#uncial script

Typography Tuesday

UNCIAL SCRIPTS AND THE CAROLINGIAN MINUSCULE

The upper and lower case letters we are used to today, along with spaces between words, punctuation, and enlarged initial letters, were a development of the late 8th century known as the Carolingian Minuscule. This manuscript hand not only established a uniform book hand that would be used throughout Charlemagne’s sprawling empire, but it also established the kinds of letter forms that would serve as the models for every Western typographic design to our current day. Today, we essentially read and write in the Carolingian Minuscule.

The Carolingian Minuscule itself developed from the insular uncial scripts and partly from the Roman half uncial that were used at Irish and Anglo-Celtic monasteries that had been founded all over Europe by the late 6th century. The insular monks who founded these monasteries also brought the traditions of word spacing, punctuation, and initial letters with them to the continent. The uncial scripts themselves derived from the late imperial Rustic Capitals, which themselves seem to have been based on Roman epigraphic letter forms.

Textual Criticism: The Reliability of the New Testament

By Goodreads Author Eli Kittim

One has to be au courant with lower criticism to understand the significance and reliability of the New Testament. If we look at the number of extant NT manuscripts together with the relatively short period of time within which they were written (i.e, the time between the purported events and the written documents), no other book from Antiquity even comes close. First, we have over 5,800 manuscripts just in Greek (not counting those in other languages), more than any other book in history. Second, the texts were written within approximately two decades after the purported events. Other books have a much wider time-gap between the historical events and their initial documentations, as most were written hundreds of years later. Third, the New Testament has also been the most scrutinized book in all of literature. Its textual integrity has been relentlessly challenged down through the centuries. To date, no other book in history has been criticized and attacked as much as the New Testament. And yet its textual reliability has stood the test of time. Critical scholars still find it reliable! In fact, most of the variants are due to simple spelling errors, which do not significantly affect the meaning of the text. So, the textual reliability of the New Testament is well known among scholars. It’s the best attested book from the ancient world, as well as the bestseller of all time! And if you don’t think that it’s reliable, then you have no grounds to believe in Caesar, Homer, or Alexander the Great, whose biography, by the way, was written 400 years later! That’s how reliable the New Testament really is! In his blog, Bart Ehrman, the world-renowned textual scholar, writes:

“He [Bruce Metzger, Bart’s mentor] thought

that at the end of the day, we can be

reasonably confident of something like 99%

[reliability] of the text of the New

Testament. Textual scholars, in his

judgment, argue about that other 1%. As it

turns out, I don’t disagree with most of

~ Fly-leaf from a book, with a drawing of Christ and an inscription.

Date: A.D. 5th century (?)

Roman Uncial Script