classics digests, reflections and reviews
The following table lists the earliest dated Greek manuscripts of all 27 books of the New Testament, sorted by the dates assigned according to Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB)[1] and New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR) [2]. It includes all manuscripts dated to between the 2nd and 4th century by both LDAB and NTVMR. The Gospels and the majority of Paul’s epistles are dated to before mid-3rd century. P52 […]
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Parchment (in green) is the dominant manuscript material for Abrahamic religions, namely Christianity, Judaism and Islam, whereas papyrus (in blue) is the dominant material for pagan religions (Figure 1). Of all Greco-Roman manuscripts in roll form, only five are on parchment, compared to over three thousand on papyrus. The roll is the predominant book form for their literary texts, so the predominant material for Greco-Roman manuscripts is papyrus. This is […]
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The classical authors listed above have the most surviving manuscripts, and they have also been cited by other ancient authors. I combined both these factors when ranking their popularity in the ancient world. The list includes epic poets (Homer, Hesiod, Vergil), orators (Demosthenes, Isocrates), philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Chrysippus), writers of tragedy and comedy, lyric poets, historians (Herodotus, Xenophon) and physicians (Hippocrates, Galenus). Not surprisingly, Homer is on top of […]
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Christian Preference for the Codex There is a strong Christian preference for the codex for their manuscripts throughout the first millennium (Figure 1), whereas roll is the preferred book form of other religions overall, namely, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Jewish and Islamic (Figure 2). According to stats based on the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) [1], the number of non-Christian manuscripts started to decrease significantly around the 3rd century AD, , […]
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Background and Disclaimer The Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) is a searchable database of metadata on Greek, Latin, Coptic, Demotic, Syriac and other literary texts. It first came online in 1998, and has been widely used by New Testament scholars. I learned about its existence only a few weeks ago, when reading a scholarly work on earliest Christian manuscripts. My interest in LDAB was piqued immediately, for many reasons: […]
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