English Literature And The Bible

Thank you for posting this.
I, like so many others, was an English Lit major in college. Hopkins has always been one of my favorite poets.
I was fortunate enough to be taught by great professors. Our Shakespeare classes and seminars were taught by a great Shakespeare scholar, who was also an ordained minister. At the time, I thought the idea that Hamlet was a Calvinist was frivolous, but it has stayed with me all these years.
Now, with a greatly deepened spirituality and understanding of Scripture, I know why the power of those words touched me.
“...and flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest”
Thank you, Mr. B

Technically, the definition of autograph is the author’s handwritten text, which makes you correct. However, I used quotation marks, because I wasn’t sure what to call the thousands of fragments of ancient manuscripts extant today, which have been preserved for scholarly study. Two facts are clear. There is more manuscript evidence for the accuracy of the Bible than any other ancient written work, and the scholarly examination of this evidence (the fragments) has produced more agreement, as to the accuracy of Scripture, than disagreement.

Here’s an interesting article about a recent discovery of one such “fragment”:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/fragment-from-worlds-oldest-bible-found-hidden-in-egyptian-monastery-1780274.html

Also, from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Where_are_the_oldest_copies_of_the_New_Testament_gospels_kept

“...there are literally thousands of fragments of the gospels scattered about across the world in various museums and libraries.
... by piecing these together its possible to compare the ealriest fragments with, say, the Codex Sinaiticus and later versions to enable any differences to come to light. Remarkably, even considering the diverse methods, locations and hands which hand coped these documents across the Roman Empire over centuries, there is outstanding agreement between them.

However, there are small fragments of new Testament books that are even older than the Codex Sinaiticus. One of the most famous is the fragment of a papyrus codex containing John 18:31-33 and 37-38, called the Rylands Papyrus. This papyrus was found in Egypt, and has been dated at about 125 A.D. It currently resides at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

The Magdalen Papyrus, an even older fragment, are tiny scraps of papyrus from Matthew’s Gospel which had been housed at the library of Magdalen College Oxford, England for more than 90 years, the gift of a British chaplain, Rev. Charles Huleatt, who bought them at an antiquities market in Luxor, Egypt. Using sophisticated modern methods of analysis these fragments have been dated to sometime between 30 and 70 A.D, with a likelihood of a date around 55-60AD suggesting that, if Matthew’s gospel was written after Mark’s gospel (a fact established by most Bible scholars), then these documents must have been already in circulation not long after the events they described - perhaps just 20 years or less.

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