Early Christian Manuscripts, Lecture by Nate Ramsayer

What are the most authoritative manuscripts of stories of Jesus, and how old are our oldest copies? What are the Gnostic Gospels, and why are they important? How many other stories of Jesus existed outside of the four Gospels we know?

Most people don’t realize that when it comes to the Bible, the oldest manuscripts we have are very fragmentary, with hundreds of mistakes and intentional changes, and trying to figure out the “original text” of the New Testament is a vastly complicated issue. Join biblical scholar and archaeologist Nate Ramsayer for the fifth installment of his eight-part course Introduction to the New Testament to learn all about this quest! We will explore what fragmentary collections exist today, where they’re kept, and what they say, including the Nag Hammadi library and many additional texts that exist but aren’t widely known. Feel free to join even if you missed the…