A
biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the
Bible. The word
Bible comes from the Greek
biblia (books);
manuscript comes from Latin
manu (hand) and
scriptum (written). The original manuscript (the original parchment the author physically wrote on) is called the "autographa." Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures (see
Tefillin) to huge
polyglot codices (multi-lingual books) containing both the Hebrew Bible (
Tanakh) and the
New Testament, as well as
extracanonical works.