Jesus, Prophet of Islam - The Islamic Bulletin

136 Jesus, Prophet ofIslam

discrepancies. As, little by little, the New Testament

writings broke away from the rest of early Christian lit­

erature, and came to be regarded as Holy Scripture, so

the copiers became more and more hesitant about tak­

ing the same liberties as their predecessors: they thought

they were copying the authentic text, but in fact wrote

down the variations. Finally, a copier sometimes wrote

annotations in the margin to explain an obscure pas­

sage. The following copier, thinking that the sentence

he found in the margin had been left out of the passage

by his predecessor, thought it necessary to include the

margin notes in the text. This process often made the

new text even more obscure.'

The scribes ofsornemanuscriptssometimes took exceed­

ingly great liberties with the texts. This is the case of

one of the most venerable manuscripts after the two re­

ferred to above, the Sixth century Codex Bezae Cantabrigi­

ensis. The scribeprobablynoticed the differencebetween

Luke's and Matthew's genealogy of Jesus, so he put

Matthew's genealogy into his copy of Luke, but as the

second contained fewer names than the first, he pad­

ded it out with extra names (without however balane­

ing them up),

Is it possible to say that the Latin translations, such

as Saint Jerome's Sixth century Vulgate, or older trans­

lations (Vetus Itala), or Syriac and Coptic translations

are any more faithful than the basic Greek manuscripts?

They might have been made from manuscripts older

than the ones referred to above and subsequently lost

to the present day. Wejust do not know. 10

The truth of the matter is that there are no complete pre-Council of
Nicea manuscripts of any of the writings contained in the New Tes­
tamentextant today - nor of the Gospel of Barnabas for that matter ­
or if there are, then whoever has them has been keeping very quiet
about them for a good many centuries, and probably for not the
right reasons.
It must be emphasised therefore that the contents of the earliest
Greek manuscripts of the four officially accepted Gospels are in

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