The manuscript hunt

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 3rd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: preserving ancient New Testament manuscripts.

No original writings of the Bible are known to have survived to this day, including any New Testament books.

BROWN: The New Testament has been reconstructed from early fragments and manuscripts that had been carefully hand-copied by scribes. And it has vastly more material evidence than other Greco-Roman literature. 

Now, a team of scholars is on a mission to digitize all Greek New Testament manuscripts for future generations.

WORLD’s Jenny Rough brings us the story.

AUDIO: [Turning pages]

JENNY ROUGH: Dan Wallace can spend hours staring at a single Greek letter.

DAN WALLACE: Is that an epsilon, or was that supposed to be a sigma and a guy accidentally put some ink there?

Wallace is a textual critic. He evaluates ancient biblical manuscripts and compares textual variants—or differences—to determine the most accurate wording. So he knows that the distinction between a sigma and an epsilon can change an entire word. 

Take 1 Corinthians 13:3, where the apostle Paul writes about giving up his body in love.

WALLACE: In order that I might boast, or in order that I might burn? Is he talking about giving up his body to be, as a sacrifice? It’s a single letter difference.

Wallace has been at this since his college days.

WALLACE: I had all sorts of questions, you know? And I grew up in a Christian home, and then all the sudden, I’m going, "Is this stuff real?" You know, that's typical for a lot of teenagers. And I began to investigate.

He studied Old Testament Hebrew too, but ultimately decided to focus on the New Testament because of his love of Christ.

WALLACE: The Bible is the only religious book of any major religion that subjects itself to historical verification. It says, "you wanna see if I'm true? Test it."

At the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in Plano, Texas, Wallace opens a text called the Novum Testamentum Graecum. It’s written in koine Greek, the original dialect. It dates to 1751.

WALLACE: So this is one by J.J. Wettstein, or Wettstein.

Wallace is careful not to touch the ink on the pages. With a pencil, he points to a verse that textual critics have squawked about for centuries.

WALLACE: And here you get to… [flips page] 1 Timothy 3:16.

Wettstein included a lengthy footnote about it, whether the word “who” was altered to “God.” Wettstein was also a textual critic. In that time, traveling to see older manuscripts in person was laborious.

But Wallace has spent nearly a quarter century working to make things easier. He’s traveled everywhere from Germany to Greece to Albania, to digitize all copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts and post them online.

Under the old method, scholars had to look at the document with a magnifying glass, often in a rushed few hours.

The invention of microfilm improved things, but people still had to travel to libraries to view it, and microfilm was far from perfect.

AUDIO: [Digital camera taking picture]

Today, under the direction of Wallace, his team at the nonprofit Center uses state-of-the art technology to photograph fragments of papyrus, parchment, and paper. 

Mark Gaither is the Center’s chief operating officer:

MARK GAITHER: This is a 150 megapixel camera. We want to make sure that the, we’re capturing the manuscript as it really is, and so that’s part of the lighting here as well. This is 5000 kelvin lighting which mimics sunlight.

Easy online access means teams of scholars can debate together.

GAITHER: Because no two manuscripts are the same because people make mistakes. As they’re copying one manuscript over, we’re fallible, so what happens is we’ll skip a word, or we’ll duplicate a word, or there might be misspellings.

Dan Wallace sees the little errors as the equivalent of typos.

WALLACE: As time goes on, you think of the New Testament, it’s kind of like a snowball rolling downhill. It’s going to pick up some alien elements, some twigs and leaves and things like that, maybe a couple of raccoons, [laughs] who knows. So it’s got some stuff in there it shouldn’t have. And at the same time, maybe some of the snow has fallen off.

The more serious errors—the raccoons—tend to center on passages that appear in some early manuscripts, but are missing from others. Like the story of the woman caught in adultery in the gospel of John.

WALLACE: That’s probably the most disputed passage that people absolutely love, and most text scholars say it's not original.

Wallace adds that most of the English translations today are exceptional, and they note a few of the differences in the margins or in a footnote. He also adds—

WALLACE: There is not a single doctrine that is different because of these new translations.

A scribe once noted that the hand that copied the manuscript will rot in the grave, but the words will stand until the fullness of time. Wallace says that’s the motto of his Center.

WALLACE: We are following in the train, the great train of these scribes to continue to preserve the word of God for future generations. It’s helping scholars to get back to the original wording in every place where they’re unsure.

So far, the Center has digitized about 20 percent of all the known Greek New Testament manuscripts. It has thousands more to go—plus whatever archaeologists continue to dig up.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Plano, Texas.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.