Loading...It is interesting that as recently as twenty years ago almost *no one* outside a small cohort of textual geeks (like me) had much interest at all in the actual manuscripts of the New Testament. Even the majority of NT scholars (a very *large* majority) just weren’t interested. And most non-NT scholars had never heard that there was even an issue / problem. That has changed a lot. Now it’s something people seem to want to talk to me about all the time.
I’ve long thought about the issues that are involved (starting when I was 17! Seriously). Here are some reflections that I made some time ago, which I ran across again recently and thought summed up one of the big problems rather neatly.
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It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around the irony of our early manuscripts (the term means: “hand-written copies,” i.e., *all* the copies before the invention of printing). To reconstruct the “original” text of the New Testament – by which, for my purposes here, I mean the text that the author himself produced and put into the public sphere by “publishing” (or sending) it – we would love to have lots of early manuscripts to look at. Unfortunately, we don’t have lots of early manuscripts. 94% of our manuscripts are 800 years after the fact. We have only a handful of manuscripts, at best, that can plausibly be dated to the second century. These are all *highly* fragmentary (the oldest is just a scrap with a few verses on it). And even these are decades after the authors were all dead and buried.
The problem is that every time a manuscript gets copied, mistakes – either intentional or accidental – are introduced. And then when that manuscript serves as an exemplar for the next scribe, its mistakes are replicated, and the second scribe adds mistakes of his own. Then a third scribe copies the copy made by the second scribe, replicating the mistakes of both his predecessors, and adds his own. And so it goes, year after year, decade after decade. Someone copying Paul’s letter of 1 Thessalonians in, say, the year 90 is already copying a text that has been in circulation for four decades. How many generations of copies have intervened between this scribe of the year 90 and the original made by Paul 40 years earlier? Is it
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And the bad/sad thing is we do not have a copy of 1 Thessalonians from the year 90. Or 100. Or 120. Or 160. Or 190. Our first copy is named P46, and is probably from around 200 CE or so. It does not have all of 1 Thessalonians, but is fragmentary (although it does have most of it). Our first complete copy of 1 Thessalonians is Codex Vaticanus, dating from, perhaps, 370 CE – over three hundred years after the original.
For most of the New Testament we do have papyri (an old writing material used for our very oldest manuscripts before scribes started using parchment — i.e., animal skins) from the second, third, and fourth centuries. These papyri are extremely valuable, as they show us how the text was being copied in the centuries before (that extremely valuable!) Vaticanus. These papyri have largely been discovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And they have taught us some very significant things about one of the topics we are most eager to know about as textual critics of the New Testament: the early transmission of the New Testament text. They show us that:
- Most early copyists were not as skilled and/or careful as the later scribes (many of whom – the later ones – were monks in medieval monasteries)
- Most of the textual changes that we find in later manuscripts were first made in these earliest copies (specialists usually maintain that most of our textual alterations were made before the year 300 CE)
- These copies differ from later ones in very significant ways in places (so that it is nice to have so many later manuscripts; but they do not always represent the form of the text that we can find in our earliest manuscripts; what about passages where we don’t have earlier manuscripts?!)
- And, as important, these copies differ significantly, in many places, precisely from one another.
To elaborate on this last point: if you collate (that is, compare in every detail the wording of) later manuscripts with one another, in many instances you will not find that many differences. But if you collate the earlier manuscripts with one another, you will typically find lots and lots of differences.
This shows that even though the earliest manuscripts are the best thing we have going – since they are closest to the originals – in another sense they are the most problematic – since they incorporate so many mistakes. It seems that the earlier you go, the less reliable the scribes were as scribes; but ironically, since they were copying earlier copies, even though the copies they made may have been relatively bad in many instances, they were copying texts closer to the originals than the later texts copied by more competent and reliable scribes.
This is one of the ironies of our textual tradition. And it makes the task of establishing the “original” text oh so difficult for specialists in the field, who want the earliest manuscripts they can find but realize that these manuscripts in many instances will be the products of scribes who were not as skilled or scrupulous as we would like. So our earliest manuscripts, in many instances, provide us with both the best of all worlds and the worst.
How helpful are the patristics in establishing the original text? I was impressed with how you were able to establish, for instance, that the heavenly words at the baptism scene in Luke’s gospel were probably closer to a later outlier in the manuscript evidence because earlier patristic sources were unanimous in their reading.
Well, that’s precisely what I spent the first seven or eight years of my scholarly life working on, nonstop! I think the Patristic witnesses are extremely important, since with them you know with relative certainly both when and where they were writing (unlike the ms and versional evidence). BUT, they also pose enormous problems, and a good bit of my early work was focused on addressing and trying to help solve the problems.
Dr Ehrman,
Great article. So the biggest errors start early but would the earliest author’s have felt that their writings we’re divinely inspired and the inerrant word of God? When was inerrantcy proclaimed?
Well, the *current* modern doctrine of inerrancy didn’t get formulated until the end of the 19th century. But certainly readers thought that the words of the Bible were inspired by God, and some thought they came straight from God, already by the end of the second century. But there weren’t any formal declarations of biblical inerrancy in the early church. As to the authors, they certainly felt their wriitngs were *right*, and some like Paul may have felt they were inspired by the Spirit in their views. But I doin’t think any of them thought they were writing the NEw Testament.
Dr. Ehrman, can you imagine what would happen if someone tried to construct your belief system based on the notes that your students at UNC compiled? Yet the curious thing is that with Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha and Confucius that is what happened: they did not leave any writings so we have to rely on what their disciples said they taught. And we don’t even have the originals of what those disciples first wrote. Seems very odd to me that a wise god would judge us according to our understanding of questionable ancient documents.
Good point. Though I suppose someone would have a good idea about *some* of the things I thought…
By looking at multiple copies it was possible to produce a more accurate text. P66, for example, benefited from being the product of two exemplars. How early did this kind of rudimentary textual criticism influence the transmission of the text? Did Vaticanus, for example, result from more sophisticated forms of textual criticism?
There is good agreement between the manuscripts, with Bezae being the main exception. Could this agreement be the result of early centralized decision making that imposed a preferred text?
If our variants pre-date our earliest copies, we have less reason to favour the early (Alexandrian) manuscripts over the Byzantine. Is that right?
It depends what you mean by “good agreement.” Not sure if you’re familiar with the lingo in the field, but the Alexandrian manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, etc.) were considered “exceptionally” good (in relation to each other) because they agreed in 70% of genetically significant variation.
Vaticanus and the other Alexandrians were also famously celebrated (e.g., by Westcott and HOrt) because unlike other types they were not the result of significant editorial work; that’s why they called them representatives of the “Neutral” text, a term we’ve gotten rid of now. BUt apart from the term, the basic judgment that these manuscript preserve the earliest variants from long before the mss themeslves were produced. We can determine that when the variants post-date our copies, and so it si almost certainly true for variants that pre-date them (since the date of their survival and the dates of the manuscripts have no bearing on the quality of the variants per se).
Or to put it differently via analogy: if you have a friend who lies to you about half the time when you can check, and a nother friend who has never ever lied to you when you can check, then if they both say something to you about a subject and their fidelity in that case can’t be checked, you have a pretty good idea (not absolute) about which one is probably lying. (Variants, of course, are not lies; I’m just using this as an analogy)
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Do you think it likely that the original author made several copies himself before sending out – which themselves contained differences?
Is that how books were published then, the author made and sold a few originals and everyone else got to copy those for free if they wished?
I think it’s likely that Paul did (sometimes?), since they were genuine letters and that happened sometimes. I don’t think it happened with books that were published simply by being placed in circulation. But there’s really no hard evidence either way, and it’s not a view I’m wedded to. Copies were never sold though, in Xn circles. They were just circulated. Most books were never sold in antiquity. THe Xn books were circulated in churches and copied whenever anyone wanted a copy and could get one made.
But yes, if Paul had “three” original copies of the letter to the Galatians, there certainly could have been differences (in fact, it seems likely). So, it poses an interesting question. Which one of the three then is the “original”?
E.g., the earliest? Or the one that’s closest to what he really meant, even if it was the third one made?
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As you know, during the space race, the government gave NASA a kind of blank check: beat the Russians to the moon and send us the bill no matter what it costs. It would be interesting if the government gave historians and archaeologists a blank check to hunt for ancient documents from first century Palestine; say spending billions of dollars training tens of thousands of archaeologists to scour Judea, and other places, for ancient scrolls. Perhaps there would be many “dead sea scrolls” like discoveries and maybe even finding mid or late first century copies of New Testament and related documents. That would answer many questions and raise new ones. Of course, that is a fantasy. But it would be interesting if biblical scholars and archaeologists had lobbyists in DC. Arguably, that would be one way to advance the field.
How often do we see one early MS dominating the later MS tradition; that is, is it common for one earlier (but not original) copy to become the exemplar for all (or most) extant later copies?
If it is common for one MS family to dominate the others and establish itself as the standard that everyone is copying, then this seems like a very acute problem, because there is a very live possibility that a corruption became universal and no trace of the original, uncorrupted text survives. But if several MS families tend to survive in parallel, it seems like the problem is less severe since we have a good shot at having at least enough survive that we *know* that we don’t know for sure which variant was original.
As a super simplified example: if the original is A, and there are exactly two copies made from A, B and C, each with its own errors, has someone done the work to estimate how likely it is that MSS descended from both B and C will continue to be copied? Or do we see evidence of “choke points” in the transmission, where one of the lines goes extinct?
We never find a single (known) manuscript dominating the entire tradition — mainly because the tradition was far too diffuse for that. A manuscript of Matthew copied in Rome in 180 CE, e.g., is unlikely to have any significant affect on a manuscript copied in Antioch in 200 CE. THe Antioch scribe wouldn’t know about it. We don’t get a good consistency among manuscripts until starting in the Middle AGes, and then it was because there were so many manuscripts that so many were in broad cirulation, and the NT was quoted so widely by so many church leaders everywhere, that a kind of consistency naturally arose (called the Byzantine text, or the Koine text, or the Syrian text, or the Constantinopolitan text, or the Majority text, or… depends which scholar you consult and when he/she was writing).
But your point is excellent. If ms A of Luke was copied twice, once very badly (copy a) and once very well (copy b), and both A and b were soon lost or destroyed, then all surviving copies today would ultimately come from teh very bad copy a. Ugh. But there’s no way to calculate *which* mss will be copied more than others.
Hi Bart … this is extremely helpful. Are there any lay-books you recommend that discuss the early manuscripts in more detail? I think I recall you touched on it in “Jesus Interrupted”. Thanks
sorry — I thought I replied to this! The best place to start is Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament.
Do you think the textual differences that would have (presumably) been apparent when the church was collating exactly what *would* be in the NT had any impact on how that process occurred? As in, was there a point in time when the early church, upon accepting which books were in the NT, also, at that same time, decided and/or did some gatekeeping as to what the “correct” version of that text will be?
I ask this only in knowing (from various lectures you have given) that there were certain heresies that were growing out of what may be different versions of the gospels, or acceptance/rejection of various of Paul’s letters, etc. Did the church fathers who accepted Mark as part of the NT accept Mark without the final 12 verses that were added later, or without the verses on the woman taken in adultery? It would seem to me that a church deciding on a particular set of scripture would simultaneously agree on what was *in* that scripture?
Ah, it’s a great question. But no, that didn’t happen. The problem was that the church was spread out in many regions over hundreds of miles working in different languages; the form of the text known in Alexandria was not hte same as known in Antioch which was not the same as known in Carthage, etc. IN fact, in each of these (and other major locations) there were different forms of the text. The vast majority of eveyrone didn’t realize it. There never were any discussions about this among in any of the major gatherings of church leaders in the early church.
It seems like I only ever hear about this in relation to the biblical texts.
Do you know of any people that do this kind of textual criticism on other works from Antiquity? Like for example, I’m sure we have manuscript variations in our surviving manuscripts of Plato. Do classicists do the same there that you do with the New Testament?
Even googling textual criticism just brings up stuff about the Bible. I’m sure these issues affect other ancient texts that only survive through manuscript transmission.
Oh yes, this kind of research is done on every work from antiquity: Homer, Aristophanes, Cicero, Virgil … literally, name your author. You don’t hear about this kind of work (and weirdly, lots of NT textual critics don’t know about it!) simply because it doesn’t get in the public press much. It’s hard, erudite, grinding, completely essential work that massively trained linguists and textual experts quietly pursue. But every one *in* those fields (Homeric studies; classical drama; Silver age Latin, etc.) know abouts about it full well. (That’s the funny thing; in some of my debates with NT experts who think I exaggerate the problem, they sometimes say: “Well if you think that about the New Testament, you’d have to think the same thing about Homer and Plato!” And they think that’s an unanswerable objection. I always just laugh, and inform them, Yes, that’s exactly right — as every textual expert in Homer and Plato will *tell* you. With the implication, of course, that possibly they should broaden their academic interests a bit; any undergraduate classics major could probably tell you that)
Hi Dr Ehrman, thank you for an excellent post as usual.
I have a couple of questions if that’s okay.
1. When were the gospels attributed to their current claimed authors?
2. Was this done by one individual who’s work went unchallenged, or was it discussed by a group that came to some agreement?
3. Was their status as ‘scripture’ under threat because they were anonymous, leading to a need to add a byline?
kind regards, Paul
1. tHe first explicit reference is in Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, around 185 CE
2. I have a lengthy discussion in my book Jesus Before the Gospels, where I argue that there may have been some kind of edition of the Gospels produced int he city of Rome that named the four, and taht no one saw any reason to think otherwise, since till then they had been anonymous, so these names caught on.
3. It’s not theat their scriptural status was threatened; it’s more that since they were seen as scripture there was a desire to underscore their authority by adding apostolic names.
Bart,
Thanks for the great article. I appreciate all you do.
1 ) In my bouncing around the WWW I found this link about Textus Receptus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textus_Receptus
It is talking about the NT. Can you tell me if it is accurate?
2 ) I have a goal of locating as many images of “original” versions of scriptures as possible and creating a pedigree chart for the KJV bible. I know that sounds outlandish. Do you know if something like that already exists? The bottom line is I am an Agnostic but would like to do as much research as possible anyway. If for no other reason than it is interesting. I also understand that what I am asking about is not practical but I have to ask. If nothing else building a list of websites that have the docs would be valuable.
Thanks in advance and keep up the good work.
John
1. I’m afraid I haven’t read it; but if you have specific quesions about any of its claims, I’d be happy to try to respond. 2. By “original versions” do you mean manuscripts? All the important ones are digitized and available online. If you want the kind of background information that you would need for this kind of work, you might start by reading Bruce Metzger The Text of the New Testament. (The fourth edition is in both of our names, but I just added some things and helped him edit the rest). Have you read my Misquoting Jesus? That’s where most peole learn some of the basics.
I just ordered the Misquoting Jesus book and Audible version.
I am also going to watch the video.
Thanks again
Dr. Ehrman: If all of these manuscripts were copied, then recopied, redistributed, etc, how does one actually know that so and so taught or said this, especially if changes and errors and alterations were done on purpose? Does that not affect Hermeneutics? Speaking of Hermeneutics, can you recommend a good book for beginners?
Yes, it’s a very serious task that is highly complex. I spent the first 20 years of my scholarship on it, and was only scratching the surface. But there are indeed very good reasons for thinking we are pretty sure for the most part what the authors originally wrote in most places. As to hermeneutics, it depends what you mean by the term — people use it in radically different ways (as it turns out).
Well, if this the case, how would you justify scribes copying information about Jesus from what they heard, or think they knew to be true? I think you would agree that there were countless stories of Jesus in circulation ALL OVER Jerusalem after he dies! What involved that selection process of gathering material to write about Jesus? It sounds a bit biased to me. On top of that, you have, in circulation for a considerable period of time, the ORAL traditions of Jesus (which you bring up in your lectures often) that were NEVER written down? What happened to those stories? Jews were accepting Jesus as the long awaited Messiah even before the New Testament was composed; if that is the case, how accurate was the reliability of what people were “hearing” about? I ask because I think the authors of the 4 Gospels were EXTREMELY CAREFUL about what they wrote of Jesus, even if that meant some truths about him were to be NOT written down. (John 21:25) Would you agree?
I think you’re talking about two different issues. One (the one you’re addressing here) is how the Gospel writers acquired their stories. That is a hugely problematic issue connected with oral tradition, as you say; I discuss that at length in my book Jesus Before the Gospels. The other issue is the one that I believe was first raised and that I was responding to, about whether we can know what words the Gospel writers actually wrote, given the fact we do not have their originals but only later copies, all of which have mistakes. They are both extremely important issues, but are not related to each other. (That is, even if we CAN know what they wrote, that doesn’t mean that anything they wrote is true)
You have often noted that most textual variants are the result of simple, scribal mistakes. Such accidental changes are usually obvious and inconsequential.
An intentional change OTOH (which by definition is not a “mistake” BTW) — presumably made to correct what a scribe perceived to be a theological problem in his source — would be nearly impossible to identify if that link in the transcription chain went up in holy smoke or crumbled to dust a millennium ago.
However, you and your scholarly colleagues have convincingly demonstrated that two of the three synoptic gospels are more editorial than authorial works. Both Matthew and Luke mostly plagiarized two earlier sources. One of these, so-called “Q,” was otherwise lost. But the other became our Gospel of Mark — the foundational member of the synoptic trinity, providing both the narrative timeline and a substantial portion of the content to its siblings.
Indeed, aren’t HALF of the canonical gospels the de facto work product of the very first scribes?
But they thereby left us irrefutable evidence of at least one such intentional emendation since it is preserved in our official (“inerrant”?) canon of scripture — in the prologue to the “Rich Young Man” pericope.
YEs, it completely depends on how one defines the categories: “scribe,” “editor/redactor,” and “author.” (I would say , though, that some mistakes can be intentional. When I pull one of my many faux pas, and someone is upset with me (say, my wife), I say, “Sorry: I made a mistake.” Sometimes that helps.
According to Mark:
“As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do so that I may inherit eternal life?’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.’” (Mk 10:17-18)
Luke essentially preserved his source:
“A ruler questioned him, saying, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.’” (Lk 18:18-19)
Matthew, however, clearly revised the prefatory exchange:
“And someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good thing shall I do so that I may obtain eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why are you asking me about what is good? There is only one who is good;’” (Mt 19:16-17)
Relocating the word “good” from the man’s salutation to his question, then completely rewriting Jesus’ response, is no misspelling, omission or slip of the stylus.
In stocking his medicine chest did Epiphanius somehow forget to include an antidote to Matthew’s blatant revisionism? Or is changing the actual the words of the Incarnate Word not heresy?
Yup, it’s a great illustration of how Matthew and Luke redacted (or didn’t) their sources, sometimes in order to keep the accounts from being misunderstood (or arguably, understood correctly!!). In this case, when Matthew changes the location and referent of “good,” it ends up making Jesus’ response non-sensical….
The Gospels talk of “false witnesses” in regard to Jesus’s trial. Do we know what these witnesses testified and why it was considered “false”?
Each Gospel portrays the trial differently, of coruse; but usually it is thought that hte false witnesses claimed that Jesus said things he didn’t really say.
Also, do we know who the false witnesses were?
Nope!
What things did the false witnesses claim that Jesus said that he didn’t really say? Do we know? Are there any ancient sources which tell us?
We don’t know. Presumably it involved violations of Jewish law (since they were informing the Sanhedrin)
Do you think that maybe there were witnesses who testified that Jesus DID break the Sabbath laws and the blasphemy laws, since there were several instances in the Gospels where Pharisees and other Jews saw him healing on the Sabbath and heard him equate his work with God’s? After all, the Jews were an extremely legalistic society and lived by the Torah, its laws and the Sanhedrin’s interpretation of those laws and could not execute anyone without proving their guilt. Is it possible that the writers of the Gospels had such antagonism towards the Jewish Establishment for taking their leader, that they wrote the Gospels with a bias towards Jesus which made him look totally innocent and “the Jews” totally guilty? Is it possible that the writers just branded all the witnesses as “false” when actually they weren’t?
Do you mean at his actual trial? No I doubt if there was ana ctual trial. The high priests thought he was a potential problem, heard he had been calling himself the future king, and turned him over to the authrities to avoid any nonesense during the Passover. That’s my view, in a nutshell.
Do you think that the Gospels were written for the purpose of exonerating Jesus from all wrongdoing, thereby paving the way towards his divinity?
My sense is that it would never have occurred to the Gospel writers that Jesus could have ever *done* anything wrong.
Is there a central online database (or databases) where I can see a list of the estimated dates of the extant Greek manuscripts of NOT ONLY the New Testament, but also other major classical works, e.g., Homer, Euripides, Virgil, etc?
I don’t know if there’s a single site, but it’s easy enough to look up the manuscripts of each author individually through various google searceds (e.g., search for “oldest manuscripts of the Odyssey” etc.)