I have been talking about the problems in knowing what the “original” text of Philippians is. Even with the following brief review, the comments I will be making in this post will, frankly, probably not make much sense if you do not refresh your memory from my previous two posts. Here I will be picking up where I left off there.
We have seen that knowing what the original of Philippians is is complicated by the facts that: 1) The letter appears originally to have been two letters, so that it’s hard to know whether the original of each separate letter is to be the original or if the final edited version which Paul himself did not produce is the original; 2) Paul dictated his letters, and the scribe who wrote down his dictation would typically have made a fresh copy of the letter after Paul had made a few corrections – so which is the original: what the scribe originally wrote or the fresh copy he made after the corrections? 3) And if Paul made corrections to what the scribe wrote, then which is the original – what the scribe originally wrote (that’s the oldest form of the written text) or the correction Paul made (that’s what he intended to say)? How do you choose which is the “original”? One of these forms of the text is the original thing written, but the other is what the author (Paul) originally meant.
And there are more complications: what if, for example, Paul dictated the relatively long letter to the Philippians (it’s short for the Pauline letters, but very, very long for typical Greco-Roman letters: usually these were only one papyrus page in length and had very little substance to them), but between the time he did the dictation and the time he corrected the copy, he changed his mind about something and decided to say or word it differently? Then which is the original – the way he originally said it or the way he later corrected himself to say?
Moreover, some scholars have suspected that the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul had (which I mentioned in the previous post) was a speech impediment, which would explain why Paul would try to justify his poor speaking abilities to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 10:10). So maybe he wasn’t well understood by the scribe.
Or what if the words Paul used when he was dictating were not the words he *meant* to use? This happens all the time. Anyone who has recorded carefully scripted lectures and then listened to them afterwards will hear what they call “mis-speaks.” You remember saying something one way, but when you see yourself on film, you hear yourself saying something completely different (opposite!) to what you remember saying (for example, by leaving out a negative; or by twisting words around). What if Paul did that on occasion? It’s not inconceivable. People do it. If that’s the case, then what is the “original” text? Is it what Paul dictated to the scribe? Or is it what he *meant* to dictate to the scribe?
Suppose Paul had a mis-speak and the scribe faithfully wrote down what Paul actually said, and when reviewing the letter Paul did not catch it. If you think that the original text should be what Paul intended to say, even though that was not written down, then you are saying that the original text is a text that was never written as a text, but a word, phrase, or sentence that was in Paul’s head that never came out of his mouth. But if you say that the original text was what he incorrectly spoke, then you’re saying that the original writing is not the thing originally meant.
All of these speculative matters are complicated and compounded not only by the fact that we are probably talking not about a single letter that Paul wrote to the Philippians, but two letters. And by the fact that we don’t have the first fresh copy of either letter sent to the Philippians, but only one fragmentary copy from 150 years later and no complete copy unto 300 years later.
Let’s think about those copies for a second. How do we know that these surviving copies are accurate reproductions of that fresh copy sent to the Philippians in the first place? Technically speaking, we don’t know. How can we know? We don’t have the fresh copy to compare them with. Moreover, of all the hundreds of copies of Paul’s letters that we have in the surviving manuscripts, there are thousands and thousands of differences in wording.
I should stress – people get on my case for not stressing this enough, so let me STRESS: the vast majority (stress: VAST MAJORITY) of these differences don’t matter for a single thing. They are immaterial, insignificant, of no weight whatsoever, important only to the extent that they show that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than my students can today. But there are some significant differences among these thousands of variant readings. How do we know which variants – if any – represent the “original” reading? It’s hard to make a decision about that if we don’t even know what we mean by the term “original”!!!
I’ll say more about the copies of Paul’s letters in my next post.
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Can you do a post on some of these significant differences?
Ignore the other post. Can you do a post on some of the significant differences in Philippians specifically?
Do you mean internal differences within Philippians? The most noticeable one is how he changes from a soothing friendly tone to an angry tone of dire warning in ch. 3. but there are more complicated problems involving how it could be one letter given who knew what about Epaphroditus. Maybe I’ll post on this — not sure I ever have!
Can you do a post on some of the significant differences between different surviving copies of Philippians?
Ah, now I see what you’re asking. I can add it to the list. Off hand, I can’t think of mahy that are hugely significant for changing the meaning, but I haven’t looked into the text of Philippians for many years. Nothing big comes to mind.
Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Try again, and indicate what differences you’re talking about. (When I answer comments I don’t get the entire chain)
What do we know about the process by which Paul’s letters were collected and eventually “published”? How did they go from the possession of individual congregations to being public documents? Did Paul make copies and hold onto them? Did the churches keep his letters until some enterprising editor came around and began collecting those that still existed? Given all the variables, it actually seems surprising that even 7 letters have survived.
Ah, now THAT is a long story! We don’t know if he kept copies. Most of his letters were surely lost, since he must have written dozens (hundreds?) and we have all of seven. The ones we have would have been kept as church property, and copied for other churches. Some churches who had one or more would have wanted copies as they learned they existed. Already by the time of 2 Peter 3:16 we have an author speaking of Paul’s “letters” (plural), so already there were wome collections being made in the early 2nd century already.
I think I’m following…I have been narrow minded all this time with how I view “original” and “copy.” I see now that a “copy” could in fact be considered an “original” if the “original” had been edited to either adjust a “misspoken” word or phrase – making the “copy” the “original” he intended.
In today’s world, the copy “sent” or “published/posted” is the original. We (I) refer to previous versions as “drafts”. Isn’t that the norm? Why would we think it would be any different in other time periods?
Note: I made several corrections in this short message while I was typing. None should be considered the original because they were incomplete. What you are reading now IS the original. ?
Is it? I don’t know. Certainly not the one published, since a publisher might change the words that the author wrote. One could argue that the “original” is the very first thing written, right? Wouldn’t something written *later* not be as old as the thing written *earlier*? Seems like a quagmire, even today. And it’s a nightmare for Shakespearians….
On a slightly different subject of Original Copies, Do some of these early Bible fragments survive as Reliquary? I realize reliquary does not guarantee authenticity or originality yet it might provide information that is otherwise substantiated.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. I think a reliquary is a container for relics? Do you mean somethig else for it.
I realise Bart, that this discussion stems from a reader question; but why should it be important whether any New Testament reading is ‘original’. No critical scholar – so far as I am aware – argues about the ‘original’ text of Daniel; or of Jeremiah. Indeed for books of the Hebrew Bible, I would propose that it makes no sense to talk of an ‘original’.
Is it that, because we are confident we know Paul as the author of a number of letters – and because we can find phrases in those letters that give indications of how Paul composed his letters – so we feel that (unusually for scriptural texts) we ought to be able to envisage an ‘original’?
Or does it derive from the simplifying assumption that the ‘original’ reading always survives somewhere amongst all the New Testament variants?
In your 2014 book, ‘The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research’ there is a chapter by your co-editor, Michael Holmes, that addresses exactly the issue of whether we can look for an ‘original text’. As I understand it, Michael suggested we instead look for an ‘initial text’. Did you agree?
I don’t agree with Mike on this, but it’s a very common view. And you’re right, it’s impossible really to talk about the “original” of the books of the Hebrew Bible, given how they were composed and distributed over the centuries, and given our very bad manuscript evidence. The reason for wanting an “original” text is that people who read a book want to know what the author said. So when I read Dickens, or Austin, or Shakespeare — I want to know the words they used. For the NT, of course, the issue is more involved, since so many people want to know what *God* said, exactly, word for word. I’m not one of those, but when I study, say, the Gospel of Mark or the letter to the Romans, I want to interpret the authors words, and the presupposes that I know what they were.
Bart: “So when I read Dickens, or Austin, or Shakespeare — I want to know the words they used.”
My youngest son (also an atheist by the way) is nevertheless a huge fan of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Last Christmas I gave him a copy that includes photographs of his complete hand-written draft with scratch-outs and insertions. I’ve also seen similar photos of some of Samuel Clemens’ (Mark Twain) manuscripts. It’s really cool to see the mind of a genius at work.
My son is a purest for the original version and hated the very dark version of A Christmas Carol produced by the BBC/FX last year. One of the executive producers was Ridley Scott. I loved it and highly recommend it if anyone gets a chance to see it, but be forewarned it is very dark indeed.
Your son has good taste. My wife and I used to read A Christmas Carol out loud every Christmas eve. I need to get that edition.
A Christmas Carol: The Original Manuscript Edition:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-christmas-carol-charles-dickens/1123506662?ean=9780393608649
A first-ever trade edition of the original manuscript of the beloved Christmas classic.
Every year at the holidays, the historic Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan displays one of the crown jewels of its extraordinary collection: the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with its detailed emendations, deletions, and insertions in Dickens’s own hand. Here, for the first time in a beautiful trade edition, A Christmas Carol: The Original Manuscript Edition presents a facsimile of that invaluable manuscript, along with a typeset version of the story, a fascinating introduction by the Morgan’s chief literary curator on the history of the story, and a new foreword by Colm Tóibín celebrating its timeless appeal.
THanks!
Would Paul REALLY CARE how ‘academics’ deconstructed his letters? He was smart enough to grasp people’s motives. He wasn’t uneducated – he became one of the most influential people in Christianity. At the end of Acts Paul was with Mark – one of the greatest historians of the ancient world. And both men spoke of Jesus, the most famous man in history.
Jesus was more than a match for lawyers, scribes and religious cognoscenti. Matt 11:25 says He REJOICED that ‘these things are hidden from the wise and prudent.’
Not ‘understood’, not ‘approved’ but ‘rejoiced.’ Think about it.
It matters big time if a painting of a Vermeer is a Meegeren fake. It might matter to some if Shakespeare didn’t write all his works. But whether Paul wrote the Pauline letters, and when and how, makes no difference at all – that’s just a tool for people to excuse themselves from the existential, human these writings raise.
What do we mean by the term “original”?
I understand why you stress that those differences don’t matter for a single thing. And your point is a general one.
Dr. William Lane Craig accuses you of being a double agent on the matter of textual variances, being conservative in the academic circles and liberal in the public view.
You shifted from the meaning of “importance” to whom is “important”.
It’s very smart to hide behind semantics.
As usual, he gets that completely wrong. My views are entirely consistent. If you have a questoin about what he claims is a contradiction in my views, I’m happy to explain it. Normally he just doesn’t understand the nuances of what I say.
Dr. William Lane Craig’s claims are trivial.
I just stated that you ducked from the problem of the importance of textual variances to the meaning of the word “original.”
Consistency is very important in the academic arena, but consistent people bore me like hell. Sometimes I feel a historian is one who believes that something less than anything has happened.
I”m not sure what you mean that I ducked it. If you think I’ve been inconsistent somehow, let me know why you think so.
You mentioned that Paul wrote this letter from prison. I find it curious that he would be able to have access to a scribe in prison, or even be able to write from prison. If so few people were literate back then, why have papyrus and ink available even if inclined to give a prisoner that luxury? If there is hard evidence that this sort of thing happened I can accept it, but is there evidence? And if not, is it plausible?
Friends would have brought him the writing materials; prisons didn’t supply prisoners with what they needed — they just kept them shut up. Their needs were provided by others.
I really love this thread. I have a couple of tangential questions. First, isn’t it true that there were no dictionaries? And that there wasn’t even any standardization of spelling? i.e. if a writer spelled the same word three different ways in one paragraph, even though they were inconsistent, none of those alternatives would have any unambiguous claim to be the “correct” vs. an “incorrect” spelling. Second, I’m guessing that ancient Greek phonetics did not provide nearly as many opportunities for variant spellings of the same word as modern English does. Am I correct in suspecting that many more of the variant readings are due to the grammar of Ancient Greek allowing for so many different word orders rather than due to different spellings of the same word?
Yes, that’s right about correct spelling. Phonetics did allow lots of different spellings of the same words in Greek. And there are more changes in spelling in the mss than word order, though both are common.
I can relate to Paul, in that I communicate much better through writing than talking. Oh how I love my speech impediment!
They put forward two,
Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also called Justus,
and Matthias. Acts 1:23
10 Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, greets you, and Mark, the cousin of Barnabas (concerning whom you received commandments, “if he comes to you, receive him”), 11
and Jesus who is called Justus.
These are my only fellow workers for God’s Kingdom who are of the circumcision, men who have been a comfort to me. Colossians 4:10-12
Was Josephus writing as Justus, Jesus, and others? Saul? Paul? Josephus father of Justus? Joseph father of Jesus?
Agrippa spared Justus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_of_Tiberias
Josephus children are Flavius Hyrcanus, Flavius Simonides Agrippa, Flavius Justus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus
Sorry — I’m not sure what you’re asking.
Great post!
You wrote “I’ll say more about the copies of Paul’s letters in my next post.”. Where did it go? Next post is about the problem of suffering as far as I can see?
Suppose that we have two copies of Philippians that date to 350 CE. They contain lots of errors, but don’t have many errors in common. Then we can reconstruct an earlier text from the parts were they both agree, right? (I guess this is what you do all day.) Can we assume some kind of “mutation rate” at which errors happen, and therefore guess the number of copies that have been made and the time that has passed since the common origin of the two? If we do this analysis for all manuscripts, do we get a common origin close to Paul’s time?
No one has been able to do so, no. But as you intimate, the study of the mss of the NT is both very old and extremely intense — I have friends who have devoted most of their waking hours to thinking and working on it for thirty years.
Sorry for speculating as a layman, but this seems like a promising field then? With how “Big Data” is (was?) all the rage… Are the old papyri and manuscripts available in well-formatted text somewhere? If so, doing the initial clustering seems easy. I guess the hard part is to come up with a model for “errors per copy” and “copies per year”. And maybe there’s too much cross-copying between multiple manuscripts and other forms of not-parent-child transmissions so that the parent-child model just doesn’t work… But it would be really interesting to see something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:Homo_lineage_2017update.svg for biblical texts like Philippians, with textual variations replacing fossils.
Thanks. Scholars in Birmingham England and Muenster Germany have been working on this kind of thing, but I’m not sure what modeing methods they’ve used….
The Egyptian hieroglyphic texts are ‘original’, are they not?
Perhaps Yahweh (this wurd sounds like levantine Arabic)
ought to hav taken a leaf out of Ra’s book.
In Islam, the motif of originality has become a credal slogan.
Muslims insist the Quran is ‘original’; and the ‘Gospel’ reveal’d to Jesus; Torah reveal’d to Mosis aren’t. Muslims use Prof Ehrmans wurks to bolster their belief the Bible is currupt.
The iruny is that the Quran charges Jews and Christians with misreadings – by and large ie that they actually have access to the pristine originals.
The Quran itself lacks any original text – it’s more oral with a chain of guarantors. Any variants are ‘authorised’.
I don’t know what you mean by originals. Are you asking if the texts we still find on buildings etc. in Egypt were composed for the occasion? Yes.
Hello Dr. Ehrman, quick question about Paul. What is your *personal* opinion on his state of mind? Do you think he was insane? (having any number of the known psychological pathologies we know today) Or was he purposely making things up?
I realize it’s impossible to know for sure, but what is your sense on this?
I don’t think he was either insane or making stuff up. I think he said and wrote what he really thought and believed.
Yes, I know that Paul belived what he wrote deeply without a doubt, what I think I’m asking is your opinion on his state of mind; he was clearly wrong about everything,
yet he wrote with such immense conviction. Is it your personal opinon that it was all simply in his head?
I understand you’re not a psychologist, but since becoming an atheist/agonist, what is your current thinking on a person like Paul?
Yes, I think everything that every one of us thinks is completely in our head! But I don’t think he was wrong about everything. He was probably wrong about as often as just about everyone else in his world was wrong (e.g., about religious realities).
Dr. Ehrman,
1. But isn’t Pauls entire message/belief system reliant on his expectation of the world ending? Doesn’t that mean he was completely wrong? I Don’t mean he was right/wrong about his personal philosophy.
2. One last question. Below some one asks about miracles.
In your opinion does a person like Luke who is obviously highly trained and very intelligent truly believe the miracles he describes or is he inventing and embellishing stories hoping a future generation takes them as serious accounts?
(English is not my first language, please excuse all grammar.)
If Paul says that you should love one another, that could be true even if his saying so was based on his apocalyptic view; and yes, Luke almost certainly believed in what we call miracles. 99.9% of the ancient world did, whether educated or not. I suppose a huge percentage of the modern world does as well, even very, very highly educated people. Luke of course may have invented or embellished some of his stories, but if they occur in other sources independently (many of the miracles) then of course he would not have made them up (since others knew the same stories but not from him.)
Yes thank you, that makes a lot of sense. But some one like Luke or Mathew or the other gospel writers who have taken old sources both oral and written then compiled them…I’m assuming they must have also created much of Jesus’ dialogue? Don’t they themselves see this as a problem?
I guess I’m asking this because if it were me, I would have no problem relaying a message that was given to me and copying it word for word, but filling in all the blanks as I went a long would make me feel like a fraud. Someone like John making outlandish claims decades after Jesus death doesn’t himself understand this? Outright creating dialogues in Jesus name after the fact .
I realize I’m asking the impossible which is to get inside an authors mind. But what is your sense on their way of thinking? Manufacturing the saviors words if you will.
An ancient historian such as Thucydides states that writers necessarily had to make up the speeches on their characters’ lips. How else would they be able to say what they said. When it came to the Gospels, there was probably some of that, but most of the time I’d suppose the Gospel writers had *heard* that Jesus said this that or the other thing and so were reporting what they had heard from others.
Hello Professor, 2 quick questions regarding Paul and Christian belief.
1) When Paul writes to his various communities why does he make his theology so complicated? (To the point that even modern theologians and scholars find it difficult to decipher). Does he not understand that most of his audience is likely a lot less educated? Is he just showing off?
2) I am not personally a Christian, but If I was I would certainly have trouble with the fact there are clear forgeries and failed predictions in the cannon.
If Paul went around thinking he himself was divinely inspired (in communication with Jesus) preaching the end of the world but ultimately being wrong, how do Christians not find this troubling today? It just seems like the Christian god is barely in control of his own word. Ignoring the problem of suffering could you personally still believe today Professor knowing the immense problems?
(If Paul’s entire theology revolves around the world ending and believers resurrecting, how do people not find this troubling, Paul being in direct communication with god yet getting this important part so wrong!?)
1. I’d say that probalby his audiences had a much better idea of what he meant than we do, since he had spent a lot of time with them talking about these things and we’re coming it out of the blue; 2. Yes, many Christians do have trouble with that. But others not as much. Many Christians think the Bible can be important for Christian faith without being infallible.
Dr Ehrman, I just recently saw your debate with Peter J. Williams…(very weirdly interesting)
Do you think that these types of debates/conversations are overall nonsense? That like people “feel” things previously and then their overall judgement is absolutely clouded? No true point to any of this overall?. Wouldn’t any belief system be correct then? How do you deal with this? Do people not understand the variety of religious experience.?
I think there are usually a couple or a few people who might be willing to change their minds, and some people who really are on the fence. But, yeah, most of the time people watch in order to see their guy cream the other guy.
Hello, 2 quick questions.
1. Would it be fair to say that Mathew, Luke, and John are superior members of society…the most Elite?
2. From your perspective, does the gospel of mark have importance….not as a historical document…but for example Would “Q” be more valuable?
1. Well, they were far more highly educated than most, but no one would have considered them among the truly elite.
2. I think Mark is highly valuable as a narrative that presents an astounding understanding of Jesus, whether or not it’s historical.
1. Well, they were far more highly educated than most, but no one would have considered them among the truly elite.
Dr Ehrman – Have you written any post about the miracles written in the New Testament that were supposedly done by the apostles? including Paul? were these made up intentionally to make people believe that they held the truth?
Yes, I’ve written on them a bit; you can do a word search for “miracle.” But no, I don’t think the early Christians were lying about it all; my sense is that they — like many modern Christians — really believe that miracles happened in their own day.
Hi Prof. Ehrman.
Question on Paul’s motivation: I have read some of your great books and have been wondering about Paul’s Damascus experience as a motivation to convert. As I read it, he appeared to be sincere in his report of meeting Jesus, as well as his subsequent letters.
We also know he reported a bodily ailment in Galatians 4:13. This would suggest that he might have sought treatment of some sort, either by self-medicating or by approaching a healer of some sort.
My hypothesis is this: There are several papers that report the use and abuse of drugs in the ancient world (examples below) as medicines and ‘cures’ would have been very experimental but also very common. One of the sources below report for example: “…they will tell you that ‘paradoxical’ is a fitting descriptor of its effects. Seeing, feeling and thinking seemingly impossible scenarios are the characteristic symptoms of this and other psychedelic drugs.”
Of course this can never be proven, but could an accidental dose account for Paul’s sudden re-assessment of his position on Christ?
I’d love to hear your views on this.
https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2014/07/psychedelics-and-the-ancient-near-east/
https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/3/2/article-p43.xml
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050654/
Kind regards
It’s *possible* of course, but I can’t think of anything that would make it likely.