Loading...As I was thinking today about the need to be consistently critical with all of our sources – not just the ones we want to be critical of (this was the topic of yesterday’s post, with an ultimate view of what I want to say about Josephus as a possible witness to the practice of Jews burying their executed dead on the days of their deaths) — another anecdote occurred to me that I thought might help illustrate my point. Here it is. In the next post I get to Josephus, I promise.
As some of you know, I have had a number of debates with evangelical Christians on the question of whether we know what the original writings of the New Testament actually said. The typical line from these evangelical Christians is that since we have so *many* surviving manuscripts of the NT, that we can be almost completely certain that we know what the authors wrote in the vast majority of cases (virtually all). My view is that we simply cannot know for sure. It’s true that we have *way* more manuscripts for the NT than for any other ancient book (without a close second). But the problem is that we do not have lots and lots of *early* manuscripts. Having thousands of manuscripts from some 800 years after the NT was originally written is, of course, extremely valuable. But it’s not really helpful if what you want to know is what the earliest form of the text was. For that we have to rely on our earliest manuscripts, and we simply don’t have very many.
In any case, I don’t need to rehearse this entire debate here, yet again. But in thinking about this need to be consistently critical of our sources of information about the past, I was reminded of an argument that is often thrown out at me in opposition to my views about the original writings of the New Testament. I have on several occasions had an opponent say to me, with a kind of triumphalistic glee, that if I don’t think that we can know for sure what the authors of the NT originally wrote, then I would have to say that we don’t know for sure what *any* ancient authors wrote: Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Livy, Cicero, Plutarch – take your pick!
This statement is usually made as a self-evident argument, that of *course* I can’t be saying something as ludicrous as *that* — otherwise we simply can’t know what any of our ancient sources originally said.
And my response always seems to surprise my opponents.
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“The only reason you don’t hear about it is because you do not hang around with classicists or read classical scholarship!”
This is a real problem with much biblical exegesis, and not just that of fundamentalists. I followed the discussion of three classicists reading the NT in Greek. It was very amusing to see how many matters of hard-won consensus of crticial biblical scholarship over the past couple of centuries were completely missing from their interpretations. On the other hand, it was also very refreshing to hear the read the text without any of the baggage of these centuries of debate. There are a few (too few) classically trained exegetes that have greatly illuminated my reading of the biblical texts.
Have you put together (even if just for your own reference) your own annotated set of the Gospels indicating which portions you think are probably authentic, possibly authentic, and probably not authentic, with (continually updated) notes and references setting out your basis for each of those “calls”?
Never have! My sense is that *most* of what we have in the Gospels *probably* goes back to the authors themselves….
Don’t Christians have even a stronger case though because not only do they have the many manuscripts, as you say, but they have the early church fathers to compare?
Yes indeed! But these are problematic too: we don’t have exact quotations of any use till the end of the second century, and those are in works of fathers that are *themselves* found only in later manuscripts.
When people say the Bible is inerrant, they often offer what they consider to be evidence in favor of that position. But I think their real reason (at least, based on what I once believed) is the belief that God guided the Bible writers. This removes the argument from the realm of rational evidence-based thought, which makes it pretty hard to have a rational discussion about it.
One of the main things that revolutionized my way of thinking about the Bible was the challenge to evaluate my own religious beliefs in the same way I would evaluate other religious beliefs. I have fundamentalist friends who tell me their starting point is that the Bible is the true and accurate Word of God and everything else is based on that premise. They can’t see the fallacy in such an approach. Thankfully I had enough rational thought left in me that I overcame such thinking. Dr. E, you among others have been very instrumental in helping me analyze religious ideas on a rational not cultural or emotional basis. Thanks!
On a side but related issue, while I hesitate to bring up what was an unpleasant experience for you, this reminds me of your debate with James White. In his debate with you, James White kept suggesting that your standard of accuracy in copying (“photocopying”) Biblical texts is unreasonably high — absolute perfection. James White says
“I would like Dr. Ehrman to explain this assertion: is he saying that he is willing to demonstrate that there are variants in the New Testament where none of the extant readings could possibly be original, or is he applying the impossible standard of absolute certainty on every single variant, which would require absolute perfection of copying? Which would mean, of course, that Scripture could not even have been revealed until at least the printing press, or more likely the photocopier. We quoted Dr. Ehrman speaking of the miracle of inspiration requiring the miracle of preservation. I would like to assert that the issue is not if God preserved His Word, but how. Dr. Ehrman seems to have concluded many years ago that preservation would require perfection of copying, something not seen in any ancient document.”
I had hoped that I would hear you point out that unlike the Bible, nobody claims that these other ancient documents are the inspired and inerrant word of God. These types of fundamentalists want to eat their cake and have it to. Why would God have had to wait for the advent of a photocopier, when he has the power of miracles, and why is absolute perfection in copying impossible in the context of a God which (who?) could apparently transmit an inerrant history to individual men over many decades? The inconsistencies are astounding, and the blindness to these inconsistencies is frustrating. Comment?
The other problem is that we *don’t* need copy machines for perfect copies to be created. We simply need very careful copyists.
I reread Dr. Larry Hurtado’s review of your book which appeared recently in Christian Century. At times, he seems respectful of your work and then at other times he seems condescending and less respectful. I found that to be confusing. I think constructive criticism can be done in a respectful manner.
I’ve come across more than a few passages in Plato and Aristotle that were so mystifying I suspected they had been garbled by copyists. But do you think copyists had much motivation to change those authors’ texts deliberately? Both in ancient and modern times, there were people for whom a single Biblical verse was very important indeed–a matter of life and death, or even more important than that. As prestigious as Plato and Aristotle may have been, I’m not sure if any single sentence in their works ever carried that sort of weight.
My feeling is that any copyist who deliberately changed the NT text would have regarded himself as “clarifying” it and “protecting it against heretical misinterpretations.” Would copyists have been so concerned about misinterpretations of Plato and Aristotle?
The upshot is that we might actually be in a somewhat better position with regard to other ancient texts than we are with the NT.
Yes, I think deliberate alterations were far more common with the NT than with the classics.
As a grad student in Classics, I agree that we do not always consider a larger number of manuscripts to get us to a more accurate reconstruction of the original. For example, we have hundreds of later manuscripts of Lucan’s Pharsalia, but that is only because Lucan’s epic was popular during the Middle Ages. It also helped that Lucan was the nephew of Seneca (who was also popular during the period), which probably caused him to have more medieval readers.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that we always know the original words better. The Pharsalia has about as many textual issues as the text of any other Latin epic. So I never get why apologists make such a big deal about the “mountain of manuscripts” for the NT. That just means more people bothered to make copies of the text. A large amount of later copies is not necessarily better than a few earlier copies.
Dr. Ehrman, would agree that the larger numerical quantity of surviving Christian manuscripts over Pagan ones owes itself primarily to these causes?
1. Christian texts, and especially the books of the NT and translations of the OT (particularly in Greek and Latin), were copied more than Pagan texts during the Middle Ages. After all, Christian monks dominated the apparatus of textual transmission during that period.
2. Even when we have a larger number of pre-medeival manuscripts, the early Christians made use of the codex, which was a writing medium that owed itself to better preservation than scrolls. Hence, we get a lot more codices of the NT that survive from late antiquity than scrolls of Pagan works.
Are there any other major factors, Dr. Ehrman, that you think have caused the numerical superiority of NT manuscripts over Pagan ones?
Also, simply because we have more copies of a text, and perhaps even a better estimate of the autograph original, does not mean that anything in the text is necessarily factually or historically correct. We could just as easily have a more accurate understanding of the original wording of a false statement.
Do you think, Dr. Ehrman, that the larger number of NT manuscripts over Pagan manuscripts has any bearing on the overall historical reliability of the NT? I do not see any sequitur, but I see apologists insinuating this notion a lot.
I think point 1 is the main thing. Pagan texts were copied in codices in the middle ages, no? In any event, you have me curious: why would a codex last longer than a scroll?
Hi Dr. Ehrman,
Here is what Reynolds and Wilson (“Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature,” pg. 34) have to say about the durability of the codex, particularly the parchment codex:
“The codex did not come into use for pagan literature until the second century; but it rapidly gained ground in the third, and triumphed in the fourth. It could be made of either papyrus or parchment, but it was the parchment codex that eventually won the day. Although papyrus is tougher than most people think and a roll might last as long as 300 years (Galen 18(2).630), the average life would be shorter, and parchment was a much more durable material ; in its time its toughness was to prove a vital factor in the survival of classical literature.”
Likewise, Reynolds and Wilson (pp. 34-35) note:
“The impulse to change the format of the book must have come from the early Christians; for while the pagan codex was a rarity in the second century, the codex form was already universal for the biblical text.”
Here is when the transfer from papyrus scrolls to the codex becomes a major problem for the survival of a lot of pagan texts. As Reynolds and Wilson (pg. 35) explain:
“The change from roll to codex involved the gradual but wholesale transference of ancient literature from one form to another. this was the first major bottle-neck through which classical literature had to pass. It must have been somewhat reduced in the process, but the losses are no easily specified or assessed. there was the danger that little-read works would not be transferred to codex form, and in time their rolls would perish. A voluminous author, if some of his rolls were not available at a critical moment, might never recover his missing books.”
My understanding of the information above is:
1. Codices (especially parchment codices) were more durable than papyrus scrolls.
2. The codex replaced the scroll, with the result that works, which were previously contained in scrolls, near the end of late antiquity were transferred to the codex form.
3. The NT easily followed the transition, since the Gospels and the other books of the NT used the codex from the beginning.
4. Pagan texts, which were originally copied on scrolls, were not all copied over to the new codex medium.
5. If you were not copied over to the codex, your trail of textual transmission ended there, since virtually all the manuscripts that survive for classical texts today came down to us through the codex.
My thoughts are thus that the transfer to the codex must, in part, be responsible for a sizable loss of pagan literature. Add to this the fact that Christian works (and especially the Bible) were copied more during the Middle Ages, and gradually with time more and more Christian manuscripts were produced, while pagan manuscripts gradually decayed and disappeared.
OK, I get it now. Yes, the preservation is not because of hte format (scroll or codex) but because of hte writing material (papyrus or parchment).
There is, of course, no need to go back so far to demonstrate the tentative nature of any source at any time. A very current debate surrounds the question of the start of the First World War – lots of sources, lots of disagreement about what this participant meant, said, wrote or was reported to have meant, said or wrote, which, needless to add, can materially affect one’s conclusion regarding the commencement of the war. This is with a wealth of material at hand, which ought to make sorting out the truth a little more straightforward. It is anything but. The dearth that attends the classical period on any topic makes the job vastly more difficult and the conclusions more tentative.
Historians will never be unemployed because of the need of each generation to tell the tale of the past in light of its present, and the constant “finding” of either new facts or the routine new interpretation of those facts. This applies doubly when the facts are relatively scarce as they are for our period.
I guess I am surprised that Bart has been challenged on this rather unremarkable truism.
The explanation, of course, is we’re dealing with divine revelation and not inconsequential matters such as what Lloyd George said in Cabinet meeting in late July, 1914.
Speaking of earliest manuscripts…
The Huffington Post ran a piece a few days ago in the Religion section by a Jesuit priest talking about the civil war in Syria and the advance of ISIS in Iraq. He said that in some of the old Christian communities that are being targeted by ISIS that some of our oldest manuscripts have been burned.
Do you know if this is true, and if so, are they really some of the oldest (I assume they would have at least been photographed, correct?)
Here’s a link to the story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-mr-michael-rogers-sj/losing-our-religion-the-d_b_5615369.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
I don’t know, but it sounds very ominous. (I would assume these are ancient manuscripts in Syriac.)
Under what methodological heading does common sense and rationale fall? Has anyone developed a list of weighted percentiles in which the historical methods rank? I can see the overall importance of each as to the bigger picture, but do you feel certain methods carry more historical weight than others?
Yes, some try to do history by statistics (Bayes Theorem, e.g.,) but most historians have nothing to do with that. Establishing what happened in antiquity is done more or less the way it is done in a courtroom or by anyone trying to figure out what actually happened recently. You look for lots of witnesses, near to the time of the events, who have grounds for knowing, who collaborate one another’s testimony, without having corroborated — etc.
” if I don’t think that we can know for sure what the authors of the NT originally wrote, then I would have to say that we don’t know for sure what *any* ancient authors wrote: Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Livy, Cicero, Plutarch – take your pick!”
One wonders what the reaction would be if you asked whether they new the numbers of manuscripts for each or if you noted that 10 Platonic manuscripts from say 330 BCE would be more significant for determining what Plato actually wrote than say a thousand or more separated from their autographs by centuries.
This argument often seems to be made based on the idea that your just being unfair to Jesus (as one person put it)