134 Jesus, Prophet ofIslam
stroyed, but also all the early manuscripts of even-the four official
Gospels, probably after the original texts had been radically altered.
It should be emphasised that as regards the four officially ac
cepted Gospels, there are no versions in the original Hebrew or
Aramaic, and that, as Dr Maurice Bucaille confirms, the earliest
Greek versions date from after the Council of Nicea:
Documents prior to this, i.e. papyri from the Third cen
tury AD and one possibly dating from the Second, only
transmit fragments to us. The two oldest parchment
manuscripts are Greek, Fourth century AD. They are the
Codex Vaticanus, preserved in the Vatican Library and
whose place of discovery is unknown, and the Codex
Sinaiticus, which was discovered on Mount Sinai and is
now preserved in the BritishMuseum, London. The sec
ond contains two apocryphal works.
According to the Ecumenical Translation, two hundred
and fifty other known parchments exist throughout the
world, the last of these being from the Eleventh century
AD. 'Not all the copies of the New Testament that have
come down to us are identical' however. 'On the con
trary, it is possible to distinguish differences of varying
degrees of importance between them, but however im
portant they may be, there is always a large number of
them. Sorne of these only concern differences of gram
matical detail, vocabulary or word order. Elsewhere
however, differences between manuscripts can be seen
which affect the meaning of whole passages.' If one
wishes to see the extent of textual differences, one only
has to glance through the Novum Testamentum Graece
(Nestlé-Aland, Pub., United Bible Societies, London,
1971). This work contains a so-called 'middle-of-the
road' Greek text.It is a text of synthesis with notes con
taining all the variations found in the different versions,"Thus not only is it possible-indeed it is highly likely -that signifi
cant changes were made to the original texts which pre-dated the
Council of Nicea and which have all been destroyed, but also even
the texts which date from after the Council of Nicea do not fully
agree with each other, cannot therefore be entirely accurate, and in
fact have themselves been altered:
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