Read Skeleton 03 - The Constantine Codex for Free Online Page B

rot, and crumble. Rats and worms will diet on them; water and dampness corrode them; fires consume them. Looters may steal them for sale on the black market, or they can be destroyed during war or by natural disasters, like floods and earthquakes.
    “Hard artifacts will wait patiently until they’re uncovered—maybe decades, centuries from now—but manuscripts are impatient. In their case, we have a time factor on our hands. We discover them, or they die.”
    Shouts of “Hear, hear!” and “Right on!” accompanied much nodding among the thirty-eight world-class scholars seated around the huge conference table at the ICO headquarters on Brattle Street in Cambridge. There were twenty-six men and twelve women at that particular conclave, at least a quarter of them from Europe, Africa, and the Far East.
    “Tell them about biblical manuscripts alone, Dick,” Jon said.
    Richard Ferris was the general secretary for the Institute of Christian Origins, a lanky scholar whose crew cut seemed to remove a decade from his actual age. “Well, you all know the numbers and how our list of New Testament manuscripts has exploded across the years. For the King James translators in 1611, only six basic manuscripts were available, but by 1870, two thousand had been discovered for the Revised Version translators. Today, however, we have about 5,700 manuscripts in whole or in part. And of course, as we have to tell the public again and again, through textual research and criticism of all these manuscripts, we get more and more exact versions of what was originally written by the New Testament authors. That’s the good news.
    “But the bad news Dr. Weber has already expressed. There are more manuscripts out there, and if we don’t find them in time, the world will have lost some priceless treasures. And it’s not just discovery. Some of these manuscripts have already been ‘discovered,’ as it were, but they’ve not been photographed, cataloged, or even examined. For example, Dr. Daniel Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, recently sent a team to Albania to photograph ancient manuscripts in its national archive. They found no less than forty-five New Testament manuscripts that had never been photographed before—an incredible cache of documents in one of the least-likely places in the world! In fact, he estimates that maybe a thousand Greek New Testament manuscripts are still out there, yet to be discovered.” He paused to let the tidings mellow.
    Heinz von Schwendener, New Testament professor at Yale, raised his pen and added, “And I’ll bet there could be more than a thousand in the long run. Okay, my colleagues, what’s our role in all this? How can the ICO contribute?”
    “Glad you asked, Heinz,” Jon said. “In fact, I’m a little surprised that a Yalie is still awake to hear all this.”
    “It’s only you Harvards that put me to sleep, Jon.”
    Amid chuckling over the inevitable Harvard-Yale banter, Jon smiled and continued. “Here’s what I envision: an effort—hopefully an international effort—to search out every known library or archive of ancient manuscripts in the world and photograph all early un photographed biblical manuscripts contained therein. We’d then do further examination of the most ancient and important of those manuscripts as well.”
    “Sounds like a task for several lifetimes, Jon,” said Sally Humiston of Berkeley’s archaeology department, “and requiring resources far beyond ours.”
    “Exactly, Sal. I’ve been discussing this with the leadership at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. They’d be delighted to cooperate with us in this endeavor, and we’ve sketched the following procedure.”
    Jon switched on his PowerPoint presentation and directed his colleagues’ attention to the large screen behind him.
    “First, we must reach a consensus on the most feasible modus operandi. This would determine the dos and