"Important Witnesses to the Text of the New Testament"

"Important Witnesses to the Text of the New Testament" Metzger & Ehrman pp. 52-134.

Metzger and Ehrman observe that witnesses to the New Testament text can be divided into Greek manuscripts, ancient translations, and quotations in early Church literature. They introduce us to many of the important manuscripts which are available.
I. GREEK MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
1. Important Greek Papyri of the New Testament - descriptions of a number of the numbered papyri
2. Important Greek Majuscule Manuscripts of the New Testament - descriptions of the most important
3. Important Greek Minuscule Manuscripts of the New Testament - especially important as they can often be sorted into text families
4. Other Noteworthy Manuscripts - a smattering of interesting manuscripts
II. Ancient versions of the New Testament
p. 94 "The earliest versions of the New Testament were prepared by missionaries, to assist in the propagation of the Christian faith among peoples whose native tongue was Syriac, Latin, or Coptic."
p. 95 "There are certain limitations in the use of versions for the textual criticism of the New Testament. Not only were some of the translations perpared by persons who had an imperfect command of Greek, but certain features of Greek syntax and vocabulary cannot be conveyed in a translation."
We observe that a "version" is a translation, though standards of translation in antiquity did not preclude additional commentary or even preparing materials which were not in the original. I am not sure what, if any, influence this pattern might have had on New Testament documents. These versions are interesting especially as we note the wide spread of the Gospel at a very early time into a variety of different language groups. Metzger and Ehrman describe each briefly.
1. The Syriac Versions
a. The Old Syriac Version
b. The Peshitta Version
c. The Philoxenian and/or Harclean Version(s)
d. The Palestinian Syriac Version
2. The Latin Versions
a. The Old Latin Version(s)
African
European
b. The Latin Vulgate
3. The Coptic Versions
4. The Gothic Version
I found this interesting on p. 115 "Shortly after the middle of the fourth century, Ulfilas, often called the "apostle to the Goths," translated the Bible from Greek into Gothic. For this purpose, he created the Gothic alphabet and reduced the spoken language to written form. The Gothic version is the earliest known literary monument in a Germanic dialect." It strikes me that this could have something to do with the number of Greek-based words which exist in German, as well as some of the similarities in the inflexion of German nouns to Greek nouns.
5. The Armenian Version
6. The Georgian Version
7. The Ethiopic Version
8. The Old Slavonic Version
9. Other Ancient Versions
a. The Arabic Versions
b. The Old Nubian Version
c. The Sogdian Version
d. The Anglo-Saxon Versions
III PATRISTIC QUOTATIONS FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT
Observe that we could reconstruct almost all of the New Testament based on early Christian quotations of Scripture. Yet the patristic authors tend to present some difficulties as it is uncertain how often they were consulting a text to make direct quotes and how often they were making paraphrases. We also have some uncertainty as to whether subsequent scribes may have "updated" the biblical quotations by use of a more modern version of the text.

All in all, a very interesting, though long chapter. Knowing of the text and its brief summaries of the characteristics of some of the most important manuscripts could prove useful at some point. The illustrations, pictures of ancient manuscript pages, are very intriguing.