Problems in the textual transmission of the Bible have been recognized since the earliest days of the Church. When the Angel Moroni first appeared to the Prophet Joseph Smith, he is described as reciting the last chapter of Malachi but quoting several verses differently from the text contained in the King James Version (see JS–H 1:36–39). Portions of Isaiah and of the New Testament book of Acts were, however, cited exactly as formulated in the King James text (see JS–H 1:40). That some sections of the biblical text are accurate, while others have been corrupted, we accept as a doctrinal tenet articulated by the Prophet Joseph Smith in the eighth Article of Faith. The Prophet provides further insight into the matter in his statement “I believe the bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers; ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing or corrupt priests have committed many errors.”1 Implicit in this teaching is the suggestion that the older the text, the closer the text may be to its original form and the less likely it is to have fallen prey to ignorant translators or careless transcribers.
In this case, as in so many other areas, the Prophet Joseph saw far beyond the scholars of his own day. Since that time, an entire field of scholarship has arisen to establish as accurately as possible the correct form of ancient texts. We use textual criticism, or the careful comparison of ancient texts, when several surviving manuscripts preserve different readings among themselves. Whether considering manuscripts of the Bible or other manuscripts from the ancient Mediterranean world, the fundamental principle of the textual critic is to give greater credence to the older manuscripts of any particular text.
Through the textual criticism of variant manuscripts, a standardization of many ancient texts, especially those of Greek or Roman origin, occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such Greek and Latin texts enjoy wide acceptance among classicists and comprise a relatively stable and unchanging body of literature taught in secondary schools and universities. Most surviving Greek and Latin classics were composed before the time of the New Testament. When the manuscripts of the Greek and Latin classics are compared with surviving New Testament manuscripts, we see quickly that there are controversies about certain sections of the New Testament because of the differences among them. Many present ambiguous passages do not accord with our understanding of gospel principles, thus affirming the statements of the Prophet Joseph Smith that pertain to the New Testament text.
The Manuscripts of the Greek and Latin Classics
Before the invention of printing, the propagation of literary works was a laborious process. Scribes copied a text by hand onto either papyrus scrolls or page-like pieces of parchment and then usually sewed them together to form a codex—the forerunner of the modern book. In comparison to modern printing, the fact that scribes produced very few written volumes through this process explains in part the scarcity of surviving texts. Moreover, the observation that hand copying was subject to easy error explains the wide variation demonstrated when a number of manuscripts survive. When such manuscripts date from a time much later than the original date of composition, human errors occur more frequently, and there are even wider variations among manuscripts.
With the calamitous fall of the Roman Empire, many manuscripts of classical compositions were destroyed. Moreover, during preceding decades in certain areas of the empire, postapostasy Christians sometimes sought to destroy works written by non-Christians, including many written by the great thinkers of Greco-Roman antiquity. Perhaps for these reasons, manuscripts of classical works are of late date. Few date back to antiquity; most copies derive from the late medieval era or the Renaissance, either possessed by Christian monasteries or preserved in the Arabic world, where the study of Greek and Latin classics was encouraged.2 For example, the oldest manuscripts of the fifth-century BC Athenian tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides, go back to the eleventh century, more than fifteen hundred years after the original composition of the works! The histories of their Athenian contemporaries, Thucydides and Xenophon, are preserved by only a few manuscripts; the earliest manuscript of the former’s work dates to the tenth century AD, while the earliest codices of the latter are from the fourteenth century. The Boeotian poet Hesiod, who wrote the Theogony around 700 BC, did not have a near-complete text until the end of the thirteenth century. Thus the Theogony’s text is formulated from copies made almost two thousand years after the original composition!3
The works and authors cited constitute only a sampling of Greek authors and texts, though they are representative of situations repeated in the case of almost every Greek author and surviving work. Even Homer, the earliest and perhaps most important Greek writer, fared no better. His widespread popularity and the use of his work as a basic school text required many copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Accordingly, the chances for surviving manuscript copies should have increased. Nevertheless, despite a few fragments that date from the first century AD, the first near-complete texts of Homer are twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts. As a result, Homeric texts are based on copies that are twenty-one hundred years removed from the author!
Roman authors were almost as poorly preserved as their Greek predecessors. However, since Latin remained the language of much of Europe during the Middle Ages, it could be expected that Latin works would be better preserved and have texts based on manuscripts of earlier provenance. Indeed, most Roman manuscripts are only a thousand years removed from their time of composition. The earliest manuscripts of Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca all date from the ninth century AD. Two very popular Roman authors, even among Christian audiences, were Vergil and Livy. Their works were preserved in copies made only a few centuries later. A manuscript preserving large parts of Livy’s work dates to the fifth century AD, and two manuscripts of Vergil’s date to the fourth century AD, barely three hundred years after the composition of Vergil’s poetry. Compared to the dates of other classical works, the manuscripts of Vergil and Livy are amazingly early.
The texts of classical authors as established through the manuscript tradition are generally accepted as accurate. For most works, a sufficient number of manuscripts survive to allow comparison to the accepted version of a text. Occasionally, the text of a work may derive from only a single manuscript. For example, extant portions of the first six books of the eminent Roman historian Tacitus’s Annales are preserved in a single ninth-century manuscript. The incomplete text by first-century historian Velleius Paterculus, who chronicled the reign of the emperor Tiberius, was copied in the seventeenth century from a manuscript that was subsequently lost and no longer exists. Despite the scant documentation for these texts, and with little debate or discussion, they are nevertheless accepted at face value and widely used as authoritative historical sources for the period.
The Manuscripts of the New Testament
There are three kinds of New Testament documents: papyrus fragments or manuscripts; parchment manuscripts written in Greek capital letters called “uncials,” the standard transcription format of ancient times; and later manuscripts transcribed in the smaller hand and lowercase characters customarily used in late antique or medieval Greek manuscripts, named “minuscules.”4 Of these three types of New Testament Greek documents, there survive in whole or in part well over five thousand New Testament manuscripts, and these do not include manuscripts written in other languages such as Armenian, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopian, and more. By comparison to Homer, a classical author for whom a large number of manuscript copies or papyrus fragments survive, the New Testament documents are far more numerous than Homer’s 1,569 pieces of papyri and 188 uncial manuscripts that survive to attest his work.5 So numerous are New Testament manuscripts that one scholar exclaimed, “The textual critic of the New Testament is embarrassed by the wealth of material.”6
In current scholarly study of the New Testament text, considered most authoritative are several lengthy papyrus documents of surprisingly early date that preserve large tracts of both Gospels and Epistles. These papyri were acquired during the 1930s in the British collection of Chester Beatty and during the 1950s in the Swiss collection of Martin Bodmer. The Chester Beatty papyri include three very old copies of parts from the New Testament. A papyrus (𝔓45) codex (in book form), preserving thirty leaves of the Gospels and the book of Acts (size 10 inches by 8 inches), dates to around AD 200–250, less than a century and a half to two centuries after the original writing of these books. Of even earlier date is a papyrus (𝔓46) of eighty-six extant leaves (size 11 inches by 6½ inches) that preserves ten Pauline letters. Also of similar date is a papyrus (𝔓47) containing ten leaves from the book of Revelation. Most phenomenal, however, is a small papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John (𝔓52) that has been dated to approximately AD 100 and, depending on the dating of John’s actual writing of the Gospel, is possibly only a scant few decades removed from the composition of John’s original text.7
The Bodmer papyri are also of pristine date. A more complete copy of the Gospel of John, the Bodmer Papyrus II (𝔓66), is preserved in this papyrus codex of 104 pages (size 6 inches by 5½ inches) that dates from AD 200. Similarly, a single-quire codex of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John (𝔓75) was transcribed perhaps as early as AD 175. That copies of portions of the New Testament survive from a period so near the time of their original composition becomes all the more remarkable considering the long centuries between the composition of classical texts and their earliest surviving manuscripts.8 Metzger observed that “the time between the composition of the books of the New Testament and the earliest extant copies is relatively brief. Instead of a lapse of a millennium or more, as is the case of not a few classical authors, several New Testament papyri exist that were copied within a century or so after the composition of the original documents.”9
With confirmation of ancient papyri that are so little removed from the time of the author’s writing, why do we not place greater credence in the text of the New Testament as it exists? Indeed, classicists have considerable confidence in the texts of the classics even when they are constructed from manuscripts that are one and, in some cases, two millennia removed from the composition of the original texts. With regard to the present New Testament text, we can, in fact, trust that many portions of the text are transmitted, transcribed, and translated correctly. However, we must also remain cognizant of problematic passages and remember that the papyri enumerated above have come to the attention of the textual critic only recently. The complete versions of the New Testament in use by disparate Christian sects and in various languages derive not from pristine papyri but from parchment manuscripts of later date, some fraught with textual problems.
The most important manuscripts of the New Testament date to the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Fourth-century uncial manuscripts may belong to the fifty New Testament copies commissioned by the emperor Constantine in AD 331. The most important of these manuscripts, the Codex Sinaiticus (א), was discovered in 1844 in the Sinai monastery of St. Catherine and later presented to Czar Alexander II of Russia, who was instrumental in securing its release from the orthodox monastery. After the Russian revolution, the communists sold the text to the British Museum, where it resides at present. It is the only complete manuscript copy of the entire New Testament that dates from the fourth or fifth century.
Although not as complete as the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus (B) is just as old. In all likelihood, it was also one of the Constantinian manuscripts, though because of certain deficiencies it may have not been accepted among the fifty manuscripts.10 It has been housed in the Vatican library since before the first catalogue of its holdings was made in the fourteenth century and may have been in the possession of the church at Rome since the manuscript’s production in the fourth century. Indeed, when St. Jerome translated scriptures into the Latin Vulgate late in the fourth century, it is possible he consulted the Codex Vaticanus (B) among others.
Other important uncial manuscripts are the Codex Alexandrinus (A) and the Codex Ephraemi (C), both of fifth-century provenance. The Codex Bezae (Dea) is another fifth-century manuscript that offers not only the text of the original Greek New Testament but also a Latin translation. The bilingual text is arranged so that Greek and Latin face one another on opposite pages. The manuscript was given to Cambridge University in 1581 by its namesake, Theodore Beza, successor to John Calvin as the Protestant leader in Geneva.
While several fifth-century “Old Latin” or Syriac translations of the Greek New Testament exist, all other original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are of later date. It is difficult to say which, if any, of these hundreds of later texts, with their unknown corruptions or deficiencies, may have influenced late-Renaissance scholars translating the New Testament into the vernaculars of their respective nations or churches. Certainly, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, widely used and familiar to most scholars of that time, would have influenced many of these translations, including the King James Version.11 In the King James Version, it is likely that Greek New Testament codices known to have been in England at the time would certainly have been consulted. These include the previously noted Codex Bezae of fifth-century provenance as well as the sixth-century Codex Laudianus (Ea) in the possession of Oxford University. The consultation of these earlier Greek manuscripts may lend greater credence to the King James text, but even a cursory reading and comparison of the Greek and Latin versions of the New Testament unsurprisingly demonstrates the heavy reliance of King James translators on the Latin Vulgate.
The very real antiquity of many New Testament manuscripts in the original Greek provides clear evidence that much of the New Testament text may be quite sound. Similarly, textual departures from early texts, as manifest in later texts, corroborate the Prophet Joseph’s admonition about textual mistakes occasioned by either careless transcribers or by priestly scribes, who sought to emend texts they were copying to accord with doctrinal principles of the churches during their time and place—doctrines that had departed, in some instances, far from the New Testament authors’ original intent and teachings.
