lot about the date of the text.

Produced from a homonymous Egyptian plant, papyrus was mainly used before the 3rd century. It was later replaced by parchment and vellum, made from animal skin, which were of better quality and more durable. Hence there are many more biblical documents from the 4th century onwards.

Another useful clue is the type of handwriting, which often varies, even from one generation to the next. Paleographers, specialists in historical calligraphy, have a very subtle understanding of what writing was like in specific periods, which allows an approximate date to be established.

By observing these indicators, scientists are able to date and locate the oldest known Bible manuscripts. These are texts from the Old Testament, produced centuries before the translation found by Kessel.

The Origins of the Old Testament

The texts that make up the Old Testament (as they are called in the Christian canon), are the basis for the three largest monotheistic religions in the world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“Written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the oldest Old Testament texts date from the 1st century BC,” says Christoph Markschies, an expert on ancient Christianity at the Humboldt University of Berlin and vice president of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin and Brandenburg. They were found at Qumran, an archaeological site in the Dead Sea region near Jerusalem.

“These documents were written on papyrus by scribes specializing in manuscripts, with extreme care, as they were convinced that the texts were sacred,” explains Markschies. The documents were copied by Jewish scribes in the scriptorium, the exclusive space for the production of manuscripts. At Qumran, only those considered “pure” could work on manuscripts, and impeccable hygiene was maintained, with constant hand washing.

Only after the apostle Paul, who would have lived between 5 and 65 AD, the Old Testament came to be seen as a part of the Bible. A second part, including the teachings of Jesus, began to be compiled in the late 1st century and eventually became known as the New Testament.

The Origins of the New Testament

According to Markschies, the New Testament gospels were composed around AD 70: “Found in present-day Egypt, the oldest transcriptions we know of were made on papyrus in the first half of the 2nd century.”

Compared to other ancient texts, this is a very early transmission. The oldest manuscripts of Plato’s teachings, for example, were written centuries after his death in 348/347 BC.

“These biblical manuscripts were originally in Greek, the main language of the eastern part of the Roman Empire,” details Markschies. Like the aforementioned Old Testament texts, these were probably copied in scriptoria, and reproduced throughout the empire.

The oldest complete version of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus or Sinai Bible, is dated to the year 400, according to Markschies. It is one of three surviving codices, which originally contained the entire Bible in Greek. The other two —Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus— are from the same period.

These codices are a significant part of the Bible’s history. Kessel and Markschies are just two of the many academics in the world who dedicate part of their professional lives to unlocking the secrets of this very influential book.