Suppose you have thousands of manuscripts of a New Testament book and a particular verse is worded in one way in 98% of them but another way in just 2%?  Surely the 98% is right, right?  That was an issue I addressed many years ago on the blog, and to some of you, the answer may be surprising.  Here’s how I said it then.

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Early on in my study of textual criticism I came to understand one of the major issues confronting scholars in the field – an issue that scholars have been contending with since the eighteenth century.  For the past hundred years or so the vast majority of experts have been convinced by a solution to the problem, but the solution was slow in coming, for all sorts of reasons.  But when I was first introduced to the problem I learned there were two sides that were being taken, and I wrote a paper about it (my first year in college, at Moody Bible Institute).  I continued to be interested in the problem for a long time, and it ended up being the subject of the Masters’ thesis I wrote under the direction of Bruce Metzger.

The problem is this.   We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament – at last count, somewhere around 5600 manuscripts in Greek alone (that includes everything from small fragments the size of a credit card with just a few letters written on them to massive volumes with the entire New Testament from beginning to end).  Over 94% of these manuscripts come to us from after the ninth Christian century – so 800 years or more after the books of the New Testament were first written and placed in circulation.  But some of them are early – with fragments going back to the second century and full manuscripts going back to the fourth.

These various manuscripts – the thousands of them – can be grouped together based on their textual similarities.  That is to say, some of the manuscripts agree a lot with each other but not with other manuscripts.  And so, to use the example from yesterday’s post, some manuscripts include the story in John 8 of the woman taken in adultery, and others lack it; some manuscripts have the last twelve verses of Mark and others do not.   Because some manuscripts are very similar to one another, we can assume they are related to one another and we can, in theory, build a kind of family tree.

And so here is the problem.  When we do that, it is the late medieval manuscripts that cohere together whereas early manuscripts tend to be different, and cohere better with each other than with the later manuscripts.

So why is that a problem?  Suppose you have a passage that is attested in, say 1000 manuscripts.  992 of those manuscripts have a verse worded in one way, and 8 have it worded in another way.  It might seem like common sense to say that the 992 are more likely to be the original and that the 8 represent an aberration.  The problem is that typically those 8 are our earliest manuscripts, the ones closest to the original.  (I’m obviously simplifying things here a bit, but not overly simplistically.)   So which manuscripts contain the original text, the one written by the actual author – the 992 majority or the 8 early?  That’s the problem.

The problem is exacerbated by significant historical, cultural, and religious factors, which in a sense can be boiled down, in the English speaking world, to one phenomenon.   The King James Bible is a translation of the text found in the majority of manuscripts, not in the early ones.  And why does that matter?  Because English-speaking biblical scholars of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries – up to the twentieth century – were raised on the King James Bible and from their childhoods assumed that it represented the Word of God.  But what if, in places, it was *wrong*?  There was a strong pull not to admit that.  And so scholars argued that in fact the early manuscripts represented aberrations.  It was the majority text, the one on which the King James was based, that represented the original.  (Similar arguments were advanced in non-English speaking realms, especially Germany, for similar reasons distinct to their own environment.)

There was a certain force to the arguments that these “majority text” scholars (as they are called today) could mount.  If there was a change of the text away from the original, how likely is it that it would infect 992 witnesses?  Isn’t it more likely that the original would survive in the majority and that a mistake would affect only a very small number?   If you had 1000 eyewitnesses to an event, and 99.2% said one thing and only .8% said something else, which would *you* believe?

That raised the obvious question, though, of how to explain that the 8 (in this hypothetical situation – which is not too far off from the reality of the case) happen to be the earliest (or, say, the five earliest and three outliers from later)?   If they’re earlier, aren’t they more likely the original?

There were numerous responses to that question that were (and in some circles still are) offered.  One is that it is almost impossible to imagine how an aberration would take over the entire tradition.  If the different manuscripts were copied from different exemplars (the exemplar is the copy that a scribe is copying), and these exemplars were copied from different exemplars, etc. – how could a mistake infect almost the entire tradition?

OK, that may be a hard question to answer (it was indeed hard – it took a couple of centuries for anyone to come up with the convincing explanation).  But you still have to explain why the earliest surviving manuscripts have a text different from the majority text.   Why does the different text show up early, and consistently early, rather than consistently later?

The supporters of the majority text came up with a sensible solution: the earliest manuscripts are simply the earliest *surviving* manuscripts.  When these manuscripts were originally made (say, back in the fourth century), they represented the minority reading even in their own day.  The majority text of the Middle Ages was also the majority text of the fourth century.  Then why are the surviving manuscripts of the fourth century – with a different text – the only texts of the fourth century that survive?  For a very good reason (it was argued).  Since they were such aberrant manuscripts, no one read them, and so they were never worn out.  It was the majority text manuscripts that were used everywhere, and these must have disintegrated over time.

Clever argument.  But not convincing to much of anyone today.  I suppose I know every major textual scholar – either personally or through email or just through reading their work – in the world today.  And I don’t know anyone who buys the argument, except for fundamentalist Christians who are convinced that for theological reasons, God would not have allowed the original text to be lost for many, many centuries until the labors of modern scholarship could uncover it based on a study of the earliest manuscripts.  That is not a historical argument, though, but one based on a certain set of conservative religious beliefs.  And scholarship of this sort has to be historical, not based on what you personally happen to believe about God.

I realized that already at Moody Bible Institute.  In my paper I argued that the text found in the earliest manuscripts must be original.