Some of you have no doubt seen my earlier blog on this. For you, this is old news. Stop reading now. Nothing new to report. For the rest of you, this should be interesting---I hope! The title of this blog is the title of a press release that will becoming out soon. How soon, I can’t tell. I thought it was going to be last week, then I thought it was going to be this week. I’m as eager as everyone else for the news to break, because then I can fill in the rest of the story. Until then, I’ll have to keep quiet on the location and specific significance of the manuscripts, as well as the number of newly discovered manuscripts.

As many of you know, these “discoveries” were made by a team from the Center for the Study of NewTestament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org). The team came back with over 18,000 high-resolution digital photographs, filling one terabyte of data. Altogether, 47 manuscripts were photographed (though many of them were previously known to western scholars). The equipment broke down, the air conditioning was shut down by the government every day, and the heat of the summer beat down on this team mercilessly. It took five weeks and two different teams (four took the first shift and three the second) to shoot all the manuscripts.

What I can tell beyond the above is that a few of the manuscripts seem to be fairly important, although only one or two can properly be called “early.” But the date of a manuscript is not the only thing that speaks of its importance. A manuscript that comes half a millennium later than a particular early manuscript can be more important because of its pedigree. Perhaps the most important aspect of this discovery, however, is simply the number of manuscripts found, one of the largest caches of NT manuscripts in years.

A class of graduate students at Dallas Seminary last semester worked on collating sample chapters in these manuscripts. Collation is, in principle, a transcription of the wording (even down to the letters) of a document. But a collation is different from a straight transcription in that a base text is collated against; all the differences from that base text are noted. The variants that are thus produced are the readings that do not agree with the base text. Otherwise, agreement with the base text is assumed. This method creates an apparatus that follows what is commonly called the subtractio princeps - that is, it creates only those readings that are not found in the base text. Since the base text is the Byzantine text (which basically stands behind the King James Bible), any differences from that base raise the eyebrows and suggest that such a reading may be early and important.

After spending what must have seemed to them like an eternity collating these manuscripts, the students finally were able to assess what the teams had photographed, or discover what they had discovered. To be sure, the library in which these manuscripts are housed had a record of their contents; they knew what they were, at least in broad strokes. We are extremely grateful for the library in opening its doors to us, too! But what CSNTM provided were the specific details, as well as decent digital images. And what the press release will say is that at least four of these manuscripts are significant for telling us about the wording of the original text. What it won’t say is that we didn’t get a chance to look at all the manuscripts in detail yet. There may be, therefore, some others that are significant as well. Regardless, just to increase the number of NT manuscripts known today and simultaneously to get great digital photographs ofthem is significant in itself.