So we were trying to discover what we had discovered, in other words. So with all the assistance by the end of the semester I was getting much closer to being able to say, 'OK, this is what we got, and I think we can make an announcement to the media about how many New Testament manuscripts we discovered and what is in them.'
We are still looking over the data. We want to get an official journal article in a scholarly journal published, but we don't have all the data figured out yet.
CP: Could you explain to the average Christian why preserving these manuscripts with digital photography is important?
Wallace: I would be happy to. I think there are several reasons why this is important. One of them is that when we think of the Bible today we think of the Bible as the thing that is printed on Bible-thin paper and is stuck between cow-hide leather and we call that the Bible with gilded edges. But that is not how historically it has been.
Every Bible that is published in printed version is based on manuscripts. So our link to the original is only through these manuscripts. We couldn't possibly tell what the original said without the manuscripts. Consequently, the more manuscripts we discover, the more manuscripts we photograph, the more manuscripts we analyze, the closer we will be to the original wording of the New Testament.
Again, what a lot of Christians don't realize is that their Bibles change in some subtle ways in terms of the wording based on new manuscript discovery and based on wrestling with particular textual problems. There are whole doctoral dissertation done on one word in the Greek New Testament - whether it is authentic or not, whether it goes back to the original or not.
So for the average Christians they don't realize all the hundreds of thousands of hours of research that have gone in to give them the Word of God. I think it is important for them to realize if we believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then we owe it to ourselves to try to recover the exact wording of the original as much as possible.
Another reason I would give is that by preserving these manuscripts digitally we actually have a better picture of them than looking at the actual manuscripts. In other words, digital photographs, the quality we use, are always easier to read than the actual manuscripts.
We can blow these things up to 3 feet by 4 feet, it's just unbelievable. You can zoom in with the picture well but with the manuscripts you can't do that. Consequently, for us to examine these manuscripts on the computer it is giving us an opportunity to read them without hurting that manuscript.
We have photographed some manuscripts that we've told the librarians that if you open this manuscript again it will completely turn to dust. They've been that fragile. And we urged them to never open the manuscript again. We photographed other manuscripts where the library itself said this is the last time this thing will ever be photographed. It was microfilmed years ago and the digital photographs were the last ones to be done. So they never want to see these manuscripts photographed again because every time you handle a manuscript you hurt it a little bit. It is almost unavoidable.
So when we photograph them we wear cotton gloves, we don't use flash photography, we take extra special care to care for the manuscripts. Then we give these monasteries DVDs of the manuscripts so when scholars come and want to study them they don't need to look at the manuscripts but they can look at the DVDs.
