Original Sources
The physical evidence — scrolls, codices, and papyri — that carry the text of the Bible from antiquity to us. Each card links straight to the institution that holds the manuscript, where you can zoom to the individual letters on the original high-resolution images.
Hebrew Old Testament
Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ)
The earliest complete copy of any biblical book — a full scroll of Isaiah, over 1,000 years older than the medieval Hebrew manuscripts. Found intact in Cave 1.
Aleppo Codex
The most authoritative Masoretic manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. About a third was lost in the 1947 Aleppo riots. Maimonides himself used this codex.
Leningrad Codex
The oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible still intact. The basis of most modern Hebrew Old Testament editions, including the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) you read alongside the BSB on this site.
Greek New Testament
Codex Sinaiticus
One of the two oldest complete Greek Bibles. Includes the entire NT plus most of the Septuagint (OT in Greek). Discovered at St. Catherine's Monastery.
Codex Vaticanus
The other great 4th-century Greek Bible. Held in the Vatican Library since the 1400s. Missing Hebrews 9:14 onward and Revelation.
Rylands Papyrus 52 (𝔓⁵²)
The earliest known fragment of any New Testament book — a credit-card-sized scrap containing parts of John 18. Within a generation of when John was written.
Chester Beatty Papyrus 46 (𝔓⁴⁶)
The earliest near-complete copy of Paul's letters. Contains most of Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, and Hebrews.
Codex Alexandrinus
A 4th/5th-century Greek Bible gifted to King Charles I in 1627. One of the three great early codices (with Sinaiticus and Vaticanus).
CSNTM Archive
Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts — over 500 Greek NT manuscripts digitized in high resolution, free to browse. The deepest single source for textual study.
Why this matters
The Bible isn't a book that descended in a single moment. It's a text that has been hand-copied, corrected, compared, and preserved across thousands of years on leather, papyrus, and parchment. We have more early manuscripts of the New Testament than any other ancient document — by orders of magnitude. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the Hebrew text was transmitted with extraordinary stability from the 2nd century BC to the 10th century AD. These aren't footnotes — they're the physical backbone of Christian scripture.