In Front | Workbook: Autographs – Original Manuscripts, Part 2

It’s been nearly two millennia since the writing of the last Bible books, and they were written on materials that were especially vulnerable to decay. On top of this, the first copies of these texts were shared for evangelism. They were passed around and handled, as they were read from and referenced for local church teachings. And remember, many New Testament books are really letters. While we know from discoveries at Oxyrhynchus that multiple copies of “autographs” were often made, the risk of losing documents “in the mail” was as real then as it is today.

After these texts were copied or shared, they would have been prominently displayed in churches, and in the first few centuries of its existence the Church was heavily persecuted. The contents of prominent churches were ransacked and destroyed. Because Christianity was, like Judaism, a “religion of the book,” the best way to try to stop it was to destroy the book. When churches were raided, their sacred texts were often burned.

There are accounts that as late as the mid-third century, autographs were still on display and venerated in Christian churches. For example, Peter, a bishop of Alexandria who died in 311, in a Paschal treatise referred to:

The autograph copy itself of the evangelist John, which up to this day has by divine grace been preserved in the most holy church of Ephesus, and is there adored by the faithful.

Unfortunately, none of these original copies survive today, but it is evident that there was an early emphasis in the Church on accuracy and the authority of the earliest copies of biblical texts. Because of this, textual criticism is our best hope at understanding the transmission of the Bible through history. 

Quote from Peter of Alexandria from: Alexander Roberts, et al., eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1890, p. 283.

Reference: J. B. H. Hawkins, “Fragments from the Writings of Peter,” in Alexander Roberts, et al., eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1898, 6:283. The original Greek treatise survives only in Latin quotations (frag. 5.2).