Book of Acts Chapter 2, Part 1 - Christogenea Internet Radio 05-03-2013
There is something which I forestalled discussing in the opening segments of this series, and that is an exposition of the ancient manuscripts which attest to the antiquity and the content of the Book of Acts. For the translations found in the Christogenea New Testament, only manuscripts which are dated to the 6th century and earlier were even considered in the reading. Of these, there are eleven ancient papyri, and 6 of these (those listed below in bold type) are dated by archaeologists to the 3rd century AD. [The manuscript numbers employed here are those of the Gregory-Aland system employed in the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.]
P8, P29, P33, P38, P45, P48, P50, P53, P56, P57, and P91.
Many of the papyri represent only fragments containing portions of the text of Acts. While the uncials were produced with more durable material, many of them are also incomplete or even represent mere fragments. For examples among the papyri, P8 contains all or part of about 28 verses from Acts chapters 4, 5 and 6. P29 contains parts of 3 verses from Acts chapter 26. P45, which dates to the 3rd century, contains larger portions of 13 different chapters of Acts, from chapters 4 through 17, as well as large portions of each of the Gospels. P45 is part of a collection of manuscripts called the Chester Beatty Papyri. A companion manuscript, P46, contains large portions of nine of Paul's epistles, and it is esteemed to date to about 200 AD.
Those of the Great Uncials which date to the 6th century and earlier and which attest to the Book of Acts are also numerous. These are the Codices Sinaiticus (א), Alexandrinus (A), Vaticanus (B), and Ephraemi Syri (C), Bezae (D), 048, 057, 066, 076, 077, 0165, 0166, 0175, 0189, 0236, and 0244. Of these, the Codices Sinaiticus (א), Vaticanus (B), and possibly 057 all date to the 4th century, and 0189 is dated to the 2nd or 3rd. Most of the others employed here date to the 5th century.