WI New Testament originals circulate

And precisely why do they not, OTL?

Major relics of Christianity include the True Cross, presented by Helena in 4th century AD and dismembered - allegedly growing in the process; Calvin claims that the fragments would fill a ship; others retort that they are individually so small that most of the Cross is missing.

Another major group of relics is corpses of sundry saints. Again, several of them have been dismembered and have multiple skulls et cetera.

But I am amazed at conspicuous lack of New Testament originals.

After all, the corpses of saints were either buried or else disposed by their persecutors in dishonourable manners. Objects like True Cross would have been expected to be discarded by their users.

Whereas the Epistles were physical letters sent to specific recipient individuals or churches. They were preserved and used for some time by the recipients - notably to produce copies.

Why, when in 3rd and 4th century the veneration of relics spread, did not e. g. the Church of Corinth publish their possession of purported originals of the Epistles to Corinthian, etc?

Of course relics may be carried elsewhere, miraculously preserved, forged and claimed by multiple holders. Why did not New Testament originals function as relics from 4th century OTL? And what would have been historic effects in an TL where this did happen? (With genuineness of some originals disputed - e. g. arguing whether Revelation is the same handwriting as Gospel of John....)
 
According to Wiki here, the state of New Testament manuscripts is actually better than other manuscripts from the same era. (I don't know if this is true or not). A couple of paragraphs further down, there are some good explanations for why manuscripts did not survive.
 
A couple of paragraphs further down, there are some good explanations for why manuscripts did not survive.
What can be summed up from the explanations is that, for some reasons, old manuscripts in good condition were not treasured and preserved: they remained in active use till worn out.

Why did no Bible manuscripts get valued to be preserved, rather than used till worn out and replaced by new copies?
 
What can be summed up from the explanations is that, for some reasons, old manuscripts in good condition were not treasured and preserved: they remained in active use till worn out.

Why did no Bible manuscripts get valued to be preserved, rather than used till worn out and replaced by new copies?

My guess: parchment was valuable, and copying manuscripts is a lot of work. That's hours and hours of work to make just one copy, especially a good copy with very few errors. If you take that scribe's work, and hide it away in some reliquary, than that scribe has to make another copy for you to actually read to the congregation, which means another X amount of work for him that you have to pay for.

Just doing some quick calculations, I would guess it would take me about two weeks to produce a nicely calligraphied copy of the Book of Matthew (22,642 words). I'm not a professional scribe, so maybe it could be done in half of that. But then, I didn't include making colorful illustrations and praying before/after writing the name of Jesus.
 
Apart from the already stated reasons, probaly a role was played by the fact taht they were not seen as "The Holy Book", but just as a checklist to remember all (or most of) the events to recollect, at least rougly (different details reported and so on).
Looking things this way, you can see that even having apocrypha around made some sense at the time.
 
Rome was a relatively literate society, as was ancient Judaism. A letter is important for the information it contains; revering the paper and ink would have seemed idiosyncratic if not insane. Relics don't start to be considered important for a few centuries after that.

Now, the originals of the Gospels I could see being considered important; Mark is sometimes believed to be a court deposition anyway. But it still runs into the idea that books and papers are not considered remarkable in a society that has lots of them.
 
Keeping and treasuring original manuscripts was not unknown in Classical Antiquity. At the time of Ptolemy III (after 246 BC), the original scripts of Aeschylus (died in 456 BC), Sophocles and Euripides were extant and kept in Athens. Ptolemy asked to borrow the manuscripts for copying. Athens demanded huge sum as guarantee for their safe return. Ptolemy agreed, paid the guarantee - but then kept the originals, forfeited the deposit and returned just copies.

Since the Epistles were written in 40s or 50s AD, there would have been nothing odd about the originals being extant and treasured in 3rd century - and beyond.

Why did this not happen?
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Keeping and treasuring original manuscripts was not unknown in Classical Antiquity. At the time of Ptolemy III (after 246 BC), the original scripts of Aeschylus (died in 456 BC), Sophocles and Euripides were extant and kept in Athens. Ptolemy asked to borrow the manuscripts for copying. Athens demanded huge sum as guarantee for their safe return. Ptolemy agreed, paid the guarantee - but then kept the originals, forfeited the deposit and returned just copies.

Since the Epistles were written in 40s or 50s AD, there would have been nothing odd about the originals being extant and treasured in 3rd century - and beyond.

Why did this not happen?

Because for one a lot of the Epistles fall under pseudepigraphy and were likely not written until a century or two later. I will otherwise bow out and let the elephant in the room be.
 
Keeping and treasuring original manuscripts was not unknown in Classical Antiquity. At the time of Ptolemy III (after 246 BC), the original scripts of Aeschylus (died in 456 BC), Sophocles and Euripides were extant and kept in Athens. Ptolemy asked to borrow the manuscripts for copying. Athens demanded huge sum as guarantee for their safe return. Ptolemy agreed, paid the guarantee - but then kept the originals, forfeited the deposit and returned just copies.

Since the Epistles were written in 40s or 50s AD, there would have been nothing odd about the originals being extant and treasured in 3rd century - and beyond.

Why did this not happen?

Well, Ptolemy was extremely rich, and early Christian communities were not and, as has been mentioned, parchment was extremely valuable and prone to reuse.

I think the most important reason hasn't been mentioned yet however, namely that in the beginning there was no conception of a "New Testament" as we understand it, and the various writings of Paul, etc. were not seen as intrinsically holy. The idea of a New Testament canon didn't really begin to emerge until the mid 2nd century (and didn't settle down into more or less it's modern form for another hundred years) - by which time the earliest manuscripts would have been copied, reused, recycled and scrapped for about a century (the earliest survivng physical document is part of St John's Gospel dated to about 125AD).

So the reason why they were'nt treated as sacred objects is because they weren't seen as sacred objects for a long time after.
 
Keeping and treasuring original manuscripts was not unknown in Classical Antiquity. At the time of Ptolemy III (after 246 BC), the original scripts of Aeschylus (died in 456 BC), Sophocles and Euripides were extant and kept in Athens. Ptolemy asked to borrow the manuscripts for copying. Athens demanded huge sum as guarantee for their safe return. Ptolemy agreed, paid the guarantee - but then kept the originals, forfeited the deposit and returned just copies.

Since the Epistles were written in 40s or 50s AD, there would have been nothing odd about the originals being extant and treasured in 3rd century - and beyond.

Why did this not happen?

Because by the time there was an infrastruicture of veneration, the originals very likely had ceased to exist. The originals of Euripides and Aeschylus survived because they were formally deposited at Athens, and even then, their status as 'originalks' is open to interpretation (they were almost certainly not working copies). The gospels were most likely not formally deposited anywhere and may not originally have been composed as written texts at all. they were also not originally seen as great things in the way the winners of Athens' dramatic competitions were, and thus meant to circulate, not to be preserved for posterity.

Bear in mind that relics don't play any significant role in the NT corpus. They are a phenomenon of a later age, when the originally pagan idea of having a concrete object to venerate in representation of a spiritual entity took firm root in the Christian mainstream. The true cross was 'discovered' in the 300s. If originals of the New Testament texts existed by then - which is pretty unlikely in itself - their status can't have been common knowledge. In theearly community it didn't matter, and in thelater church, it was much preferable to ascribe your text an ancient origin than to preserve an extant original that would only lead to questions.
 
Actually, the whole discussion of original documents and why they didn't survive is largely irrelevant.

There aren't any fragments of the True Cross, or Noah's Ark, but that didn't stop there being a lively traffic in these 'relics'. Similarly, there are multiple places that claim the head of the same saint.

So. It would certainly be possible for some monastery or cathedral or something to have what they CLAIM is the original of e.g. one of Paul's letters. One possibility would be that St. Helena could easily have 'discovered' a copy, just like she 'discovered' so many of the New Testaments sites in Jerusalem.

It's actually interesting that no one DID claim they had some original.

OTOH, it was originally the WORDS that were important (Paul's letters were widely copied, for instance), not the physical documents, and by the time they were actively collecting 'relics', the original documents would have been gone long enough ago that it would be hard to claim otherwise.
 
Perhaps the Apostolic church was more interested in the ideas and concepts contained in the Gospels and Epistles than in the stationary they were written on.
 
I think there is a possibility for church to stay united and less schisms..

Quite unlikely, actually. The New testament text transmission from the moment of written fixation is pretty good, so there is no issue with text corruption. An 'original' gospel would be a venerated relic, and interestingly, probably not even a terribly important one. The text, not the object, was thought to be divinely inspired.
 
I think there is a possibility for church to stay united and less schisms..

I disagree. The majority of arguments between sects either lie outside of the bible, involve differences in how passages that are otherwise exactly the same are interpreted and in what passages of the bible are considered important.
 
I disagree. The majority of arguments between sects either lie outside of the bible, involve differences in how passages that are otherwise exactly the same are interpreted and in what passages of the bible are considered important.

The early schisms especially involved semi-philosophical questions that just weren't really on the radar of the writers of the NT, because most of them are questions that only arise once you have answered your initial questions and elaborated your initial theology.
 
Since true Christians believed that the Bibl was the word of God and had decided which Gospels to use at the council of Nicea then the original manuscripts would have been theologically irrelevant.

However, there would have been a lot of prestige attached to any one who possessed the originals. For example would the original gospels be kept in Constantinople or Rome? This could cause conflicts. Would be the possessor lay claim to being the headquarters of Christendom?
 
The early schisms especially involved semi-philosophical questions that just weren't really on the radar of the writers of the NT, because most of them are questions that only arise once you have answered your initial questions and elaborated your initial theology.
Agreed; the major schisms within early Christianity dealt with things like:
The application of Greek philosophy to Christian theology (Arianism, Nestorianism and Monophysitism).
Moral/legal questions the Bible could not possibly have addressed (Donatism).
Theological questions the Bible left unanswered about salvation and original sin (Pelagianism).
Syncretic offspring of Christianity and other religious movements (Gnostic Christianity).

None of those issues would be resolved by having a single absolutely authoritative version of the Bible. The only way I could really see a One True Bible affecting sectarianism in the early Church is if it were radically different from any current copies, in which case you would probably see yet another schism between those who accepted the One True Bible's authenticity and those who denied it.
 
Funnily, as I now found, THE original Gospel was extant in 4th century and recognized as such - but not regarded as canonical nor a relic.

Under the traditional Church account - which on text critical grounds may contain errors, but which the Church by middle of 2nd century believed to be true - the 4 canonical Gospels were written between 50 and 100. 2 of the Evangelists were eyewitnesses - Apostles Matthew and John - and 2 were disciples - Mark a disciple of Peter, Luke a disciple of Paul.

The noncanonical Gospels included Gospels regarded as fake and heretic by end of 2nd century, like Thomas and Jude, and the infancy Gospels, which were regarded as true - the Gospel of James is the source of Mary´s perpetual virginity - but unimportant.

But there was the Gospel of Hebrews. Under the traditional account - which was regarded as true by Jerome - Matthew the Apostle first wrote a Gospel in Hebrew language. It was copied, its Greek translations circulated as well as Hebrew copies - but the purported Hebrew original was deposited in library of Caesarea and extant when Jerome had a copy made for him.

The official explanation was that Gospel of Hebrews was not canonical because it was superseded by the Gospel of Matthew, a later and better account from the same author, written in Greek from the beginning.

In early Church, the Gospel of Matthew was widely regarded as being the first Gospel in date - which is why it is usually put the first in order - so the Gospel of Hebrews was the first of all.
 
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