(21 votes, average: 4.90 out of 5)
Loading...I have been talking about different kinds of changes made in our surviving New Testament manuscripts, some of them accidental slips of the pen (that’s probably the vast majority of our textual variants) and others of them intentional alterations. One of the points that I’ve been trying to stress is that at the end of the day it is, technically speaking, impossible to know what a scribe’s “intentions” were (or if he had any, other than the intention of copying a text). None of the scribes is around to be interviewed, and so – as with a lot of history – there is a good bit of scholarly guess-work that has to be done.
This guess work is not simply shooting in the dark, however. And it is dead easy for a highly trained expert to tell the difference between informed guesswork and just plain guesswork. But at the end of the day we are always talking about historical probabilities, not historical certainties, when it comes to figuring out why a scribed decided to change a text.
And in some places it is very hard indeed to tell whether a change was made intentionally or not.
Let me give a prime example, again drawn from the Gospel of Mark. This one occurs right off the bat. In fact, it is in verse 1.
There is a significant variant in the opening line of Mark’s Gospel. It may not seem significant at first, but in fact the more you study Mark’s Gospel, the more significant you realize it is. The way Mark is said to begin in most manuscripts is this (these are the opening words):
The Rest of This Post Is For Members Only. If you don’t belong yet, JOIN UP AND SEE THE LIGHT!!!
I took a college course in New Testament Greek, but have never heard of “nomina sacra.” How interesting. Sounds like abbreviations now used in “text messages.”
Yeah, kinda like…
Has a manuscript ever been found where a scribe does something in between the extremes of including or leaving out the four letters by leaving out just some of them? If I write theta as O since I don’t know the ascii code then I mean something like, instead of YYOY:
YY or YO or OY or YYO or YOY or maybe even a misspelling such as OYY
if so, then it seems like one could lean more towards the opinion of the omission of all 4 letters being more of an accident that intentional.
Not that I know of; there is one manuscript (known as 28, from the eleventh century) that has something slightly different by way of omission, but I’m not sure what it is)
Another question out of blog context as I continue to watch your videos. Where did the concept of someone whether God, SemiGod or Human having the capacity or power et al to take on another’s sins not to mention the sins of the world originate? It is not in Buddhism or yoga. Have you written about this aspect. If so please suggest ! Totally intriguing.
I find this concept alone extraordinary but again historically where did it originate?
I suppose the idea of a substitutionary death can be found in most sacrificial cultures (not to mention ones that practice human sacrifice!)
You know that I live in a culture where human sacrifice was prevalent until the Spanish conquest and was still practiced among the Mayan Lacondones of Chiapas until the mid 1970s (the then Mexican president told them to stop it/it was bad for tourism:) and of course the neighboring Toltecs and later Aztecs practiced on a horrific scale … but within these cultures sacrifice had nothing to do with transference or substitution of sin. A little known book by the late Jungian Dr. John W. Perry The Kingship Cycle talks about human sacrifice comparatively and again unconnected with sin but more with fertility. Was the Jewish purpose of lamb sacrifice in the temple then a substitutionary act for sins?
Not the Passover sacrifice, but other sacrifices appear to have been atoning. Biblical scholars have long and protracted debates about the meaning and function of Jewish sacrifice, since the sources that *describe* the sacrifices almost never tell you what they were *for* or what they were supposed to *mean*!
Then I really don’t get how the concept of Christ assuming the sins of the WORLD came about nor what John accomplished by making Christ the lamb in a parallel structure? I’m unclear. Again I find the concept of anyone having or given the capacity to assume the sins of others extraordinary.
It’s probalby because you don’t live in a world that practices cultic sacrifices.
My understanding is that in that time, ‘Son of God’ was an honorific that might be applied to any devout Jewish man. While I’m guessing stories of the Virgin Birth were already in circulation by then, the author of Mark doesn’t make any reference to them, and of course neither did Paul, decades earlier. Meaning that they were still controversial, and a source of division within the larger Christian community. As the generation that knew Jesus as a man died out, and more and more pagans converted, it became less and less controversial to tell that story of divine propagation.
If there is a different venue that you would prefer my asking questions unrelated to the current blog, please tell me… another question from again your videos … Can Christianity with its primary theological emphasis on Christ’s death and resurrection be categorized as a Death Cult? (using the world “cult” as you’ve defined it in one of your videos)
Some have indeed thought of it this way.
I had just finished watching a downloaded BBC documentary that included the decimation of the South American Indigenous by their Spanish conquerors and Catholic priests before continuing with your videos … the combination left me thinking that Christianity is a death cult.
Greetings Dr. Ehrman,
Did you “intentionally” use 3 “that”s in the 6th line from the bottom of your post or was that first “that” an “error” for “thought”?
Probably not!
‘that that *that*’. Is this this this accidental or a deliberate insertion by the author who *intended* to demonstrate how easily the eye can skip words without meaning to? If it’s the latter then I’m ready to claim my prize…
Accidental corruption by the author himself
Great Post Thank You!
“ΑΡΧΗΤΟΥΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΥΙΗΥΧΥΥΥΘΥΚΑΘΩΣΓΕΓΡΑΠΤΑΙ
You can see how easy it would have been for a scribe simply to miss those four letters.”
No I can’t. Not a native Greek speaker. Let’s try that in English:
THEBEGINNINGOFTHEGOSPELOFJSTCTSNGD
What is does look like to me is an apology for trying to explain accidental omission.
Yeah, it’s even worse in Greek since JSTCTSNGD has five letters, three of which are all the same
I almost find your argument persuasive for the shorter reading. The thing that I find troubling in the manuscript evidence is that there are nine Byzantine minuscules that also have the shorter reading (530 582* 820* 1021 1436 1555* 1692 2430 2533), and as far as I know these don’t form any kind of textual cluster. I just don’t see how the shorter reading can have gotten into such a miscellaneous collection of rather bad manuscripts unless it had arisen on several occasions.
As a bit of an aside, the thing that most puzzles me about this variant is that the long form generally quoted (because thus saith Aland) – Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Θεοῦ – looks and feels like an article error, the likeliest explanation being harmonization to Mt 1.1 where Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Δαυὶδ υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ is secure without articles. The support for omitting the article in Mark is very thin: ℵc1 B D L W and a couple of Byzantine minuscules. What we know about these witnesses does not make it any better: D omits the very next article as well (v2); W makes a nearly identical omission at 5.7; B D wrench the word order at Mt 27.54 to get υἱὸς θεοῦ (do they like this phrase or something?); and I would suggest that the similar variant at Lk 20.36 (where the support is only B L 892 for Aland et al’s text; their citation of A is misleading) also needs some re-examination. The version with the article Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ is supported by good Alexandrian (Δ 33 579 892 1342) and Caesarean (f1 f13 565 700) witnesses as well as the Byzantine majority, and better explains the readings of 055 (Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ) and 1241 (Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Κυρίου).
YEs, interesting point about the Byzantine textual cluster — although these are long after the fact of original change. I tend not to think that harmonization is at work where we’re dealing with the presence or absence of an article.
“The way these words were typically abbreviated was by giving only their first letter and their last letter, and drawing a line over the top. It is often thought that this was a more reverential way to write the words.”
Does the Jewish practice of writing “G-d” stem from this, or does it predate it?
That’s an English convention (and so modern), but it is based on a much older view, that hte name of God was so holy that it was not to be pronounced (or, eventually, written)
Ah I didn’t realize that – I’d just assumed they’d done that for a long time even in Hebrew.