Bible Facts - The Ancient Biblical Manuscripts

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This post is especially for Muslims, Muslims should look over the below facts.

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The Three Great Ancient Codices

There are three great manuscripts still existing of the Bible in Greek (containing the Septuagint of the Old Testament and original Greek text of the New) dating centuries before the time of Muhammad. They are:

1. Codex Alexandrinus

This volume, written in the fifth century after Christ, contains the whole Bible except for a few leaves lost from the New Testament (Matthew 1.1 - 25.6, John 6.50 - 8.52 and 2 Corinthians 4.13 - 12.6). Nothing is contained in it that is not part of our current Bible. The manuscript is in the British Museum in London.

2. Codex Sinaiticus

This very ancient text, dating from the late fourth century, contains the whole of the New Testament and much of the Old. Preserved for centuries in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg in Russia, it was sold for one hundred thousand pounds to the British Government and is also now kept in the British Museum.

3. Codex Vaticanus

Probably the oldest surviving manuscript of the whole Bible, it was written in the fourth century and is preserved in the Vatican Library in Rome. The last part of the New Testament from Hebrews 9.14 to the end of Revelation is written in a different hand to the rest of the manuscript (the original scribe probably was not able to complete the text through death or some other cause).

These manuscripts prove conclusively that the only scriptures in the hands of the Church at least two hundred years prior to Muhammad’s time were the Old and New Testaments as we know them.

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Other Early Evidences of the Integrity of the Bible

There are numerous other evidences for the integrity of the Bible dating from many centuries before Islam.


1. The Hebrew Massoretic Texts

Not only do Christians possess early Biblical manuscripts but Jews likewise, who hold to the Old Testament as the only scripture ever written for them, possess texts in the original Hebrew language in which the Old Testament was originally written, going back at least a thousand years. They are known as the Massoretic texts.

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls

First discovered in caves in the wilderness of Qumran around the Dead Sea in Israel, these contain numerous portions of the Old Testament in the original Hebrew dating back to the second century before Christ. No less than two copies of the Book of Isaiah were included in this collection containing predictions of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Isaiah 53.1-12), his virgin-birth (Isaiah 7.14) and his deity (Isaiah 9.6-7).

3. The Septuagint

This is the title of the first translation of the Old Testament into Greek. It was likewise transcribed in the second century before Christ, containing all the great prophecies to the coming of the Messiah, the fact that he is the Son of God (Psalm 2.7, 1 Chronicles 17.11-14), as well as details of his suffering and atoning death (Psalms 22 and 69). The early Church freely used the Septuagint.

4. The Latin Vulgate

The Roman Catholic Church translated the whole Bible into Latin in the fourth century after Christ using the Septuagint and ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The Vulgate, like the Septuagint, dates from the fourth century after Christ and contains the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as we know them. It was established as the standard text for the Roman Church.

5. Portions of the Greek New Testament

There are numerous pages, fragments and portions of the original Greek New Testament surviving from as early as the second century after Christ. They all, taken together, form the contents of the New Testament as we know it. It is very interesting to compare this wealth of evidence with the texts which exist for the oldest of the Greek and Roman classics, many of which date not earlier than a thousand years after Christ. In fact no other ancient writings from the same era have such a mass of manuscript evidence as that for the Greek New Testament.

What is most important and must be emphasised is that there is no alternative source of evidence suggesting that the life and teachings of Jesus Christ were substantially other than that which is recorded in the Bible. All the apocryphal writings rejected by the Church at least generally follow the same threads as those in the New Testament manuscripts. Certainly no historical evidence from the same period exists to suggest that he was really the prophet of Islam which the Qur’an makes him out to be.

Draw your own conclusions from the above.