CT: How will theologians and scholars use these manuscripts you photographed? What impact will it have on the Christian community?
Wallace: Well, I think the first thing that needs to happen is we need to examine and analyze these manuscripts in detail. And what that involves is either transcribing them word for word, letter for letter, or what is called collation where we simply compare it to a standard published Greek New Testament and we list all the differences that manuscript has. It is sort of a quick and dirty way to do a transcription. But once we do that we can determine much more what the original wording of the original text was because these manuscripts are a window to that.
For example, the most important discovery we found among these manuscripts was that there were three of them that didn't have the story of the woman caught in adultery at all. And the manuscripts we are talking about are a little bit later than 9th century and all the way to the 14th century, which is pretty late. But three of them did not have the story of the woman caught in adultery. And [while] that is rare in latter manuscripts, it is far more common in the early manuscripts. These manuscripts may well have a fairly decent pedigree that go back to earlier times.
One of the manuscripts that had it had it at the end of the Gospel and that is even rarer. There are very, very few manuscripts that have the story appended to the end of the Gospel instead of its normal place in John 8. So this kind of information helps us determine where did that story come from and gives us a little more information.
Basically the way to think about this is let's say you are putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a thousand pieces but you're missing about 200 pieces. It is pretty hard to figure out how to connect the dots. What we just discovered is 47 mores of those pieces.
CT: Is there anything else you want to add?
Wallace: We're searching for other manuscripts. We have leads on over 200 more manuscripts that are not yet known in the Western world. In order to go to these places and order to do the photographic work we rely on both donations from individuals and foundations.
Or center does not have any creedal statement - even though we are obviously interested in New Testament manuscripts and I am obviously a committed Christian - but that is not part of what we are expecting to have in terms of the people and groups that we work with.
Some of these manuscripts are owned by non-Christians - like the national archive in Albania; it's 70 percent Muslim in the country. There are still quite a few communist in the country. So we want to work with groups like this and really make these manuscripts known.
Over the next 18 months I am going to be traveling to eight or nine different sites with a team of four people. We are hoping to photograph as many as 200,000 pages of Greek New Testament manuscripts. It is a lot of work and we'd appreciate prayer and support.
On the Web: www.csntm.org
