No ancient literature has survived in its original form; everything we have is derived from copies of the originals. The NT is no exception. However, in comparison with any other ancient literature, the NT is without a peerboth in terms of the chronological proximity and the surviving number. Several ancient authorities are preserved in only a handful of manuscripts. Not so with the NT. There are approximately 5,500 Greek witnesses, ranging in date from the second century AD into the middle ages. Besides the Greek evidence, there are nearly 30,000 versional copies (e.g., Latin, Coptic, and Syriac), and over 1,000,000 quotations from the NT in the church Fathers. NT textual criticism has always had an embarrassment of riches unparalleled in any other field.
The Greek witnesses are by far the most important, since in large measure they represent some of our earliest witnesses and since they involve direct reproduction from Greek to Greek. There are four kinds of Greek witnesses: papyri, uncials (or majuscules), minuscules (or cursives), and lectionaries. The first three are important enough to warrant some discussion here.
Papyri
These documents are written on the cheap writing materials of the ancient world that were roughly equivalent to modern paper. Literally thousands of papyrus fragments have been found of which approximately 100 contain portions of the New Testament. Actually, taken together, these 100 fragments constitute over half of the New Testament and all but four are in the form of codices (i.e., four are scrolls rather than the book-form [codex]). All NT papyri were written with uncial or capital letters. They range in date from the early second century through the eighth century. About 50 of them are to be dated before the fourth century. Though many of them are somewhat fragmentary, and at times the copying was looser than one would like (i.e., they were done before the canon was officially recognized), they are nonetheless extremely important for establishing the text of the New Testamentif for no other reason than the fact that they represent some of the most ancient witnesses we possess. Six important papyri are illustrated in the chart below. The symbol for each papyrus is Ì followed by a number (e.g., Ì45). The most important papyri cited in the NET NT footnotes are as follows:
Uncials
There are approximately 300 uncials known to exist today that contain portions of the New Testament and one uncial that contains the entire NT. Like the papyri, these manuscripts were written with uncial or capital letters, but unlike the papyri they were written on animal skins or vellum. For the most part they are beautiful manuscripts, elegantly written and routinely done in scriptoria and often for special purposes. Generally speaking, they range in date from the fourth through the ninth centuries. Our oldest complete copy of the NT is an uncial manuscript, Í (see chart below). The symbol for each uncial is either a capital letter (in Latin or Greek letters [though one MS has a Hebrew letter, Í) or a number beginning with 0 (e.g., 01, 0220, etc.). The most important uncials cited in the NET NT footnotes are as follows:
Minuscules
There are approximately 2813 NT Greek minuscule manuscripts known to us today. These copies range in date from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, were produced on vellum or paper, and were written in cursive or a lower-case, flowing hand. They are the best representatives of the medieval ecclesiastical text, that is, the Byzantine text. There are approximately 150-200 that deviate from the Byzantine standard, almost always representing an earlier transmissional stream and hence are quite important for NT textual criticism. The symbols for the minuscules are of four kinds: (a) arabic numbers (e.g., 1, 565, 1739), each of which represents one manuscript; family 1, [Ë1] family 13 [Ë13] (involving a group of closely associated manuscripts); Byz (involving the majority of Byzantine minuscules); Ï (representing the majority of minuscules). The following are among the more important witnesses cited in the NET NT notes:
Minuscule
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Date (approx.)
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NT Books Covered
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General Characteristics
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33
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9th century
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Gospels, Acts, Paul, Catholic Epistles
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Alexandrian
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81
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AD 1044
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Acts, Paul, Catholic Epistles
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Very important for establishing the text of Acts. Agrees substantially with the Alexandrian texttype.
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1739
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10th century, but probably goes back to a late 4th century ms
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Acts, Paul, Catholic Epistles
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Alexandrian
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Family 1 (Ë1)
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12th-14th centuries
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Gospels
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Caesarean (of the 3rd or 4th centuries)
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Family 13 (Ë13)
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11th-15th centuries
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Gospels
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Important in the discussion of the authenticity of the pericope adulterae (i.e., John 7:53-8:11)
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