The oldest Bible in the world today is Codex Sinaiticus - this literally means ‘the book from the Sinai peninsula.’ It was made around 325-350 AD (which means that it is a century older than Codex Alexandrinus), and it originally contained all 66 books of our current Bible. It was discovered by Constantin von Tischendorf, in St. Catherine’s monastery, at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It made its way into the hands of the Tsar of Russia. After the Russian revolution in 1917, the Russians sold it to the British Museum on Christmas day 1933, for £100,000. Today it is on display in the British Library. With James Greig, Zenas Heritage Tours - https://www.zenasheritagetours.com/

There are about five thousand fragments of New Testament manuscripts in the original Greek language. The earliest of these is the John Rylands fragment - officially called P52. This is kept in the John Rylands library of the University of Manchester, in England. It is a fragment of John’s gospel, and dates to around 125-150 AD. Most scholars believe that John’s gospel was the last to be written, so there is a very short gap between when this gospel was first written (probably in Ephesus), and when this copy was made. With James Greig, Zenas Heritage Tours - https://www.zenasheritagetours.com/

The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin is named after an American mining engineer and collector, Alfred Chester Beatty. One manuscript in his collection, called P45, contains the four Gospels and the book of Acts, and dates to around 250 AD. The Gospels are the foundation documents of Christianity. They record the life and death of Jesus, and Jesus’s teachings. P45 is important because it shows us which documents the early church trusted. The Gospels that are in our Bible today (and no others) were universally recognised. As early as the late second century, the church leader Irenaeus said that there are just four Gospels. With James Greig, Zenas Heritage Tours - https://www.zenasheritagetours.com/

‘Codex Alexandrinus’ literally means ‘the book from Alexandria.’ It is one of the earliest copies we have of the whole Bible in Greek, having been made around the 450s AD. Cyril Lucaris (the patriarch of Constantinople) gave it to the king of England, in the seventeenth century, and it is now on display in the British Library, in London With James Greig, Zenas Heritage Tours - https://www.zenasheritagetours.com/

The Oxyrhynchus papyri are a collection of ancient documents, including parts of the Bible dating from around 250 AD. These documents were not commissioned by an emperor or bishop - they come from ordinary church communities making their own copies of the Scriptures. Two scholars from Oxford, B P Grenfell and A S Hunt, discovered them on a rubbish tip in Egypt, and the fragment of the book of Hebrews is now in the British Library, in London. With James Greig, Zenas Heritage Tours - https://www.zenasheritagetours.com/

The early Christians made great use of Old Testament prophecies. In particular, they understood Isaiah 53 to be a prophecy about the death of Jesus. This is why it is important to know how old the book of Isaiah is, and how reliable is the text we have? Is it the result of tampering by early Christians? We could have said that before 1947: The oldest Hebrew copy of Isaiah before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found dated to around 900 AD. But there were two copies of Isaiah among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the older one dates from a century before Jesus was born. This shows that the text of Isaiah has not been changed. Today, we can see this scroll in the Shrine of the Book, in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. With James Greig, Zenas Heritage Tours - https://www.zenasheritagetours.com/