Loading...QUESTION:
I am curious about the early patristic evidence for the various Gospels and other New Testament writings. As I understand these are helpful in establishing the dates for many of these works. Related to this is, when early Church Fathers quote passages from NT writings, are they usually verbatim or do they often differ from the canon that was eventually established? Perhaps my question is a bit broad, but feel free to narrow or expand as time allows.
RESPONSE:
This is a good set of questions, and I may make two or three posts on it, depending on how it goes. As it turns out, it is an issue I’ve long been interested in. In fact, when I started doing serious research in the textual criticism of the New Testament – back when I was in the last year of my Master’s Program – this was the one topic I was most interested in: the Patristic evidence for the text of the NT. (Patristic = Writings of the Church Fathers.) I told my mentor and advisor, Bruce Metzger, that I wanted to do a PhD dissertation in that sub-specialization of textual criticism; he suggested I work on the citations of the NT in the writings of the fourth-century writer Didymus the Blind; and I did. That ended up being my dissertation. It was the first volume to be published in a series edited by a textual scholar named Gordon Fee, and called The New Testament in the Greek Fathers. After Fee’s term as editor in chief was up, I took on the position myself and stayed on editing the series for six years. And so, I have long and deep interests in the study of the writings of the church fathers and their quotations of the NT text.
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Gordon Fee is also the author of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and Discovering Biblical Equality, among other works.
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This sounds interesting. Can you suggest a source book that would contain a selection of patristic writings that won’t force me to pawn the crown jewels? 😀
I”m afraid they are extensive. There are lots of new editions of many of the church Fathers. A standard collection of the *set* comes in two very large multi-volume editions of over a century ago: The Ante-Nicene Fathers and The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. You can get them still, in nice hard-cover editions, online.
Both of those books are on Google books (http://books.google.com/). The first in it’s entirety, but not the second although much of the Post-Nicene book (several volumes by the way!) is still readable.
Wow! Wow! Wow! I just finished studying your 24 lectures in “The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History” course produced by The Teaching Company. These lectures are really terrific. For many years, I attended many different churches for extended periods of time. I finally stopped attending churches not because of a difference in beliefs, but because I felt that religion is really, really important, important enough to merit a respectful, critical examination of crucial questions which churches do not provide. To be fair, some Unitarian fellowships provide some of this, just not enough. In contrast, your course lectures, debates, and books respectfully and critically examine crucial questions. Moreover, your “Greatest Controversies” course, except for a couple of sections on Gnosticism, which I just could not understand, provide such an examination with unusual clarity especially when contrasted with the other Teaching Company courses of other lecturers. In all honesty, I probably had trouble following the concepts about Gnosticism because these concepts are so strange, at least to me. Your lectures in the “Greatest Controversies” series on the virgin birth, The Resurrection, and the Trinity, and on whether or not the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses are especially helpful. Your organized argument contending that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses is very convincing. Such a conclusion obviously challenges the historical reliability of the Gospels and is contrary to what many Christians claim and preach with so much certainty. Hence, this review is quite important. Keep writing and teaching. Thanks so very much.
Are there any lectionaries available from the Patristic era, and could these lectionary texts (if available from that period) shed any light on the NT text they possessed?
Yes, there are lots of lectionaries, but most are not early (so it depends how you define “patristic” era). These are usually numbered among the Greek manuscripts.
For anybody who is interested, Daniel Wallace has some ITunes videos on NT manuscripts. They are broken down into several different sections. Some include ancient writing materials and paper, disputed texts, church fathers, etc. To my knowledge, he hasn’t added anything to them in quite some time. But there are around forty videos averaging eight minutes or so. Hope this helps.
” since Latin was the language of the West and that’s where most of the Christians were ” I have thought that right up until Constantine , Christianity was primarily urban and that the East was more urbanized than the West . Another misconception on my part ?
Well, it was urban and both east and west. But I was thinking of the Middle Ages, when most of the mss were produced.
I read a Christian article once saying that all the verses in the New Testament were quoted by early Church fathers hence therefore this proves that the New Testament is in its original form (his argument not mine). Any thoughts?
That’s what my posts were on! The problems are that the NT is not quoted extensively in *early* church fathers, that the fathers all quote the NT in different ways, that even within the fathers’ quotations there are variations for this or that verse quoted, and that we don’t actually have the fathers’ writings either, but only later manuscripts in which their own words have also been changed. Almost everyone who makes this argument has never actually worked with the Father’s texts. (The first father to quote the NT extensively in Greek is Origen; I wrote a book on his quotations of John)
/I wrote a book on his quotations of John/
Which book would that be?
The Text of the Fourth Gospel in the Writings of Origen.
Hello,
I have compiled an article on the matter:
https://islamicarchives.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/can-the-new-testament-be-reconstructed-from-the-writings-of-the-church-fathers-muslims-answer/
Have you ever heard it said that if all the Bibles and Biblical manuscripts in the world were destroyed tomorrow, we could reconstruct all but 11 verses of the NT from the writings of the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers alone? Recently, in an interview featuring NT textual critic, Daniel Wallace, we learn that this claim is demonstrably false.
Daniel Wallace mentions the following :
Islamic-Awareness concludes the following:
Admitting the best case scenario, more than 50% of the New Testament is missing according to the manuscript evidence. This hardly equates with eleven missing verses (~0.1%) as is frequently propagated in the missionary and apologetical literature. We have also observed that the alleged time frame for the completion of this work – set at two months in the literature – is also untrue.
For a period of more than 165 years missionary and apologetical publications, whether they are in the form of books, articles, audio/video cassettes, radio programs, TV shows, internet, etc., have all continued to selectively repeat in full or in part the anecdote attributed to Dalrymple, highlighting only those aspects of the anecdote which served the purposes of spreading the good news. None of the authors, from the past or present, have attempted to study the original documents in order to verify those claims which we now know to be false. Josh McDowell hailed this piece of information as new evidence that demands a verdict. In reality it is a two hundred year old anecdote based on a third hand account, whose recollection (transmission) is questionable, and whose results have been grossly exaggerated and fabricated. Perhaps it is best to finish with some words from Dalrymple himself. In a short unpublished tract entitled Habits(advice on how children should be taught) under subsection Avoidances Or Bad Habits, he advised:
Taken from:
https://theosophical.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/modern-myth-all-but-11-verses-of-the-nt-could-be-constructed-from-the-writings-of-the-early-church-fathers/
http://www.apologetics315.com/2013/06/daniel-b-wallace-interview-transcript.html
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Bible/Text/citations.html
Since we know that we don’t have any of the originals of the church father writings and whatever we have are from scribes who came later on. So my question is..what is the earliest manuscript we have from the writings of the church fathers? And could you name specific examples where scribes changed what the originals words of the church fathers could have been?
Hmmm… I’m not sure I know. There are some bits going back to the fourth or third century, I seem to recall, but I don’t really know “the earliest” And yes, there are hundreds and hundreds examples, all over the map. If you can read any of the languages, just get a critical edition of a Latin or Greek father and you’ll see. Same kinds of changes you get for the NT.