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WITHIN THE general field of archaeology the study of discoveries of a specifically textual nature is known as epigraphy. The documents unearthed by archaeologists extend to numerous different kinds. The vast majority of these from the Biblical period consist of either stone inscriptions or clay tablets. The reason for this is simply that stone and clay are both far more durable than the other common ancient writing materials of papyrus and parchment.

These latter have only survived where climate and conditions have been favourable for their preservation. Thus the dry sands of Egypt have yielded a large number of papyri, whereas from other regions possessing a damper soil very few documents of papyrus and parchment have been found.

Writing materials

When the inspired writers of Scripture first set down the Word of God in written form it was without doubt almost totally upon papyrus and parchment.(Footnote 1) This is the evidence of the Bible itself. The Hebrew word sepher, commonly found in the Old Testament, simply denotes a book without any indication as to its form. Yet on occasions it is used in conjunction with the word megillah, meaning unambiguously a scroll or roll. Implied in this word is a document of papyrus or parchment, seeing that other writing materials would not have permitted the text to be rolled.

Jeremiah 36:2 is a well-known passage, and here the prophet Jeremiah is commanded to take a “scroll of a book”(Footnote 2) and write certain prophecies thereon. Later, the wicked King Jehoiakim cut the scroll in pieces with a knife and burnt it on a fire (v. 23). This incident is to be dated around 600 B.C., towards the end of the Old Testament period. Yet four hundred years before this there is, in one of the psalms of David (40:7), reference to a “scroll of the book”, apparently meaning the even earlier book of the Law of Moses. Thus it is generally held by scholars that the original Old Testament documents were written on rolls, probably made of parchment. In the case of the New Testament, papyrus was almost certainly used for the Epistles (cf. 2 Jno. v. 12), while the longer books such as the Gospels and Acts may have been on either papyrus or parchment.

This consideration of the materials upon which the Scriptures were originally penned is important when we come to the subject of manuscript discoveries. From the above it should be evident that the archaeologist cannot hope to find any first editions of the Biblical books. These all rotted away many years ago. So what we are concerned with here is the discovery of ancient copies of the original documents, and obviously the more ancient they are the more significance they have for the integrity and reliability of the Biblical text.

The critics refuted

To deal with the Old Testament first, in the middle of the last century it was fashionable amongst scholars to assign a late date to the writing down of the Old Testament books. It was commonly believed that the art of writing was a comparatively late invention on the part of man, certainly unknown to Moses at around 1500 B.C. It was held that the stories of the patriarchs and the early history of the Israelite people were passed down from one generation to another by word of mouth.(Footnote 3) They were not written down, it was claimed, until the latter days of the kings; that is, in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. On the basis of such a low estimate of Scripture it was possible to question the accuracy of the accounts. Error, exaggeration, confusion and conflation were all bound to have crept in during the centuries of merely oral transmission, it was said. Thus scholars felt free to amend the Biblical text and theorise as to what actually might have taken place.

Happily, today we are able to say with confidence that the results of archaeological excavations over the last hundred years have undermined the higher-critical view. Firstly, writing is now known to have been a common practice even a whole millennium before Moses. Abundant hieroglyphic inscriptions from the pyramids and tombs of the Pharaohs in Egypt, and thousands of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, have made this fact clear. There is no reason why Moses, educated in Pharaoh’s court (Acts 7:22), could not have written the five books named after him. The Amarna Letters and Ugaritic Tablets, both more or less contemporary with Moses, show that the eastern Mediterranean seaboard boasted a highly literate civilisation. It was this civilisation that was conquered by Joshua, Moses’s successor, and could have provided the Hebrews with the simple, yet practical, twenty-two-letter alphabet with which God’s dealings with the nation are recorded. Secondly, as other articles in this issue will demonstrate, the discoveries of archaeology have proved time and time again that events related in the Old Testament do not belong to the realm of myth or folklore, but to history.

Scrolls from the Dead Sea

Without doubt the most momentous discovery of Old Testament manuscripts is that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These documents are so-called due to their discovery in caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The first finds, in 1947, by local Bedouin Arabs were purely accidental. These were followed up by professional archaeological explorations during the years 1951 to 1956. The result was thousands of fragments of very ancient manuscripts, besides a number of much better-preserved scrolls, notably of Isaiah and Psalms.

The historical background to the Scrolls is still uncertain. The most popular theory is that they once belonged to a breakaway Jewish sect, the Essenes, who occupied the site of Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea not far from the caves. The Essenes, it is thought, hid their precious manuscripts to prevent their destruction at the hands of the Romans during the First Jewish War (66-73 A.D.). More recently, however, and with convincing evidence in support, the idea has been put forward that the Scrolls were in fact from the library of the temple itself in Jerusalem. These manuscripts were hidden away along with other temple treasures during the closing stages of the siege in 70 A.D.(Footnote 4) Yet whatever the story behind the hiding of the Scrolls, the discovery of such an ancient and extensive collection is truly remarkable.

The significance of the Dead Sea documents lies in their great antiquity. Prior to their discovery the evidence for the ancient text of the Hebrew Old Testament was scant, if not virtually non-existent, before the ninth century A.D. Most modern Hebrew Bibles were based upon the famous Leningrad Codex dated as late as 1008 A.D. Thus there existed a great gulf of time between the writing of the original documents (c. 1500-500 B.C.) and the earliest available copies (c. 800-900 A.D.). The question was quite fairly asked, How can we be sure that the text was faithfully transmitted during those intervening centuries? The Bible critics claimed that it was not, while more fundamental Christians trusted in God’s providential use of the careful Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes. The finds of 1947 to 1956 helped to resolve the issue. Most of the fragments dated from before the Christian era, some as early as 200 B.C. Thus the evidence for the Old Testament text was taken back a thousand years. And when the older text was compared with the later text, what was the result? Bible believers are now able to state quite categorically that during this thousand-year period the Hebrew Scriptures were copied and recopied over and over again with amazing fidelity.

Reconstruction of the Scriptorium at Qumran.

Differences?

It is true that a less positive estimate of the Dead Sea Scrolls would point out that there are thousands of differences between the Scrolls and more recent manuscripts. This cannot be denied. Nevertheless such a statement would give a totally wrong impression without illustrating the nature of the differences at the same time. Let us take an example from the book of Psalms. The printed Hebrew text of Psalm 132:10 in transliterated form reads:

b’bwr dwd ‘bdk ’l tshb pny mshychk.

In the same verse the Psalm Scroll from the Dead Sea(Footnote 5) has:

b’bwr dwyd ‘bdkh ’l tshb pny mshychkh.

The more modern text contains twenty-five Hebrew letters, while the ancient has twenty-eight.

Yet each, if translated into English, would read:

“For Your servant David’s sake, do not turn away the face of Your Anointed”.

The three differences that exist are merely variations in spelling. The name David may be spelt either dwd or dwyd without the slightest ambiguity in meaning. Similarly the possessive pronoun ‘your’ may be featured as the suffix k or kh. The two verses would be read by the modern Jew with identical pronunciation. The variations are merely historical, in much the same way as Elizabethan English spelt ‘son’ as ‘sonne’.

The above case is typical of the kind of differences that exist in the Scrolls. Variations in spelling probably account for as much as ninety-nine per cent of the overall number of disagreements between the two text types. Other differences are mostly genuine scribal errors. These are very few, seeing that the ancient Jewish scribes took great pride and care in their work. Everything was checked and double checked. Where such mistakes occur it is usually obvious what the scribe originally intended, or correction may be made by comparison with other manuscripts.

Finally, there are a small number of instances, exceedingly few it has to be said, where the texts do actually diverge. Yet even here we may see the Divine providence at work, for not one of these differences affects in the slightest the message of the Old Testament, with its promises, covenants and prophecies.

The Divine Name

One noteworthy feature that arises out of the study of the earliest Old Testament manuscripts is how the Name of God, Jehovah or Yahweh, was represented. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, when the scribe came to the four Hebrew consonants spelling this most revered Name, yhwh, he wrote them, not in the Hebrew script of his day, but in an archaic form of script commonly used at a much earlier period of Israel’s history. The two scripts differ considerably. The reason for this change was not only that it was believed to show reverence for the Divine Name, but also that it provided a kind of visual aid to any public reader of the text. The Jews thought it blasphemous for any save the high priest to utter the most sacred Name of God. Thus, when the Old Testament was being read, where the letters yhwh occurred the Hebrew word adonai, meaning ‘Lord’, was read in its place. If all the letters were in an identical script it would be easy for an inattentive reader to unintentionally express the Name of God. Thus the change in characters gave him advance notice that this word was not to be pronounced.

The Psalms Scroll from Qumran. Note the Divine Name in archaic script (e.g. second line, right of centre).

It is interesting that when the Old Testament was translated into Greek the distinction in the Divine Name was still preserved. In the earliest Greek manuscripts, some of which are included among the Qumran discoveries, the Name of God is found in either the archaic or contemporary Hebrew scripts, thus making the name stand out from the letters of the Greek alphabet. When the manuscript was read it was pronounced kyrios, this being the Greek for ‘Lord’. From the evidence available this seems to have been the standard practice during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.

Now the question arises as to the form in which the Divine Name appeared in the New Testament documents, written in Greek, dating from the same period. The New Testament is packed with quotations from the Old. Many of these passages contain the Divine Name yhwh.

There can be little doubt that in the manuscripts possessed by the apostles and evangelists a distinction was made in the script in which the name was written. Did the New Testament authors continue this tradition? There is no reason why they should not have done. In fact, now that for the Christians there was another kyrios, that is, the Lord Jesus Christ, to distinguish between the two in the text of Scripture would have been a simple means of avoiding confusion. Thus in Psalm 110:1, cited several times in the New Testament, we read in English, “The LORD said to my Lord . . .”, both words being kyrios in recent Greek editions.

A fragment of a first-century manuscript of the Old Testament in Greek. Note the Name of God preserved in Hebrew script (third and fifth lines).

The Old Testament manuscripts of the first century, however, would have distinguished between the two, the first being the Lord God (in Hebrew letters), the second being the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ (in Greek letters). If such a practice were originally carried over into the New Testament Scriptures then it would have been a simple matter to differentiate between Jesus and God the Father in ambiguous cases (for example Acts 1:24).

Once Christianity moved out of a Jewish into a totally Gentile environment this custom would have been discontinued and the Hebrew letters yhwh would have been replaced by kyrios. This allowed for confusion to creep in and may have been one factor in the Trinitarian controversy raging at that time.

Manuscripts of the New Testament

We move now to consider the books of the New Testament. Here the accurate transmission of the text is even better attested than that of the Old Testament. Ancient manuscripts of the New Testament have long been known. The chief examples of these are the famous Codex Sinaiticus from St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, the Codex Vaticanus from the vaults of the Vatican Library, and the Codex Alexandrinus, a gift from the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople to King Charles 1.

The first two of these date from around 350 A.D. and the third just after 400 A.D. Thus the span of time between the original writing of the New Testament and the earliest complete copies has never been as great as in the case of the Old Testament prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet, this being so, there are always those who wish to question the reliability and authenticity of the Bible. This was the case with what is now known as the Tubingen school of higher criticism, popular in northern Europe during the last century. It was their claim that the books of the New Testament were not the product of the apostles and evangelists but rather of certain unknown Christians who fabricated them during the second century, assigning to them the names of the first Christians to enable them to gain acceptance.

Discoveries from Egypt over the last hundred years have finally put paid to the likes of the Tubingen school. Great excitement was caused in the early 1930s by the publication of the Chester Beatty Papyri. This was a collection of very ancient copies of Biblical books, mainly from the New Testament. The most notable is a papyrus containing substantial portions of the Epistles of Paul dating from around 200 A.D.

Significant as this find may have been, just a few years later in 1935 an even more remarkable discovery was made. C. H. Roberts, an Oxford papyrologist, was examining some fragments acquired in Egypt back in 1920 and sent to the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Amongst these he was amazed to find a tiny scrap of papyrus, measuring no more than nine by six centimetres, containing words which unmistakably came from John 18. His astonishment was due to the style of handwriting in which it was written, for all his learning told him that this papyrus must have been scribed in the first half of the second century A.D. Hardly believing his own conclusions, he promptly consulted other leading scholars in the field. They were able to confirm that this document indeed dated from somewhere in the region of 120-140 A.D. This made it the oldest known portion of the New Testament in existence. What is more, it proved beyond doubt that John’s Gospel was copied and read in Egypt in the early second century, contrary to the claims of the Tubingen school, who believed it not to have been written until 170 A.D.

The John Rylands fragment of John’s Gospel

Older still?

Finally, there is one other discovery worthy of note. We have previously mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls in the context of the Old Testament Hebrew text. In one of the caves near Qumran (Cave 7) a number of Greek fragments were found, one of which may have some bearing on the New Testament text. In 1972 the Spanish scholar Jose O’Callaghan, having already accurately identified other fragments from the same cave, announced that one particular tiny scrap of papyrus bore a text which he identified as coming from Mark’s Gospel. The fragment is even smaller than the John Ryland’s Papyrus, and contains only a dozen letters, not all of which are recognisable. In the second and third lines of the text the Greek letters kai and nne are clearly discernible. The word kai is simply the Greek word for ‘and’. The second group of letters are obviously the middle part of a longer word. O’Callaghan claimed that this word was Gennesaret, and that the two lines came from Mark 6:53: “And when they had passed over, they came into the land of Gennesaret” (AV).

Is O’Callaghan’s identification correct? When the sequence of letters on the fragment was analysed by computer, amongst the mass of Biblical, apocryphal and secular Greek literature of that time no other passage besides Mark 6:53 appeared. Yet some of the letters which were fed into the computer were disputed. It is perhaps for this reason that the majority of scholars remain sceptical. Yet should future study demonstrate the claim to be true then this would be one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries of all time. It would mean that we have a fragment of a Gospel dating from before A.D. 70, from the times of the apostles themselves.

FOOTNOTES

1. The exception being the stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed (Ex. 31:18).

2. Quotations are from the New King James Version (Revised Authorised Version) unless stated otherwise.

3. Such conclusions were reached, it would seem, on nothing other than the analogy of the early Nordic sagas. These, however, are far removed in time, culture and character from the ancient Hebrew narratives. Interestingly, many of the scholars who developed these higher-critical views of Scripture were Scandinavian or Germanic in origin.

4. See the well-argued article by N. Golb in Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 48 no. 2, June 1985, pp. 68-82.

5. This is the document known as 11Q Psalms A.

About the middle of the last century it was confidently asserted by a very influential school of thought that some of the most important books of the New Testament, including the Gospels and the Acts, did not exist before the thirties of the second century A.D. This conclusion was the result not so much of historical evidence as of philosophical presuppositions. Even then there was sufficient historical evidence to show how unfounded these theories were ... but the amount of such evidence available in our own day is so much greater and more conclusive that a first-century date for most of the New Testament writings cannot reasonably be denied ... The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.

F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, pp. 14,15.

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