RELIGION.PROJECTMOOSED.COM

How every claim here is graded

Lead story: the guy who scanned a bunch of old Bibles

Somewhere in the last twenty years, photographing the world's old Bibles became a race — against crumbling parchment, war, theft, and time. This project's first job was naming the man behind the story. Nobody flatbed-scans a fragile codex, by the way: the field works by overhead photography and multispectral imaging. Here is the field, ranked against the description.

• Daniel B. Wallace and CSNTM — the leading match. Wallace, a Dallas Theological Seminary professor, founded the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in 2002 to photograph every extant Greek New Testament manuscript. By CSNTM's own conservative count: some 700 manuscripts and nearly 300,000 images with 45+ institutions, and 75+ previously unknown manuscripts discovered along the way; Wallace himself puts the pages photographed at almost half a million. CANDIDATE — STRONG CSNTM summary · Wallace lecture
• Fr. Columba Stewart and HMML — the monk on television. Stewart has run the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library since 2003, traveling to some of the world's most dangerous places to photograph endangered Christian and Islamic manuscripts; HMML's archive holds photographs of approximately 486,000 manuscripts from 1,500+ repositories. Broader than Bibles, and the institution predates him by decades. CANDIDATE HMML FAQ · Stewart profile
• The Codex Sinaiticus Project — not a guy, a consortium: the British Library, Leipzig, St. Catherine's Monastery, and the National Library of Russia reunited the world's oldest surviving Christian Bible online in 2009 — 800+ pages, photographed, transcribed, free. DOCUMENTED Project report
• The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls — the Israel Antiquities Authority with Google: five great scrolls online from the Israel Museum, then the Leon Levy Digital Library with some 5,000 images across about 900 manuscripts and 25,000+ fragments. DOCUMENTED Leon Levy Library
• The Vatican Library (DigiVatLib) — the biggest count of all: roughly 80,000 manuscripts being digitized (plan: some 41 million pages, with NTT DATA since 2014); more than 27,500 are online, including the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus itself. DOCUMENTED NTT DATA report

The identification stays CANDIDATE until it is confirmed — that is the discipline of this site. The full evidence file is in research leg 1.

The great codices

• Codex Vaticanus (c. AD 300–350, Vatican Library) — most of the Greek Old and New Testaments in one fourth-century book; in the Vatican's catalogue since 1481, and now digitized by the Vatican itself. DOCUMENTED
• Codex Sinaiticus (c. AD 325–360) — the earliest complete New Testament, split across four institutions in four countries and reunited online in 2009. It also carries the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas — its table of contents is not a modern one. DOCUMENTED
• Codex Alexandrinus (c. AD 400–440, British Library) — the Septuagint and essentially the whole New Testament, plus 1 and 2 Clement; a gift to Charles I in 1627 and the first of the great codices opened to scholars. DOCUMENTED
• Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (c. AD 425–450, Paris) — a palimpsest: the Bible scraped off, sermons written over it, the underwriting recovered centuries later. DOCUMENTED The four great uncials

The Dead Sea Scrolls

• Found 1946/47–1956 in eleven caves near Qumran; the manuscripts date from about 250 BCE to 68 CE — roughly a thousand years older than the medieval Hebrew Bibles scholars had before them. DOCUMENTED
• 900+ manuscripts; biblical texts include portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. DOCUMENTED
• The Great Isaiah Scroll (c. 125 BCE) is remarkably close to the Masoretic text of a thousand years later — and the same caves hold genuinely different text forms. Stability with real plurality: that is the honest summary. DOCUMENTED Israel Museum project

Textual criticism: the variant question

• Some 300,000–400,000 variants across ~5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts, against ~138,000 words of text — an estimate Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace share. DOCUMENTED
• About 70% of variants are spelling. Under 1% are both viable and meaningful. Ehrman, the field's best-known skeptic, states on the record that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by the variants. DOCUMENTED
• Two famous passages — Mark's longer ending (16:9–20) and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) — are absent from the earliest manuscripts, and modern translations print them with notes saying exactly that. PROVEN (as a fact about the manuscripts) Manuscript evidence
• The full "nature, not number" breakdown is in research leg 1. IN RESEARCH

How the canon actually formed

• c. 170 — the Muratorian fragment: the oldest surviving book list, most of today's New Testament, a few books still missing.
• 367 — Athanasius's Easter letter: the first surviving list of exactly the 27 books used today.
• 393 / 397 — Hippo and Carthage affirm the list, recognizing a consensus more than creating one.
• The traditions still differ (Protestant 66, Catholic 73, Orthodox and Ethiopian broader) because the Old Testament side was never closed by one universal act. DOCUMENTED Canon development

The translation line

• Septuagint — Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, Alexandria, 3rd–2nd c. BCE. The Bible the early Christians quoted.
• Vulgate — Jerome's Latin Bible, commissioned 382, the West's Bible for over a thousand years.
• Wycliffe (c. 1384) — first complete English Bible, from the Latin. Tyndale (1525) — first printed English New Testament, from the Greek.
• Geneva (1560) — the exiles' Bible, first with numbered verses. King James (1611) — translated from the Hebrew and Greek texts of its day, Apocrypha included at first.
• Modern translations work directly from Hebrew and Greek against the full manuscript base the scanners are still enlarging. DOCUMENTED Translation history

Truth vs. lies — the short version so far

• "The Council of Nicaea picked the books of the Bible": Nicaea never took up the canon — it argued about Arianism and Easter. The story was popularized by a novel. FABRICATED (as stated)
• "The Bible is a telephone game of translations": English Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek, not from chains of translations. MISIDENTIFIED
• "Constantine's fifty Bibles survive as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus": the commission is documented in Eusebius; the identification is possible but unproven and not widely accepted. UNPROVEN
• "Seventy translators produced identical Septuagints": an ancient legend about a real translation. MISIDENTIFIED (read as an event)
• The full graded ledger — claims from every side — is in research leg 1 and grows leg by leg.