Can we know what a scribe intended to do when he changed the text? Is it actually possible to know what anyone INTENDS?  Isn’t that technically impossible, unless we get into their minds somehow?  I had to deal with this issue in the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and there I laid out the theoretical premises I have/had, to allow me to say that a scribe intended to change a text.  It’s a view that most readers completely overlooked, including a bunch of my critics.

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Intentionality as a Functional Category

The other theoretical claim that I made in Orthodox Corruption involved the broader concept of what it means to describe a scribal alteration of the text as “intentional.”   I have been deeply interested in the question of “intention” for many years, as a philosophical problem (there is considerable philosophical discourse on it, of course), an issue in literary interpretation (especially since Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous “Intentional Fallacy”), and, naturally, as it relates to scribes.

Most textual critics have unproblematically talked about scribal changes being either accidental or intentional, with accidental changes being slips of the pen of one kind or another and intentional changes being those that a scribe made with deliberation and forethought.  There are enormous problems with this taxonomy.  For one thing, in most instances it is impossible, at the end of the day, to differentiate between the two.  When a scribe spells a word in an unusual way, who is to say that this is an accident?  Possibly he simply copied his exemplar, and so did not make a mistake at all.  Possibly he thought his exemplar had misspelled the word, and so spelled it the way he thought it should be spelled, even though he was wrong.  Possibly he liked altering the spellings of words the way most of us like to alter the grammar of our sentences.  Or take a special case.  In Matthew 10:25, most witnesses speak of Beelzeboul, but some refer to Beezeboul and others Beelzebub.   There is no way to determine whether scribes accidentally reverted to a more familiar spelling of the name or, instead, meant to change the text.

More striking are instances in which changed readings make a difference to the meaning of the text.  In John 20:31 is the famous statement concerning the purpose of the Fourth Gospel.  But there is a textual variant: in some manuscripts the statement is an aorist, in others a present, subjunctive.  With the former reading, the Gospel was written “that you might come to believe that Jesus is the Christ,” making the book something of a missionary document.  With the latter, it was written “that you might continue believing that Jesus is the Christ,” making it a community book.  The change may have been accidental, but if it was, it still makes a difference to the meaning.  It is virtually impossible to know whether such meaningful changes were made precisely with the intent to create the new meaning.

Or consider Romans 5:1.  Did the earliest form of the text say, “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God” or did it say “Since we are justified by faith, let us have peace with God”?  As is well known, it is a difference between an omicron and an omega, εχομεν and εχωμεν, and the difference would not have been distinguishable at the aural level, since both words would have been pronounced the same.  Here again, it is impossible to know whether a scribe changed the text intentionally or by accident.  If it was an accident, is it an “accident” that is meaningful?  Or possibly the change was made semi-consciously.  If so, we cannot tell in which direction it more likely went.

And so we have the problem, when distinguishing between accidental and intentional changes, that at times it is difficult, or even impossible, to know which is which.  A second problem is more subtle but also more significant, and may require us to redirect how we think about so-called “intentional” changes.  The problem may be seen in some of the preceding examples.  There are passages where we can conjecture that a change was made intentionally, but we cannot know for certain what the intention was.

I want to stress this point because the single most common objection to my claims in The Orthodox  Corruption of Scripture has been that I do not establish well enough, to some critics’ thinking, what an individual scribe was “intending” to do when he altered the text.  Critics have suggested in a number of instances that what I am calling a Christological variation was created for some other reason, for example, to harmonize the text with another in a parallel passage or to bring the text into better conformity with the Septuagint.  These objections, however, overlook the way I was, and am, imagining what an intentional variation is.

To start with, I should stress that despite the problems I am about to mention, I have no intention of eliminating the category of intention.  Quite the contrary, I am certain scribes did have intentions and that in some instances these intentions affected the text.  Whoever added the final twelve verses of Mark did not do so by a mere slip of the pen.  They were added deliberately.  But it is difficult to reconstruct, ultimately and completely, his intentions.  Whoever added the story of the woman taken in adultery also must have done so deliberately.  But scholars continue to debate why.  I should point out that even in these cases, one could argue that the changes were accidents, for example, if scribes thought that marginal notes in their exemplars were to be included in the text.  If we assume, however, that the changes were made consciously with forethought, we are still left to ponder what they were meant to accomplish.

In this connection we may be helped by considering a categorical distinction made by philosophers of intention.  A classic work in the field is G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention.[1]   At the outset of her study, Anscombe indicates that “we may be inclined to say that ‘intention’ has a different sense when we speak of a [person’s] intentions simpliciter — i.e., what he intends to do – and of his intention in doing or proposing something — what he aims at.”  That is to say, there’s a key difference between what one intends to do and what one intends to achieve.  If I say, “I’m planning to go into town today,” it is clear what I am intending to do, but it is not clear what my intention is in doing it, that is, what I am going into town for.

If this problem with understanding what someone intends to do in an intentional act applies to all of us in our daily lives, it certainly applies to contemporary authors who write the texts we read.   How can we really know what they intend to achieve?  Even if we ask a contemporary author about why she wrote what she did, we can never be certain that she will remember, or remember completely or correctly, or that she will tell the truth, or that she will not be self-deceived.  Her intentions may be obscure even to herself, or mixed, or too complex to convey in words.  And if that applies to modern-day authors — living breathing human beings who, in theory at least, we can contact to discuss their intentions — how much more does it apply to ancient authors, who are no longer here to interrogate?  And if it applies to ancient authors, it applies even more to ancient scribes, nameless, faceless individuals who copied our texts and occasionally changed them in sensible ways, and sometimes in nonsensible ways, and then left us no other records.   It may be possible to assume that these scribes intended to change the text (their intention simpliciter); but that does not tell us what they were intending to achieve by doing so.

In view of these problems I tried to propose a conceptual reorganization of our category of intentional changes in Orthodox Corruption.  I did not suggest that we do away with the category of intentional changes, since I think that it can be a useful heuristic device for us, its problems notwithstanding.  But what I tried to do (this was my “intent”) was to make a further taxonomic distinction in the category of intention by suggesting two additional subcategories.  The first is the largely speculative matter of what an individual scribe may have had in mind when he deliberately changed a text and the second is the more demonstrable matter of what effect the change has on the text and its meaning for readers.  This second category takes seriously the claims of critics since Wimsatt and Beardsley that we have no real means, or possibly any reason, to know what an author (in this case a scribe functioning as author) intended by making a change.  But we do have the resultant text, and we can evaluate how the text reads to see how it differs now that the change has been made.

This second category is a functional understanding of intentional changes.  Some changes in the text function to harmonize one passage with another (whether or not that is what the scribe wanted to achieve); others function to eliminate grammatical problems, historical errors, or geographical mistakes; others function to make the text more theologically acceptable to orthodox thinkers; others function to make the text more suitable for apologetic purposes; others function to diminish the role of women; others function to heighten the animosity of the text towards Jews.  There are, of course, many other options.

If we restrict ourselves to the function of intentional changes, we keep ourselves from getting bogged down in the quagmire of personal scribal motivations, which we can never really establish.  We instead can focus on the text in its multiple forms as it has come down to us.  As an additional advantage, this strategic move can help circumvent the rather pointless wranglings that we sometimes have over “why” a text was changed.  We may never know why a text was changed.  But we can know what the result of the change was for the way the text could be read.   This is not to say that we cannot argue over the more speculative, first subcategory of intentional changes: one can always make more or less plausible arguments about what was driving a scribe to make a change, and I do indeed make such arguments in The Orthodox Corruption.  But arguments over what motivated scribes are irrelevant when dealing with the second subcategory, of the function of the changes, which can be assessed independently of the whims motivating any particular scribe.

I stress this latter point because, as I’ve indicated, a common rhetorical strategy to attack an argument over the “intent” of scribal alterations has been to invoke alternative scribal motivations .  Let me illustrate how that strategy has worked, and show how it can be circumvented, by citing just one example.   In the well known variant of Jesus’ cry of dereliction in Mark 15:34, instead of crying out “My God my God, why have you forsaken me,” in the Western tradition Jesus cries, “My God my God, why have you mocked me?”  It is an intriguing change for numerous reasons.  Some scholars have proposed that it relates to a linguistic issue, that Semitic terms for “forsake” and “mock” are easily mistaken for one another.  The verbs were switched at the oral level of the tradition, it has been proposed, and this switch affected later scribes of the text.

Other scholars have pointed out how well the Western text fits now into the context, where everyone else in the scene seems to be mocking Jesus: the Jewish leaders, those passing by, both other robbers.  Now, at the end, God himself is said to mock him.  Yet other scholars have pointed out that the verse was a favorite among certain groups of Gnostics, who understood that at the cross, before Jesus died, the divine Christ left him.  This may be the interpretation of the Gospel of Peter, where Jesus cries out “My power, O power, you have left me.”  It seems certain to be the interpretation of the Gospel of Philip, which indicates that it was Aon the cross that he said these words, for there he was divided.”  And so, in order to circumvent the gnostic misuse of the verse, some scribes may have changed its wording.  No longer does it speak of Jesus as abandoned or left behind, but of his being mocked.  Which, if any of these views, is “right”?[2]

Part of the intrigue of the text-critical enterprise involves seeing how scholars argue their case for what a scribe had in mind when he decided to change the text (my first subcategory of intention).  At the end of the day, this scholarly back and forth is a rhetorical exercise intended to convince an audience to a particular perspective on an entirely speculative issue.  If intentional changes are seen from a functional perspective, however (my second subcategory), much of that argument is circumvented.  For the change functions, for example, both to provide an interesting change in the context of Mark’s passion narrative and to circumvent the use of the text by Gnostics attempting to advance their own Christological views.  These functional descriptions of the alteration of the text can be argued out on textual bases.  They too cannot be absolutely “proven,” of course, but they do not depend on hypotheses concerning the psychological motivations of unknown scribes in unknown places at unknown times.

At the end of the day, this functional reading of intentional changes provides us with common grounds of discourse.  It has the advantage of appealing to evidence that is available rather than knowledge that is not.  And it is based on the empirical states of the text that we have access to, rather than inner states of the scribes that can never be recovered.

 

[1] 2^nd ed. Harvard Univ. Press, 1963.

[2] See my discussion of the variant on pp. xxx-xxx