Every Bible that is published in printed version is based on manuscripts. So our link to the original is only through these manuscripts. We couldn’t possibly tell what the original said without the manuscripts. Consequently, the more manuscripts we discover, the more manuscripts we photograph, the more manuscripts we analyze, the closer we will be to the original wording of the New Testament.
Again, what a lot of Christians don’t realize is that their Bibles change in some subtle ways in terms of the wording based on new manuscript discovery and based on wrestling with particular textual problems. There are whole doctoral dissertation done on one word in the Greek New Testament – whether it is authentic or not, whether it goes back to the original or not.
So for the average Christians they don’t realize all the hundreds of thousands of hours of research that have gone in to give them the Word of God. I think it is important for them to realize if we believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then we owe it to ourselves to try to recover the exact wording of the original as much as possible.
Another reason I would give is that by preserving these manuscripts digitally we actually have a better picture of them than looking at the actual manuscripts. In other words, digital photographs, the quality we use, are always easier to read than the actual manuscripts.
We can blow these things up to 3 feet by 4 feet, it’s just unbelievable. You can zoom in with the picture well but with the manuscripts you can’t do that. Consequently, for us to examine these manuscripts on the computer it is giving us an opportunity to read them without hurting that manuscript.
We have photographed some manuscripts that we’ve told the librarians that if you open this manuscript again it will completely turn to dust. They’ve been that fragile. And we urged them to never open the manuscript again. We photographed other manuscripts where the library itself said this is the last time this thing will ever be photographed. It was microfilmed years ago and the digital photographs were the last ones to be done. So they never want to see these manuscripts photographed again because every time you handle a manuscript you hurt it a little bit. It is almost unavoidable.
So when we photograph them we wear cotton gloves, we don’t use flash photography, we take extra special care to care for the manuscripts. Then we give these monasteries DVDs of the manuscripts so when scholars come and want to study them they don’t need to look at the manuscripts but they can look at the DVDs.
CT: How did you receive permission to photograph the manuscripts in Albania? Did the situation in the country change or what factors made it possible?
Wallace: That’s a great question. I’m not sure what factors made it possible but I know that Albania was a communist country almost immediately after World War II until fairly recently. Consequently, western scholars couldn’t get in there to look at the manuscripts. When we wrote to the director of the national library, we told her what our credentials were and where we had been in the world to photograph manuscripts, and she wrote back and said, ’We’re delighted to have you come and photograph our manuscripts.’
So it was that open door that occurred because I think we already established our legitimacy and credential with others. Nobody else was able to get in because perhaps they didn’t have the same credentials. I’m not exactly sure. But frankly as far as I’m concerned, the Lord is more concerned about getting these manuscripts preserved than we are because they are the copies of the ancient scriptures. So He is the one that opens a lot of doors for us that we wouldn’t know otherwise.
CT: When you say that no one else has gotten in, does that mean no one else has even microfilmed the manuscripts?
Wallace: As far as we are aware of, only two of the manuscripts have ever been photographed at all and that was by microfilm. This was decades ago before the country became communist. So this is a huge discovery and huge opportunity for us to be able to photograph all 47 New Testament manuscripts.
CT: Why has Albania been so secretive with the number of manuscripts it possessed? You said that you only knew there were 13 but then there were 47.
