The Major Manuscripts

When people say "the Bible," they are usually thinking of the book on their shelf or the app on their phone. But behind all of that are actual, physical, ancient documents — and some of them are genuinely remarkable.

This small scrap of papyrus is about the size of a credit card. It contains verses from John 18 — the trial of Jesus before Pilate. It is dated to approximately 125 AD, meaning it was written just 25-30 years after John's Gospel was originally composed.

That is an extraordinarily small gap between an original composition and its earliest surviving copy — virtually unheard of for ancient documents.

It was discovered in Egypt in 1920 and is now housed at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

Found in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd who threw a rock into a cave and heard something shatter. What he found transformed biblical scholarship.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of nearly 1,000 manuscripts found in caves near Qumran by the Dead Sea. They date from about 250 BC to 68 AD and include:

• Copies of every Old Testament book except Esther
• The oldest complete copy of Isaiah (1,000 years older than any previously known copy)
• Community rules, commentaries, and other religious texts

The remarkable discovery? When scholars compared the Dead Sea Isaiah scroll to the medieval copies that had been in use, they were virtually identical — after more than a thousand years of copying. The preservation system worked.

One of the oldest complete copies of the New Testament. This substantial manuscript was discovered in 1844 at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai (hence the name).

The story of its discovery is dramatic. A German scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf found monks using ancient pages as kindling for their fireplace. He recognized what they had and effectively rescued it. (The full story involves multiple trips, political negotiations, and a gift to the Russian Tsar.)

Codex Sinaiticus contains the entire New Testament plus large portions of the Old Testament in Greek. You can view it online — every page has been digitized.

Housed in the Vatican Library since at least 1475, this is considered by many scholars to be the single most important biblical manuscript. It contains most of the Greek Bible (Old and New Testaments) and dates to the early 4th century.

Together with Codex Sinaiticus, it forms the backbone of modern Bible translations. When your Bible reads differently from a King James Version, it is often because modern translations incorporate readings from these earlier, more reliable manuscripts.

A 5th-century manuscript now in the British Library. It contains most of the Bible in Greek and is one of the earliest and most complete manuscripts of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament that the early church used).

A collection of papyrus manuscripts containing portions of the New Testament that date to the 3rd century — making them among the oldest substantial New Testament manuscripts in existence. They include large sections of Paul's letters, the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation.

These are not mythical documents. They are real, physical objects that you can visit in museums. They have been photographed, analyzed, carbon-dated, and studied by thousands of scholars.

They demonstrate that the text of the Bible has not been secretly altered by powerful people over the centuries. We can compare what we read today to manuscripts from the 100s-300s AD. The evidence is available for anyone to examine.

The Bible did not survive by accident. It survived because people treated it as something worth preserving — and the manuscript evidence confirms that judgment.