Cite & learn

How to cite this site

Replace bracketed placeholders with your access date. Adjust the author line to match how you attribute the repository maintainer.

@misc{illustrative_manuscripts_site,
  title = {Illustrative Manuscripts: An illustrated timeline of early biblical witnesses},
  author = {{Illustrative Manuscripts}},
  year = {n.d.},
  howpublished = {Website},
  url = {https://severin12am.github.io/illustrative-manuscripts/},
  note = {Source code: https://github.com/severin12am/illustrative-manuscripts. CC BY 4.0 metadata; MIT code.}
}

@misc{illustrative_manuscripts_census,
  title = {Greek New Testament variant census (1--400 CE vs SR GNT)},
  author = {{Illustrative Manuscripts}},
  year = {n.d.},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url = {https://github.com/severin12am/illustrative-manuscripts/blob/main/public/variant-census.json},
  note = {37,528 word-aligned variation units; 86 witnesses. Mechanical collation vs open SR GNT (CNTR); not NA28 apparatus.}
}

For researchers

Cite CNTR and INTF/NTVMR for primary Greek transcriptions and manuscript registers. Cite Illustrative Manuscripts when you use our illustrative census slice, coverage aggregates, or hand-curated passage cards — not as a stand-in for critical editions. For a one-page methods statement (windows, units, scripts), see Methods.

Public data files

public/variant-census.json and public/variant-census.csv — one row per counted variation unit (witness, verse, kind, readings vs SR GNT). src/data/coverage.json — build-time aggregates (totals, by book, by kind, intentional-tag summaries). src/data/witness-texts.json — diplomatic verse bundles for timeline cards (CNTR-derived). Schema notes in DATA.md.

What is not in the JSON

Full NA28/ECM apparatus, manuscripts outside our 1–400 CE Greek NT window, copyrighted scan pixels, or proprietary translation text (NA28/NIV/ESV). Block-level famous passages live in src/data/famous-passages.json; claim discipline cards in src/data/claims-evidence.json.

Claim discipline

Before comparing our counts to tradition-scale estimates, read Use this site and Coverage & scope.

What the numbers mean

Greek NT counts on this site compare surviving letters in our CNTR witness slice to open SR GNT (Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testament, from CNTR). Qurʾān and Nag Hammadi cards show catalogued witnesses but do not yet publish the same mechanical census. For regional rasm within the Uthmanic Text Type (~35–40 reports in published stemmatics), see Uthmanic regional rasm.

Witness

One physical manuscript — e.g. P52, Codex Vaticanus (03), a Hijazi Qurʾān leaf. Each card is a single witness, not the whole tradition.

Paleographic range

Scholars estimate when a hand was written from handwriting style (and sometimes radiocarbon). Cards show a range (e.g. 125–175 CE), not a single exact year.

Variation unit

One spot where a witness's extant letters disagree with SR GNT at the same aligned word position — for example, a different spelling at John 1:1. Our site counts word-aligned variation units in surviving text only.

Kinds (omission, addition, substitution, orthography, …)

Each unit is classified mechanically:

• Orthography — Spelling or pronunciation spelling only (itacism, movable nu, nomina sacra, diacritic/breathing-insensitive).
• Omission — SR GNT has word(s) the witness lacks in the aligned extant span.
• Addition — Witness has word(s) SR GNT lacks in the aligned extant span.
• Substitution — Different lexical content at the same aligned position (not explainable as orthography alone).
• Transposition — Same letters or word multiset in different order (cheap mechanical check only; may miss complex cases).

SR GNT comparison

SR GNT is an open critical Greek text from the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR). Comparing one witness to SR GNT shows where that copy differs from this reconstruction — not “the right reading” by itself, and not every manuscript ever copied.

Lacunae are not counted as variants

Fragments have holes. If software treated every gap as a deliberate omission, counts would explode. We only compare extant letters — lacunae ([...]) and editorially supplied reconstruction (~) are excluded. That keeps numbers smaller and more honest than naive string diffs.

How to read a card

On the timeline, each witness card stacks three layers of evidence for the passage we show:

1. Photograph — when we have a legal Commons plate or an institutional IIIF embed; otherwise an outbound link to the holding library. We do not rehost restricted scans.
2. Diplomatic text — what survives on the leaf in the original script (Greek uncial, Arabic rasm, Coptic, or Hebrew consonants), with lacunae marked honestly.
3. English of these lines — a public-domain translation for the same verses (WEB for Greek NT, Pickthall 1930 for Qurʾān, etc.), plus variant strips under Greek NT verses where the witness disagrees with SR GNT.

The header line gives the Gregory–Aland or catalog siglum, paleographic date range, and a short variant summary for Greek NT witnesses with CNTR data.

How to use Compare and Variants

1. Open the variant explorer to browse 37,592 counted disagreements vs SR GNT. Filter by kind (omission, orthography, …), witness, or book.
2. Click a row to expand witness vs SR readings for that unit; use the search box for verse references or Greek snippets.
3. Open witness compare, pick two Greek NT witnesses (e.g. P75 vs 03), choose a book overlap, and run the comparison. Toggle the SR GNT column and “disagreements only” as needed.
4. Follow preset pairs (P66 vs P75 in John, etc.) or URL parameters ?a=P75&b=03&book=Luke to share a view.
5. Download the open census from Coverage or the citation block above for spreadsheet or research workflows — always note our scope limits when you publish.

What we are not claiming

• Not a full New Testament census. We count disagreements in our CNTR witness slice (1–400 CE plus select uncials) — not ~5,700+ Greek manuscripts and not Peter Gurry's ~500,000-reading extrapolation.
• Not NA28, ECM, or IGNTP apparatus judgments. Our mechanical classifier and optional intentional tags are illustrative tools, not editions of record.
• Intentional-vs-error tags are provisional. When present, they are model-assisted hypotheses — do not cite tag counts as settled scholarship.
• For Bart Ehrman's framing of tradition-scale volume vs what this dataset actually counts, see Coverage & scope.

Scholarly sources we reuse

We compile metadata and transcriptions from open catalogs; institutional image rights stay with holding libraries unless a Commons or IIIF license explicitly allows reuse.

Site metadata compilation: CC BY 4.0. Code: MIT. Details in DATA.md.

Further reading

Accessible starting points — popular introductions alongside standard reference works and open tools.

1. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) — popular framing of NT textual variation (read alongside critical reviews and our Coverage limits).
2. Bruce M. Metzger & Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) — standard handbook introduction to textual criticism.
3. Peter J. Gurry, “How Many Variants Are in the Greek New Testament?” Journal of Theological Studies 67, no. 2 (2016): 657–664 — doi:10.1017/S0028688516000216.
4. Institute for New Testament Textual Research — INTF overview and NTVMR for manuscript registers and images.
5. Center for New Testament Restoration — greekcntr.org for open transcriptions and SR GNT.
6. Tommy Wasserman & Peter J. Gurry, eds., Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019) — clears common public misunderstandings about counts and methods.
7. Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018) — short, lay-friendly introduction to Gospel manuscript evidence and common misconceptions.
8. Corpus Coranicum — corpuscoranicum.org for early Qurʾān manuscript cataloguing and bibliography. Our Uthmanic regional rasm page summarizes Cook / Sidky stemmatics with curated examples.