BIBLICAL ORIGINS

Evening Star, Issue 22448, 19 September 1936, Page 2

BIBLICAL ORIGINS

The fragments of Deuteronomy which have just been discovered at Manchester are from the Septuagint, says the London ‘ Daily Telegraph.’ Hitherto the oldest known fragments" of .this Greek translation from the Hebrew wero the famous papyri discovered, m 1930 in a Coptic graveyard in Egypt, and later bought by the American collector, Mr Chester Beatty. The earliest of the Chester Beatty, papyri, containing Numbers and Deuteronomy, is put by experts at- 120-150 a.d. -The -new Manchester fragment is thus 300 years older than anything else wo possess. Apart from these papyri, which are at most mere fragments, we owe our possession of the earliest complete manuscripts of the Bible, the Vaticanus, and the Sinaiticus codices to the invention in the third century a.d. of parchment as a writing material. Papyrus is ruined by > damp. Indeed, Egypt, because of its drv climate, is the only country in, which papyri have survived at all. Weather has little or no effect upon parchment.