Posted on: 4th September 2026

This past year I have been lucky enough three times to see manuscripts of parts of the Bible from over 1500 years ago. You may not be an archaeologist or a philologist - nor am I. But these ancient pages of scripture are exciting evidence that Christians who lived hundreds of years ago treasured and read and passed on the stories from the same Holy Bible that still tell us the good news about Jesus today. 

Let me take you on a tour.

The Chester Beattie Museum in Dublin, Ireland, displays a group of 11 early Greek papyrus pages dating from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD.

Included in the collection in Dublin are portions of the Gospels, Acts, Pauline letters, and the Book of Revelation - some written within 200 years of when Jesus lived on earth!

My favourite passage was an encouraging verse from the book of Hebrews, Chapter 13 verse 20 “Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep…”

And a striking one was from John Chapter 19, verses 31 to 32:

“Since it was the day of Preparation, Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, especially because that Sabbath day was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed.”

In Egypt, where many Bible manuscripts have been found, in the museum in the basement of the new library in Alexandria you can find a text from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It’s from the late 4th to early 5th Century AD and it was found in Al-Bahnasa, a historic village in Egypt's Minya Governorate, famous as the ancient Greco-Roman city of Oxyrhynchus. Some scanning and translating of the Greek using my phone helped me discover that the text on display there is 1 Corinthians 7:36-38 - Paul’s advice for those who are unmarried.

And in the UK, I visited the British Library in London which holds 347 pages of the Codex Sinaiticus. This is the world's oldest copy of the complete New Testament and is made from animal vellum or parchment. A codex is an ancient book made of separate pages stacked and bound together at one edge, and today about 800 pages survive which is about half. This codex was handwritten in Greek in the 4th century AD and was held at St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai (hence the name) until the 1850s.

I was truly inspired by this early evidence of the complete new testament! From it we can see original wording of the Greek text and it helps us understand how Christian scriptures were copied and passed on.

So as we see this amazing historical evidence, let us consider what we ourselves can do to pass on the good news of Jesus today. Over 1000s of years, people have diligently copied, daringly translated and faithfully shared the Word of God with the next generation. Thanks to their faithful and often hard, expensive, time consuming and risky work, we have in our Bibles the good news of Jesus, a great Shepherd of the sheep who was crucified for the people he loved and brought back from the dead to overcome evil and give freedom and new life to those who trust in Him.