Loading...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 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)? And 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…
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“I’ll say more about the copies of Paul’s letters in my next post.”
This material is fascinating.
So much for biblical literalness.
Definitely “eye-opening” … if not mind boggling as an exegesis of this nature only leads to more and more questions.
These are all very good reasons to not overestimate a possible interpretation of an obscure text in Paul’s letters (or any obscure Bible verse). Data mining on such passages is of course interesting in itself (and a main occupation for NT scholars) , but it does not carry much weight? How can we say if something is the result of a faulty transmission or if it is the result of a highly subjective religious mystic who is inventing expressions then and there, to suit his immediate emotional state, with little consideration for his overall consistency of thinking?
I guess, in response to your first couple of sentences, that it depends on whether it is important to know what the authors of the Bible said or not. If it doesn’t much matter, then no, this kind of consideration does not much matter either.
This reminds me more than anything of “The Satanic Verses.”
This is interesting: “…but between the time he did the dictation and the time he corrected the copy, he changed his mind…” Even God changes His mind, so this would still be a potential problem even if Paul’s epistles were divinely inspired and the reason he changed his mind is that God made him change it. We would never know what God originally told Paul to write.
No wonder the church so stresses this not so small matter of “faith”.
Last week I was looking for more info on something you were discussing on the blog and while googling the subject I came across a blog by a group of Christian scholars who were talking about your many discussions of how we don’t have the original of any book of the Bible. Their explanation was that we might not have the originals that were written by Paul and the other authors of the NT, but this might be because God doesn’t want believers to because maybe Christians would come to revere those works in an unhealthy manner. But, they say, surely within all of the known copies found throughout history the words of the originals are found within those texts in bits and pieces, a few in this papyrus and few in that one, etc.!
I’d love to see how they’d rationalize their belief given your current topic. Fascinating stuff!
Wow.