INK. HANDS. CENTURIES.

The surviving witnesses.

The words reached us. The pages did not all survive.

Meet the physical manuscripts behind the printed Bible. Examine what remains, follow where it travelled, and learn to see the difference between evidence and inference.

01 / THE INSPECTION DESK

Six witnesses. Six ways to look.

Select a manuscript to examine it. This is a selection, not a census.

Photograph · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)

CODEX SINAITICUS

A complete New Testament. An incomplete Bible.

Sinaiticus preserves the whole New Testament, alongside an incomplete Old Testament and other early Christian writings.

The surviving codex has over 400 large parchment leaves. Its pages are material evidence of the work of scribes, correctors and the people who preserved it.

Copy date

4th century

Language

Greek

Catalogue number

01

Kept today at

British Library, London Leipzig University Library St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai National Library of Russia, St Petersburg

“Complete” needs an object: the whole New Testament survives, but large parts of the Old Testament do not. Neither description should be stretched to cover the other.

02 / HOW MUCH SURVIVES

Thousands of copies. No originals.

Not one book of the Bible survives in its author’s own hand. What we have are copies, and copies of copies, in more languages and from more centuries than any other ancient text. These are the open records behind this site’s collection.

262 of them hold a book of the Bible. Beside them, 220 Hebrew codices and 3 Samaritan Pentateuchs.

The Septuagint, the Bible of the first Greek-speaking churches. Only 75 of these records carry a date.

1,809 have an open record here, among them 134 of the 141 papyri.

Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Slavonic, Arabic, Georgian, Coptic, Gothic and Ge’ez. The real numbers are far larger: Latin copies alone run to thousands.

The 3,115 records that carry a date, by century. The scrolls end with the first century; the Greek papyri begin in the second; most copies of everything are mediaeval. Point at a century to count it.

03 / HOW CLOSE TO THE WRITING

The gap between author and oldest copy.

For each New Testament book: when it was written, as a wide approximate range that holds the main scholarly views, and the oldest copy in the open data that holds it. Most early copies are dated by their handwriting, so their dates are estimates too. For most ancient books the gap is many centuries; for several New Testament books it is a few generations.

• Matthew P104 ≈ 70 yrs
• Mark P45 ≈ 185 yrs
• Luke P75 ≈ 135 yrs
• John P52 ≈ 25 yrs
• Acts Uncial 0189 ≈ 120 yrs
• Romans P46 ≈ 145 yrs
• 1 Corinthians P46 ≈ 145 yrs
• 2 Corinthians P46 ≈ 145 yrs
• Galatians P46 ≈ 150 yrs
• Ephesians P46 ≈ 125 yrs
• Philippians P46 ≈ 140 yrs
• Colossians P46 ≈ 130 yrs
• 1 Thessalonians P46 ≈ 150 yrs
• 2 Thessalonians P46 ≈ 130 yrs
• 1 Timothy P46 ≈ 115 yrs
• 2 Timothy P46 ≈ 115 yrs
• Titus P32 ≈ 65 yrs
• Philemon P46 ≈ 140 yrs
• Hebrews P46 ≈ 125 yrs
• James P20 ≈ 180 yrs
• 1 Peter P72 ≈ 225 yrs
• 2 Peter P72 ≈ 195 yrs
• 1 John Codex Vaticanus ≈ 225 yrs
• 2 John Codex Vaticanus ≈ 225 yrs
• 3 John Codex Vaticanus ≈ 225 yrs
• Jude P72 ≈ 220 yrs
• Revelation P98 ≈ 80 yrs

Point at a book to read its oldest copy here; choose it to open the record.

04 / A BOOK, SCATTERED

Count what remains. Notice what is missing.

P46 makes survival tangible. Each small leaf here stands for one leaf in Michigan’s account of the codex.

A surviving leaf need not be intact. Lost lines within these leaves mean that a leaf count is not a percentage of readable text.

One symbol = one leaf, with two sides. Grouped by present custody; this is not the original leaf order. The 104-leaf total is a reconstruction reported by Michigan.

05 / WHERE THEY ARE KEPT NOW

Scattered like P46, across three continents.

2,042 records name a library we can place on a map: 68 libraries, museums and monasteries in 53 cities. The largest keepers are national and university libraries that gathered manuscripts from the eastern Mediterranean over the last five centuries.

• 01 British Library London 303
• 02 Bibliothèque nationale de France Paris 293
• 03 Vatican Library Vatican City 176
• 04 Bodleian Libraries Oxford 173
• 05 National Library of Russia St Petersburg 78
• 06 Biblioteca Marciana Venice 70
• 07 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Florence 68
• 08 Austrian National Library Vienna 67
• 09 Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts 61
• 10 National Library of Greece Athens 55

What can the evidence actually say?

Make the distinction before making the claim.

Did Alexandrinus omit the beginning of Matthew?

Does “complete” mean the whole Bible?

Can handwriting give P52 an exact year?

LEARN TO READ THE RECORD

A few words. A sharper eye.

The catalogue becomes more useful when its language becomes familiar.

Keep the evidence within reach.

Go from this study to the people who preserve, catalogue and interpret the objects.

The manuscript itself

Open Sinaiticus’s digital pages and compare the object with its transcription.

Manuscripts and their texts

D. C. Parker’s introduction to New Testament manuscripts and the work of studying them.

God’s Library

Brent Nongbri examines the archaeology and modern histories of early Christian manuscripts.

A selected introduction to manuscript evidence. Dates are attributed to the linked records; debated dates remain debated. Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each; the drawn forms are explanatory diagrams, not facsimiles. Further-reading links identify works to explore.

Every manuscript, one by one.

5,269 open records through time and book by book, the great witnesses on one shelf, and the libraries that keep them on a map.

THE QUESTION TO CARRY WITH YOU

What survives — and what am I inferring?

Rooted in Scripture. Open for discovery.

A place to read slowly, ask deeply, and follow the connections. Scripture, study and the voices of Christian history, brought together for a lifetime of learning.

SPEND TIME IN THE WORD

• Open the reader
• Books & reading progress
• Compare Scripture editions
• Find a passage

FOLLOW YOUR QUESTIONS

• Study collections
• People & places
• Faith & apologetics
• Stories of faith

A library with a paper trail.

Meet the authors. Explore the collection. Trace each work to its source.

Download the code.

Open source on GitHub.