Manuscripts

For more than a millennium, daily prayers have been offered on Mount Athos. Described as “the spiritual heart of Orthodoxy,” this secluded peninsula in northeastern Greece is regarded by many as one of the most sacred places on earth. Few sites have been more significant in the history of the Greek New Testament manuscript tradition. […]

A sensational story recently made headlines: researchers at the University of Glasgow have recovered the text of 42 “lost” pages from one of the most important early Greek New Testament manuscripts— Codex H (GA 015), a 6th century copy of Paul’s letters.

Few national manuscript collections have been transformed as dramatically in recent decades as the Greek New Testament manuscripts of Albania. Until the last 20 years, much of this collection remained effectively unknown to the wider scholarly world—a virtual blind spot on the map of Greek New Testament manuscripts.

This post launches a new series exploring how the landscape of Greek New Testament witnesses has changed over the past thirty years. The Kurzgefasste Liste—the catalogue of all known surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts—is foundational for virtually all scholarly work on the Greek New Testament textual tradition. Drawing on my editorial work on the forthcoming

The Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg preserves a remarkable and comparatively under-studied collection of Greek New Testament manuscripts. Its earliest New Testament witness is GA 091, a sixth-century majuscule fragment of John; its latest is GA 2267, a manuscript containing the Gospel of Matthew and dated to 1830, making it the second latest-dated manuscript in the entire Kurzgefasste Liste. The collection spans fourteen centuries and offers a striking cross-section of the Greek New Testament tradition, from the early Byzantine period to the nineteenth century.

Two Greek New Testament Manuscripts Sold for $20 — Rediscovered Last month, an unusual post appeared in the Facebook group Greek Palaeography. It would lead to the identification of two Greek New Testament manuscript leaves that had been missing for over sixty years. Bryan Blakemore of Springfield, Illinois, shared images of two framed Greek manuscript folios.

How Many Complete Greek New Testament Manuscripts Are There REALLY? For decades, the standard answer to the question, “How many complete Greek New Testament manuscripts do we currently have?” has been “about 60.” But what, precisely qualifies a manuscript as “complete”? And do 60 manuscripts really meet that standard? In what follows, I examine these

Colleagues often ask whether it is possible to determine when a manuscript was first added to the list of Greek New Testament manuscripts. The cataloguing of these manuscripts—making them available for use in critical editions and broader scholarly research—has been a major undertaking for over a century. This list has developed through several stages, from