My article last week was How are New Testament Manuscripts Dated?. Today's article is a follow-up describing one particular method of dating ancient manuscripts: paleography.
The word paleography comes from the Greek words παλαιός (transliterated: palaiós; English: old), and γράφειν (transliterated: graphein; English: to write), meaning "old writing". Paleography is the study of how old manuscripts were...
In my article Do I Need a Dictionary to Study Ancient Manuscripts?, I included the word boustrophedon, but I haven't used the word yet in any of the articles. I've read there are (or were) New Testament manuscripts which use (or used) boustrophedon, but I was unable to find any specific manuscripts.
Most languages that I'm aware of write from left-to-right, while some languages are written right-to-left (e.g. Hebrew and Arabic)....
There's a lot of conflicting information on this subject, so please forgive me if I get some details wrong.
This whole story is convoluted, so a "cast of characters" (and organizations) may help, and I'll be using some below.
I want to address several related issues in this article:
I did a quick search on Google and found several web sites that sell old Biblical manuscripts and...
Illuminated manuscripts are manuscripts with pictures that, originally, were intended to make the text more understandable. In places where literacy was low, illuminated manuscripts could help non-readers understand the Bible (or other texts) more easily. In later times, illumination came to mean decorated, regardless of whether the decorations were related to the text.
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The monastery on the island of Skellig Michael, off the coast of Ireland, was built about A.D. 600-800, and was in use until about A.D. 1200-1300. The name comes from the Irish word Sceillic, which means "steep rock," because the island rises out of the ocean 715 feet. There are 600-670 steps from the ocean to the monastery (depending on which part of the monastery), up which water and food had to be carried when the monastery was in use. In 1996,...
People study Biblical manuscripts for a variety of reasons.
