Dr Daniel B. Wallace, the director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) in Frisco, Texas, spoke to Christian Today this month about his center's major discovery, the importance of using state-of-the-art digital photography to preserve the documents, and why hundreds-of-years old manuscripts are important to the average modern-day Christian.
The following are excerpts taken from the interview:
CT: What are these manuscripts? Are they the original ones written by the disciples or just early manuscripts?
Wallace: Well, we don't have the original documents of the New Testament anymore. They deteriorated a long time ago. Instead what we have are copies and later copies and later copies and later copies. Until the time the printing press was invented, all of these manuscripts had to be copied by hand. There was no way to print them because there was no printing press, so all of the manuscripts of the New Testament that were done by hand take us all the way up until the 16th century.
Now we have over 5,700 of them that have been cataloged; that is a lot of Greek New Testament manuscripts. But every year normally only one or two are found, and for us to discover as many as 39 manuscripts in one place is almost unheard of.
CP: Are there any other institutes that are also preserving these early copies of Scripture with the same technology you are using? We just want to have an idea of how unique your technology is and how unique your centre is.
Wallace: I'll put it in perspective this way. There is one institute in the world; it's called the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, and that's in Munster, Germany. Since 1959, they have been microfilming New Testament manuscripts, but the microfilm quality is very bad and in fact sometimes it is completely illegible, and they realize that. But at least what they have done is gotten 90 percent of all the New Testament manuscripts on microfilm and that is better than nothing.
We started the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in 2003 in Munster and we photographed the actual manuscripts that they own to start with and they put them on their website. So they are very excited about the work that we are doing, but they have not taken one digital photograph; that is not what they have done. They are no longer doing any sort of photography of manuscripts. It is really kind of up to us and others that are doing it.
In terms of the uniqueness with other institutes, CSNTM is the only institute in the world that is dedicated to taking high-resolution digital photographs of all Greek New Testament manuscripts.
Now there are others who are dedicated to photographing this manuscript or that manuscript or are doing outsourcing. For example, Yale University might outsource the digital photography of their manuscripts to some other party, but it would be the manuscripts that they have in their library and some of them are New Testaments but most are not.
They have five New Testament manuscripts, for example. But our goal is to go to all of these sites that have the New Testament manuscripts and photograph specifically those with very high resolution digital cameras. These are top end professional grade cameras that we use that just do a magnificent job.
