CT: When did your team go to Albania and when did they come back?
Wallace: They went in July 2007 and came back the first week of August 2007. There were really two teams that were there. We sent a team of four people to start with that arrived in Albania, and when they got to the national archive in Tirana they discovered that there were a lot more than 13 manuscripts that we knew existed there.
Instead, there were 47 New Testament manuscripts and at least many of these if not most of them have never been heard of before. The Western scholars were completely unaware of them.
So they started to photograph those but realized soon enough that they wouldn't be able to get the job done because we had budgeted two and a half weeks for the first team to go and they were all going to come home; we had already purchased a ticket for them to come home. And we figured they could take 6,000 pictures in those two and a half weeks.
Well now with 47 manuscripts to photograph it looked like there were 18,000 photographs to take and there is just no way they could get that done in two and a half weeks. We had to quickly get a second team out to replace the first team so they could finish the job.
CT: Could I ask out of curiosity, why did you only release this news now? It has been quite awhile since August.
Wallace: (Laughs) As far as manuscripts and discovery and things like this go this is a very early announcement. For example, the largest single cache of manuscripts ever discovered was in 1975 at St. Catherine Monastery in the Egyptian desert. They discovered these manuscripts in a hidden storeroom in 1975. Well the news didn't really get out on what they had discovered for 25 years.
The other thing is we wanted to tell other people as soon as we could on what we discovered, but the fact is we weren't exactly sure what had been discovered. So this semester I taught a course called 'New Testament Textual Criticism' at Dallas Theological Seminary, where I am a professor. And I had the students go through hundreds of these pages of manuscript to try to determine exactly what they were saying.
So we were trying to discover what we had discovered, in other words. So with all the assistance by the end of the semester I was getting much closer to being able to say, 'OK, this is what we got, and I think we can make an announcement to the media about how many New Testament manuscripts we discovered and what is in them.'
We are still looking over the data. We want to get an official journal article in a scholarly journal published, but we don't have all the data figured out yet.
CP: Could you explain to the average Christian why preserving these manuscripts with digital photography is important?
Wallace: I would be happy to. I think there are several reasons why this is important. One of them is that when we think of the Bible today we think of the Bible as the thing that is printed on Bible-thin paper and is stuck between cow-hide leather and we call that the Bible with gilded edges. But that is not how historically it has been.
