No original autograph of any biblical book survives today—every copy we have was made by hand on materials such as papyrus, vellum, or leather that naturally deteriorate over centuries. What we do possess is an unusually large and early body of copies, which textual scholars use to reconstruct the original wording with high confidence. This work—comparing manuscripts to identify and correct copying variations—is called textual criticism, distinct from "higher criticism," which examines a text's date, authorship, and unity.
Key Old Testament Manuscripts
The Septuagint (LXX)—the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, traditionally produced by seventy scholars in Alexandria, Egypt. It became the standard Old Testament text of the early Christian church. The Samaritan Pentateuch—a version of the five books of Moses preserved independently by the Samaritan community, who accepted only the Pentateuch as canonical. Despite early scholarly skepticism, it shares significant common ground with the Septuagint, some Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament. The Nash Papyrus—acquired in Egypt in 1902, this fragment containing the Ten Commandments and part of Deuteronomy was, prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscript.
The Dead Sea Scrolls—discovered at Qumran in the 1940s and '50s and dated before AD 70, these are the single most important ancient witness to the Hebrew Bible. They include fragments of every Old Testament book except Esther and show remarkable agreement with the much later Masoretic Text, confirming the Jewish scribal tradition's accuracy over roughly a thousand years. The Masoretic Text—the most complete Hebrew Bible text in existence, standardized by the Masoretes of Tiberias, who added vowel pointing and marginal notes to the traditionally consonant-only Hebrew text. Key manuscripts include the Codex Cairensis, the Aleppo Codex, and the Codex Leningradensis.
Other important witnesses include the Aramaic Targums (interpretive translations made after the exile, when Aramaic became the Jews' everyday language) and various Old Latin and Syriac translations predating Jerome's Vulgate.The Care of the Scribes Scribes who copied the Old Testament followed extraordinarily strict procedures: counting every word in a section, identifying the middle word and middle letter, and cross-checking their copy against these counts when finished. If a single mistake was found, the copy was destroyed and work begun again—reflecting deep reverence for the belief that they were handling God's very words.
Key New Testament Manuscripts
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri—thousands of fragments discovered in Egyptian rubbish heaps in 1898, including over fifty manuscripts with New Testament portions. The Chester Beatty Papyri—an early and significant collection including portions of all four Gospels, Acts, most of Paul's letters, and parts of Revelation. The Bodmer Papyri—includes an early, largely complete copy of John's Gospel (c. AD 175) among other New Testament portions. Codex Sinaiticus (c. AD 350) and Codex Vaticanus (slightly earlier)—among the oldest and most reliable manuscripts containing the whole Greek Bible. Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century) and Codex Bezae (fifth century) are also significant early witnesses.
Why This Matters
According to Philip Comfort, we currently have more than six thousand manuscript copies (or portions) of the Greek New Testament—a volume of evidence unmatched by any other work of ancient Greek literature. The time gap between original composition and earliest surviving copies is also remarkably small compared to other ancient texts: works like Caesar's Gallic Wars or Tacitus's Annals survive only in copies made about a thousand years after they were written, whereas fragments of John's Gospel exist from within a century of its composition.