Loading...A few days ago I answered a question about whether someone in the very earliest church who was reading one of the Christian writings to his congregation in the church — say, one of the Gospels or one of Paul’s letters — might have *changed* it in places orally so that the people who were listening to him (most of whom wouldn’t be able to read themselves) might have heard something other than what was written. Great question.
In this and the following posts I want to deal with an equally vexed question. Stick with that same situation. That writing the person is reading (unless he is living in the same town as the author and this is just a little while later) is presumably a copy of the original writing, or, more likely, even if it’s just a few years after the original, a copy of a copy. What are the chances that that copy was different in places from the original, and if it was, do we now, today, actually have the original.
I dealt with this question many years ago on the blog and thought I would take it up again, starting with the question that “originally” (!) prompted it — which, I think arbitrarily, was asked about Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
QUESTIONS:
Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing of Paul? Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original? Assuming there were errors made by the person(s) who copied the original letter of Paul to the Philippians, would you agree that the first copy even with some errors still had the original context of the first letter. If you do agree, then is it totally accurate to say that we don’t have the original letter of Paul written to the Philippians? Don’t you think that it’s more accurate to state that we do have the original but it has been altered to some degree? Has the letter to the Philippians written by Paul been altered so much that we can’t really know what the original proclaimed?
RESPONSE:
These are great questions. They have the benefit of making very concrete some of the things that I have said, in general terms, about the textual tradition of the New Testament. I think I might devote a few posts to delving into the issues that the questioner has raised, since the answers are not as simple as one might imagine, and they open up a number of very interesting issues that need to be decided when trying to resolve the questions of (a) what the “original” text of a book like Philippians might have been, and (b) whether we can reasonably hope to know what that original text was.
But before going into detail with various parts of the problems that are involved, let me give here in this post a more rapid-fire shorthand response to each of the questions seriatim. I’ll do that by …
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I would think that the letters of Paul, at least the shorter ones, have a better chance at being a 100% (or at least close) match than other books in the New Testament, simply because they are shorter. It would be hard to copy John by hand without making a typo. Philemon seems like it might be doable.
There are other problems of course. Intentional changes. Letters being spliced. Philemon being copied by later scribes as part of the whole Bible rather than a single letter.
Is there evidence to suggest that even the shorter books probably contain errors/changes?
They certainly do. We have manuscripts that have differences in them, so they were definitely being changed. Again, almost always in insignificant ways.
“Again, almost always in insignificant ways”, why are people so negative towards you? it seems to me you’re quite standard and the life of Jesus you set out seems basically similar to most Christian scholars, i guess the difference is you don’t believe a personal god is possible, and i guess it makes perfect sense that if you don’t accept a god then the apostles couldn’t actually have seen jesus, and his messianic aspirations probably can only be thought of as imminent ones if he never expected to die, the passages that lead us otherwise would then only show what later christians thought.
To tell the truth, I don’t hear from many people who are negative toward me, so I’m a bit unaware of what they say. But those I do know about — you’re right! — don’t realize that most of what I say is simply standard material for biblical scholars. There is very, very little that I teach or lecture on publicly that is something I myself came up with. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of anything….
Some people assume that copies were made by looking at and copying an original. But do we have any evidence from that period that sometimes people wrote down copies from listening to a dictated letter or document? It seems to me that writing while listening, or especially from memory of what was heard, would be very error-prone.
That became a bigger issue later, when multiple copies would be made of a text: if one person reads, and six people transcribe, then in theory you have something like mass production. (Though it actually doesn’t save any time, since it’s the same number of people-hours, or more, actually, since one of them is not copying.). Mistakes can and were made that way, especially when a word that was read aloud was a homonym. But we don’t have recordss of that sort of procedure happening until a few centuries later.
That also adds another possibility of changes – the reader can change the words and the writers can change the words.
IWhat would be different for the other “undisputed” letters? Do we have reason to believe that in one case we are closer to the original than in another?
Same situation for all of them!
Ok ok ok… nobody could ever spell anything in antiquity. Ok ok ok… occasionally somebody skipped a line phrase word or letter or conversely duplicated one.
But dr E… when an intentional alteration or adulteration of the text occurs, what is the evidence that these kinds of intentional changes occurred early?
For example, Did someone delete the phrase “nor the son” from Matt. 24:36 to strengthen his theological position on the divinity of Jesus somewhere between 350 CE and 1500 CE? Yes it appears so. There is evidence to support that theory.
But where is the evidence that anyone made those kinds of changes intentionally among the earliest copies and fragments we do have?
You admit in the above post that it is your guess that we do have a pretty good idea what the original said, what is your evidence for that guess if not comparing the early copy’s and fragments?
It seems to me that the postulation that pre 100 CE major intentional doctrine altering changes in nt manuscripts is conjectural. And as to scribal errors in spelling etc… man, is all this hollering and jumping up and down waving arms and what not in that case, much ado about… nothing?
The same evidence is used for alterations of the text that are intentional and accidental. We look (very carefully!) at ever surviving manuscript witness, at the versions, at the writings of the church fathers, and we collect all the differences among them. We note the dates of the surviving witnesses; we see how they are genealogically related to one another; we explore possible reasons for the alterations; and we establish a plausible date. From about the mid-20th century scholars began adducing reasons for thinking that almost all the variations we find in later witnesses were actually created earlier, that later scribes were reproducing changes for the most part, not creating them. One compelling reason for thinking so is that whenever a new papyrus appears (it happens several times a year still!) if it has an unusual reading in one place or another, it is almost ALWAYS a reading that had previously been known from a much later manuscript. So even though before the discover of the ms. the reading may have been attested late, it turns out it was early. Early papyri almost never contain readings unknown from later witnesses — a very interesting phenomenon.
Well you know… there are those that swear that TR is actually the best representation of the authors’ original intents… I suppose anything is possible.
Off the top of my head I can think of… less than 10 biggies in NT variants. Is there a website where a person could find when the earliest attestation was on these biggie type passages? How many of the gazillion variants in the NT would you consider biggies? On par with Matt. 24:36, mark 16:9ff, John 8, acts 8: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God.”, 1 John 5:7, … are ANY of those attested before the 4th C?
I don’t have a number in mind, but more than 10! If yu’re interested in pursuing them, you might look at my book Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
Ok, i have derived what i believe to be the answer to my question. It seems to ME that the majority of the variants of the N/T have their first manuscript attestation in either Bazae, Alexandrinus, or Washingtonesius which are all proto Byzantium which is proto Textus Receptus, and the “earlier mss” cited rather ambiguously by the footnotes of my beloved Oxford pub NRSVs refer to p45, p66 Sinaticus and Vaticanus which would be proto alexandrian and proto critical text/Nestle Aland etc. Do i basically have the gist of it? I know there are exceptions to this rather sweeping generalization, but i think i have the feel for it. AND how do you like my courtesy to Dr. Bart Ehrman in using the term “proto”? 🙂 i think thats a pretty nice tip of the hat myself
Anyway, based on the research I was able to do tonight, IMHO, the preliminary thesis of my postulated, and yet to be written dissertation on textual variants of the NT goes like this:
“early” attestation of textual variants start surfacing en masse around the 5th C CE
IF i were a student of yours at UNC, what grade would i get on this assignment? Lol
The big problem is that Bezae is not proto-Byzantine but a real loner, apart from some latin and syriac support, and ususally labeled as the main Western text.
Well I been doin some serious digging. I always assumed there was no early attestation to the pericope adulterae and the longer Mark 16… but Bazae has both? 400 CE? And no matter how you cut it, Erasmus was a text critic. He knew about Vaticanus, referenced it to note the absence of the johannan comma. And speaking of vaticanus, access to it was limited and discouraged till tichindorf’s discovery of Sinaticus? The vulgate didn’t originate in Latin you know. It had to have a Greek text behind it. Just because it’s lost to history doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. why am I starting to revisit the idea that TR might have deep roots after all? And perhaps might be descendant from an earlier tradition than the NA text? Was Hort wrong? Guide me back toward my firm belief in the critical text.
If you’re really interested in this kind of thing — and it is very interesting indeed — I would suggest you start by reading Bruce Metzger’s book The Text of the New Testament. It is the absolute classic.
Prof Ehrman,
On an unrelated subject please.
Regards your recent book ‘Heaven and Hell’ and given how the soul is understood in both the Jewish and Greek culture. How do you think Matt 22:37 … you shall love the Lord your God with all your soul (my point of interest) ought to be understood from a Jewish perspective.
Should this bit have appropriately read ‘breath’ and that there was probably a Greek overtone to this where Greek writers were giving a Greek spin to the statement.
In that context it means something like “your entire being.”
Dr Ehrman,
I have an unrelated question about the Gnostics. Was the view they had of a lower physical realm deity, and a higher spiritual realm deity. Some sort of fusion of their Pagan polytheistic back grounds, and Christianity’s monotheistic view. Or did they see the higher and lower deities as different aspects of the same god?
Or was that just certain Gnostic groups that had that view?
Most of the ones we know about had a divine realm populated by multiple divinities that were spiritual, separated from teh material world here. Most of them do have some kind of originating divine principle though.
Dr. Ehrman,
There’s one scholar who I know of who has a field day of saying that virtually everything is an interpolation. Are there any academic standards in place that are used to rebut what could be run-away scholars?
Well, there aren’t any laws… But yes, the burden of proof is on the one who thinks something is an interpolation, and some people just go nuts finding them everywhere. I myself hold to very few indeed, apart from 2 Cor. 6:14-7:1.
Dr. Ehrman,
Interesting point. What do you find is the issue with 2 Cor. 6:14-7:1 making it a likely interpolation?
Ah, that one’s pretty clear I think. The discussion interrupts the context (read 6:13 then 7:2 next to each other without the passage in between); the passage includes words Paul never uses otherwise (Beelsebul), and takes a positoin he doesn’t address otherwise (being unequally yoked). It looks like it’s been inserted.
Prof Ehrman,
Q1. Please, are we to understand the church in Rome (the one Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans to) as what eventually became the Roman Church – i.e. the church which eventually defined Christianity upon the conversion of Constantin?
Q2. I read from your textbook ‘The Bible’ that this is the only Pauline epistle to a church that was not founded by Paul. Please, do we any idea who established this church?
1. It certainly *became* that later Roman (CAtholic) church; but the first century church was nothing like the fourth century church. (Just as traffic in NYC ain’t nothin’ like the traffic there 300 years ago!) (Just as an analogy).
2. We don’t have any hard evidence. It’s usually thought that since it was the largest city in teh enmpire by far, and the most visited, that Christian travelers brought it there — either people just visitingn the city or, say, merchants from Rome who converted on trips elsewhere who returned.
Prof Ehrman,
Q1. Please who is ascribed (be it pseudonymously or actual) as the author of the Didache of the Twelve Apostles?
Q2. Please, is the Didache same as the Apostolic Constitution?
1. The book is anonymous; it claims to present the teaching of twelve disciples, but it doesn’t claim tobe written by any of them.
2. The Didache was *used* by the much later Apostolic Constitutions as one of its sources, taken over wholesale.