Loading...QUESTIONS
I have received the following three, interrelated, questions from an inquiring mind that wants to know, all of them involving the potential accuracy of the manuscript tradition of the NT based on what we can deduce from the early papyri. My responses will follow.
- In your last debate with Dr. Wallace, he seemed to argue, in part, for the relative integrity of the early NT manuscript tradition. He referred to p75 as being representative of other early NT MSS in that, while obviously the product of non-professionals, it yielded variants that were easy to correct, in the nature of “onion instead of union”. Is this a fair characterization on his part of these early texts? What portion of these variants would indeed fall into the category of “easy to correct”?
- Citing Dr. Metzger, Dr. Wallace also claimed that Alexandria was one place where uncontrolled early scribal practices was not the norm. You countered with the letters of Clement of Alexandria as evidence against this conclusion. Could you please elaborate on this point & mention whether these letters are typical of the place and period?
- Another argument Dr. Wallace made was founded on the claim that earliest papyri discovered merely confirm the previous judgments of scholars as to what was the most likely original form of a text in that they don’t add any new variant readings. These judgments were based on later though more reliable NT manuscripts. He referred specifically to the work of Westcott & Hort on Codex Sinaitcus & Vaticanus whose conclusions were attested by the later discovery of p75. This dynamic, according to him, is also true of other early papyri. This leads Dr. Wallace to argue that if these early papyri simply confirm earlier judgments then we should expect even earlier papyri to do so likewise. Your thoughts on this argument would be appreciated.
RESPONSES
These are terrific questions, to which I can, I think, give some direct answers.
- P75 is indeed…THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don’t belong yet, you should join!!! It costs about $2/month, and you have full access to my comments!
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Bart, perhaps you already addressed this in a prior blog entry, but I have a question about the plausibility of apostolic authorship of the canonical gospels. You have taken the position that it is highly unlikely that the gospels had apostolic authorship in part because they were written in Greek, and the apostles, being Aramaic speaking Palestinian Jews, we’re illiterate. Do you have any historical evidence to support your position that the individuals who would have comprised the 12 apostles were unlikely to have received training in Greek and/or Aramaic literacy? It’s not too difficult to imagine that a fishermen (Simon Peter) was not literate. But Matthew was reputed to be a tax collector. Would that not require at least some basic literacy? And considering that Greek was the lingua franca of Roman Empire, would not such literacy on Matthew’s part involve Greek literacy?
I recently conversed with anew evangelical Christian who insisted that typical 1st century Palestinian Jews received a well rounded education that included not just the precepts of Jewish law, but also Aramaic and Greek literacy. He also pointed to the prevalence of the Septuagint to support his position.
A tax collector *may* have been literate, but would not have needed literacy for his job. The idea of widespread literacy in Palestine is a myth. The authoritative study is by Catherine Hezser, Literacy in Roman Palestine.
As I have read in your books, I certainly understand that the copying in the first century may have been filled with more errors than copying done a 1000 years later. But I am more than willing to let the Fundamentalists say that we more or less have something that is close to the original Gospels. The bigger problem is what to do about all of the contradictions in the Gospels using whatever ancient texts and whatever translation you want to choose. Of course, you reviewed all of this in “Jesus Interrupted” which, for me, has been the most helpful of your books. In other words, give in to all of the textual arguments and one still has a Bible of questionable historical reliability. That to me is the big issue.
Dr. Ehrman,
I know your interest is primarily in textual variants, but I have a series of questions that have nothing to do with that:
1. How many Christians were there in Egypt in 90 CE?
2. How many of those could read?
3. How many of those would have had a copy of Mark?
4. How many of those would have had an extra copy, so they could dispose of one?
5. How many of those would have chosen to dispose of one copy as part of a funeral mask?
6. How many of those would have been available to a group of evangelical scholars whose soul interest in the masks was to find a biblical manuscript?
7. What are the odds that this unpublished, unseen manuscript actually exists?
First four questions: We don’t know! Second three: the idea is that a copy of Mark was worn out and thrown away and deteriorated, until someone took some of the scraps from it to use for a paper-mache mask. I think the MS certainly exists.
It just seems to me that unless someone is taking apart thousands of masks, or unless there were thousands of copies of NT manuscripts floating around Alexandria at the time, the odds against someone finding the one thing they are looking for in a mask are astronomical! Shouldn’t someone have calculated the probability of finding something worthwhile before they started destroying the masks?
What’s the criteria for knowing here? We can’t know with absolute certainty very much at all about things in the past, even last year. You seem to put the bar for knowledge here incredibly high. Isn’t it reasonable that we have now what was written in these documents like Mark? Isn’t it reasonableness rather than absolute certainty what we’re after here sice it’s all we can have? I get that there are Christians that are literal interpreters making claims, and they can be annoying, but that shouldn’t color every statement about knowledge.
Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say. I think it reasonable that what we have is pretty close to Mark as it was written. But if for theological reasons you need to know the very words of the text, that’s a bit problematic.
That last point you make is precisely the same as a classics prof at the U of MN made to me in the summer of 1982, and it made all the difference in my direction of graduate study. Excellent post (if there’s anyone out there like i was still wondering the same thing)!
Is there an official sanctioned body that catalogs manuscript papyri and parchments?
They are cataloged at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Muenster Germany.
In the last two “There is a new comment added” notices I’ve received, when I click the link, it only brings me to the page of the post without going down to the post number. Second, I cannot find the reply from the other member. I thought I could email Steve, but I didn’t see that in Support. Please forward or advise. Thank you.
A scribe who copied say, a work of Plato, Homer, Virgil, Cicero, or hymns for the cult of Isis wouldn’t have copied any of the Gospels?
Basically, if there are no major problems with papyri of Plato, Homer, Virgil, Cicero, hymns for the cult of Isis, why is quality slipping with first century New Testament manuscripts?
While there is talk (scholarship) of the Library at Alexandria, is there any scholarship for Libraries of the Forum in Rome. I’m thinking great Roman works of the first century made it there. They must have had scrolls on religion in Israel because King Herod sent at least one of his sons to Rome for education.
It’s *possible*, of course, that a copyist who produced pagan works also produced Christian. But there are problems with the manuscript traditions of all the ancient authors. I’m not aware that the forum in Rome housed a major library, but maybe I just don’t know about it.
Libraries of the Forum, consisted of separate libraries founded in the time of Augustus near the Roman Forum that contained both Greek and Latin texts, separately housed, as was the conventional practice. There were libraries:
in the Porticus Octaviae near the Theatre of Marcellus,
in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and
in the Bibliotheca Ulpia in the Forum of Trajan.
Bart, I was wondering whether you could comment on how the geographic distribution of early manuscripts can support or disconfirm reliability of the text. If two manuscripts that were discovered in two locations far apart from each other (say, Egypt and Greece) and contain the same readings that would support scribal reliability since if a change was made in an Egyptian manuscript it would only show up in the Egyptian MSS and would be easy to weed out since the change would not be in the MSS from Greece.
Perhaps in this way, even if you only had manuscripts from the 3rd century, if they lined up well and were greatly disbursed you could be pretty sure that those readings date reliably back to an earlier date before the manuscripts were widely disbursed.
Good question. I’ll add it to my questions to post on. But the problem is that all of our early manuscripts have been and are being discovered only in Egypt, since that’s the climate where they can be preserved.
doc, i don’t understand you reply. do you mean that ALL of our early manuscripts were not WIDELY disbursed?
thanks doc.
They may have been *very* widely dispersed. They could have come from Rome, or Ephesus, or Lyons — but they all *ended up* in Egypt.
I’m a bit confused. If the earliest manuscripts are in the main the worst, shouldn’t we infer that our versions of the New Testament books are probably quite a bit different from the originals? I suppose the key word in your post is “radically.” Are you saying then that your guess is that the originals are probably quite a bit different, but just not “radically different”?
Ah, good question. They are the “worst” not because the text behind them is bad, but because their copyists make high numbers of mistakes. But the texts they are copying (also with scribal mistakes) are our oldest available, so that’s gotta be good. Maybe I’ll post on this.
I think it would be hard to argue that the early gospel manuscripts were radically changed due to the presence of certain difficulties in the texts having to do with theology. If scribes would just change the script to read however they wanted it to read, why have Jesus baptized by John the Baptist which might imply that John is Jesus’ spiritual superiority? Why have Jesus rejected in his hometown? If early scribes were just at liberty to make radical changes, you’d think they would have smoothed these things out
What is your scholarly response to this claim on Zola Levitt’s website as provided by his friend, Dr. Thomas McCall, the Senior Theologian of our ministry, has written many articles for the Levitt Letter. He holds a Th.M. in Old Testament studies and a Th.D. in Semitic languages and Old Testament.
“. . . what we have to understand is that first-century Israelis were tri-lingual, and even perhaps quadri-lingual. The languages spoken in Israel at the time of Christ were Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin. Most Jewish people spoke the first three, and some were conversant in Latin as well.”
https://ehrmanblog.org/how-accurate-are-our-earliest-nt-manuscripts/
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What evidence is there for / against such an assertion of poly linguistic prowess?
Yes, that’s what people used to think. But it appears simply not to be true. The evidence is overwhelming. You might look at the books on Galilee by Mark Chancey and on literacy in Roman Palestine by Catherine Hezser.
Dr Ehrman, do you think that it is plausible, or even possible to find the originals, or MSs close enough the date so we could be almost sure what the originals said? How likely they survive readable about 2000 years later?
Not related really, but if you made a papyrus today with the methods they used back then how it would survive in wilderness compared to a paper made today? Yeah, there are many kinds of paper, so let’s say something standard paper used in offices, I don’t know the english definition though 😀
Thank you
1. My sense is that in most cases we’re pretty close to the originals, but there’s no way to know for sure. 2. Great question! I don’t know!
I came across a web page from a Christian source that compared several early papyrus manuscripts. It said, “There is a surprising connection between the text of P75 and the 4th century Codex Vaticanus, sharing 85% agreement with one another.”
Huh? 85% is terrible! This seems like a stop-the-presses kind of discovery, because it casts great doubt on the copying process. Am I missing something?
https://www.wesleyhuff.com/blog/2021/5/6/the-earliest-new-testament-manuscripts
Yes, my dissertation was focused on this whole idea. It’s a valid statistic and important. But 85% does not mean that they are different 15% of the time. It means that they differ on 15% of the *genealogically significant variations*. The VAST MAJORITY of the words of the New Testament do not involve genealogically signficant variation (those are differences in wording that could helpfully show how closely manuscripts are related to one another), and in fact don’t involve variation at all. If that doesn’t make sense, let me know and I’ll go into greater depth.
Thanks. Let me see if I understand. We toss out the trivia (the bits where the variations we find are uninteresting). 15% of the remaining part (presumably less than 10% of the total text?) is significantly different in P75 vs. Vaticanus. That still sounds like a big deal to me, but perhaps I overestimate the size of this significant part.
I came across this fascinating comment from paleographer E. C. Colwell: “As an editor the scribe of P45 wielded a sharp axe. The most striking aspect of his style is its conciseness. The dispensable word is dispensed with. He omits adverbs, adjectives, nouns, participles, verbs, personal pronouns—without any compensating habit of addition. He frequently omits phrases and clauses. He prefers the simple to the compound word.”
Is there an English side-by-side comparison of P75 and Codex Vaticanus with the genealogically significant differences highlighted? Perhaps that’s where I should go next.
If I understand your position, you argue that these changes between manuscripts are substantial in the ones we know of and quite possibly far more substantial as we move back in time to manuscripts lost to history.
But don’t you also argue that we can reliably recreate the NT?
Merry Christmas!
Colwell was a major figure in the field and was in fact responsible for coming up with the idea of “genealogically significant variation” in the way I”m using it. It’s not quite what you’re expressing. The issue is not whether or not the variants are interesting. It is whether they are the sorts of things scribes would likely come up with independently of one another so that they *accidentally* agree verses more significant variants (not significant because they are interesting but because they are not the kinds of things two scribes independently wuld have created) that scribes therefore were more likely to have found found in their earlier exemplars. There is no way to know what percentage of the variants in the manuscript tradition would be significant for genealogical relations and what percentage not, though by far the majority would NOT be signficiant; and most words of the NT do not have any variant readings at all. Does that make sense?
What’s interesting to me here is the possibility of being quantitative about the reliability of the transmission process of the books of the New Testament, particularly in the first few centuries. While the claim “There is a surprising connection between the text of P75 and the 4th century Codex Vaticanus, sharing 85% agreement with one another” offers hope of putting some percentages to the problem, your point is that this applies only to that (small?) subset of “genealogically significant variations.”
It sounds like I should be trying to put some numbers to these “genealogically significant variations.”
Perhaps you could point me to an article you’ve already written in the blog? Or in your textbook? I don’t want you to re-write the wheel, especially on vacation!
The quantitative methods we used were quite primitive, for anyone who actually knows anything about quantitative methods. Here is where I explained it something like 35 years ago.
“Methodological Developments in the Analysis and Classification of New Testament Documentary Evidence,” Novum Testamentum, 29 (1987) 22 45.
Bart: Much appreciated!
Dr.Ehrman. concerning P75 and Vaticanus, is this collation of similarities in the genealogical variants based on the entire manuscript? Or select sections of the NT? Also are there any resources for this type of information between other early manuscripts?
And lastly professor, I read a paper by Dr Nongbri where he says that P75 can be comfortably situated in the 4th century paleographically. Wouldn’t this render the entire analysis useless since they would be from the same era?
Yes, when establishing textual similarities the entire manuscript needs to be collated, but the investigator pays very close attention to whether there are books or passages that have different alignments than others. To do the work requires more than just comparing one manuscript with another, but comparaing a large number of manuscripts against each other to see which agrees and disagrees with which at what level (usually expressed in a percentage). Prof. Nongbri is dating a lot of our manuscripts later than most other scholars; it will take a long time for everyone to decide if his datings are correct. But it is not at all the case that manuscripts produced at the same time will necessarily have the same form of text, so the similarities of these two would be significant even if both are fourth century (though possibly not *as* significant)