Were the Church Fathers Aware of Variations in the New Testament Manuscripts?

Awareness of textual variants in literature goes back at least a few hundred years before Jesus was born, and scholars have constantly been trying to find the original readings. In the series I've been writing, I've been focused on textual variants in the New Testament, but they also exist in the Old Testament and in secular literature.

Secular Literature

The city of Alexandria, Egypt, was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C., and...

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Do Fake or Forged Biblical Manuscripts Exist?

I want to address several related issues in this article:

  • Are Authentic Manuscripts Legally Available for Sale?
  • Are Biblical Manuscripts Sold Illegally?
  • What Are Unprovenanced Biblical Manuscripts?
  • Do Fake or Forged Biblical Manuscripts Exist?

Are Authentic Manuscripts Legally Available for Sale?

I did a quick search on Google and found several web sites that sell old Biblical manuscripts and...

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Was the Bible Copied Like Links in a Chain or a Tangled Ball of String?

Chain or String

A common complaint against the Bible is that it's been copied, re-copied and corrupted so many times that it's impossible to know what was originally written. Behind this complaint is the assumption that scribes frequently made errors while copying the Bible, and that later scribes simply copied the errors rather than correcting them.

Many people believe the Bible was copied like links in a chain, with each copy made from the last one that was...

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Why were the Early Christians More Likely to Write on a Codex Rather than a Scroll?

In the second millennium B.C., when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and for the first few hundred years after the Exodus, documents were typically written on papyrus. Papyrus sheets were made from the papyrus plant, which was common among the Nile river. Sheets of papyrus were fragile, and creases in papyrus could tear easily. Typically, documents were made into scrolls rather than books, which would help prevent sharp bends in the sheets.

In...

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What is a Manuscript?

What is a Manuscript?

The word manuscript comes from the Latin words manu, meaning hand, and scriptus, meaning write. Historically, a manuscript is a handwritten document, or a handwritten copy of a document. In modern times, a manuscript could be made on a typewriter or computer, but then refers to the original document created by the author, as opposed to mass-produced copies of the same document.

Manuscripts are a...

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Did Moses Write the Torah? Part 2

Last week I posted the article Did Moses Write the Torah? Part 1, and I showed other Biblical authors clearly attributed the first five books of the Bible to Moses, in both the Old and New Testaments. In this article I want to make the case that the books we have in our Bibles may not be exactly what Moses wrote, but they are accurate representations of what Moses, and God, were communicating to the Israelites, and to us.

Editors may...

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What are some Statistics about the Torah?

Here's some
information I found about Sefer Torah scrolls. There's quite a bit of
conflicting information, so its kind of hard to summarize.

Web sites pretty
consistently indicate there are 304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. Try a Google
search for How
many letters are in a Sefer Torah?, and you'll find a huge number of pages
which show there are 304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. Since the Torah has been
checked so...

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What is the Middle of the Torah?

The “middle letter of the Torah” is written much larger than normal. It should be the size of the letter two letters to the left.

The research I did
for the article What is a Sefer Torah? shows there are
304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. A common question asked on the websites I
looked at is: What is the middle of a Sefer Torah?  The word Sofer
is the Hebrew word for counter (not scribe, writer, author, copier, etc.), and Soferim count the letters in a Sefer Torah to
ensure it was copied accurately. Since the letters have been counted so many
times over a few...

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Who are the Hebrew Sofer?

The Hebrew alphabet (excluding final letters) in Ashurit script.

My last two articles have been: What is a Torah? and What is a Sefer Torah?, and now I want to address who writes Sefer Torahs. The Hebrew word Sofer (or sopher) (plural: soferim/sopherim) means "one who counts", and refers to Jewish scribes who have faithfully copied the Torah for thousands of years. I find it interesting the the scribes are called "counters" and not "writers". Only a trained and certified Sofer...

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