(17 votes, average: 4.88 out of 5)
Loading...A couple of posts ago I promised to deal with an argument sometimes used by those who believe we can know with good certainty what the original text of the New Testament books said. This is the argument called the “tenacity of the tradition.” If you recall, the argument is prefaced on the very interesting phenomenon that whenever papyri manuscripts are discovered – say from the third or fourth Christian century – they almost *never* contain new variant readings that we did not already know about from later manuscripts, of say the seventh to fifteenth centuries. Instead, the readings of these early manuscripts re-appear in later manuscripts.
The conclusion that is sometimes drawn, then, is that that tradition is “tenacious.” That is to say, later manuscripts did not invent their variant readings, but in almost every instance replicated variant readings that they got from earlier manuscripts. And one corollary that is sometimes drawn, then, is variant readings do not disappear but continue to be replicated in later witnesses. If that is the case, then the “original” readings almost certainly still survive somewhere in the manuscript tradition. The task of textual criticism, then, is simply to figure out which or our surviving variant readings is the original.
This certainly sounds like a convincing argument, and it’s no wonder that so many people find it compelling. I myself, however, do not, and I would like to explain why.
The first thing to stress is…
THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don’t belong yet, JOIN! Or you will never know!!!
Were the later scribes all copying a full bible at a stretch or were they breaking it up, starting a manuscript and then handing it off from the Genesis guy to the Exodus guy, etc? If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading your trade books it’s that the earliest scribes weren’t copying full bibles or testaments because often they probably weren’t aware of or able to obtain copies of all of the “books” that eventually would make up the Bible and later, they couldn’t even agree on which texts those were. Also did the early scribes see the books as being so important that they needed to make sure every i was dotted and it’s was tittled, or was it only important to them to pass on the gist of the correspondence or the storybooks they got their hands on?
Some manuscripts contain individual books, some a collection of books (Paul’s letters, the Gospels , etc.), some the whole NT, and some few the whole shooting match.
Would the scribes of the first 200 years have had more motivation to change the scripture, in an effort to make the scripture less supportive of what they considered to be heresies (as opposed to the scribes of the 7th to 15th centuries)? I don’t know whether there was as much of a battle during the 7th to 15th centuries over what should be believed as there was in the first 200 years.
Yes, that’s part of my thesis in Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
Dear Prof, thanks a lot for this project! I see your point and agree that it is highly unlikely (impossible) to derive the “original” gospel(s). Nonetheless, I have two questions.
1) Is there a way to infer the “copying rate” for manuscripts? I guess it can be probably estimated for later scribes operating in the middle ages. But what about the output rate at the very beginning when less trained (amateur?) scribes were active? What could be a hypothetical number for the manuscripts available let’s say in Rome at the end of the II century (assuming none of them got lost)?
2) If Mark and Luke were well educated Roman citizens, did they not have access to professional scribes? (In fact, what about an author copying himself?)
(For simplicity, I am assuming that all gospels, including the apocryphal, were equally popular and had the same number of (good/bad) scribes working on them. Also, a prolific scribe could propagate a variant and increase its frequency relative to other readings transcribed by less prolific scribes. Etc. )
THANK YOU!!
1) I’m afraid we don’t know. 2) There’s nothing to suggest the Gospel writers had access to professional scribes (they were clearly educated, but they almost certainly were not citizens of Rome; and we have no clue as to how wealthy/poor or well-connected they were.
How would we know that the authors were not Roman citizens?
Well, it’s impossible to know for sure. But most people living in the provinces of the empire were not citizens of Rome.
Well, since these early copies were made about 300 years before there was a canonized New Testament, one would guess that these early copyists did not yet work with the view that they were copying an “inerrant” New Testament that should not be changed because, at the time of these early copyists, there was no New Testament. I think those copying the Koran, in contrast, knew quite early that they were copying something that should not be changed. This may account for part of the reason the early copyists of the New Testament were not as careful as later copyists, namely, that, at the time of the copying, the early copyists did not know they were copying “the” Bible because there was no “the” Bible. .
You should research the inerrancy of the early Koran for yourself and not take the word of modern day Muslim apologists 🙂 It wasn’t as perfect as they believe or want others to believe.
Oh it is perfect, very perfect, perhaps a lot more perfect then you would like to admit gmatthews. 🙂
The so called “variances” weren’t just known an acknowledged by early Muslims but embraced and accepted. There are a plethora of narrations of earliest Muslims reciting ayat in a slightly different way being directly told that the Quran was revealed in different recitations by none other than Rasulullah himself. The recitations preserved even today were passed flawlessly through the ages. Even today some Muslims recite one ayah as Maliki yawm id deen and others as Maaliki yawm id deen (King of the day of recompense or Owner of the day of recompense.)
The fact that early Muslims didn’t have an issue with “variants” is another evidence of the flawless transmission of the Quran. Sooner or later you will confess its true. Bart I hope you do as he says and research it yourself- hopefully you will join our group and make it to Paradise.
🙂
A counterargument could be made about this–once the “doctrinal” Gospel of Mark had been “set” then there was no need to make alterations and so it kept its “tenacity of the tradition” for ages and ages hence. Proves nothing other than the fact that in the minds of the church fathers, the Gospel of Mark had all the elements necessary to make it orthodox. What do you think of this as a counter argument to “them?”
Interesting argument.
That doesn’t mean that all the copyists were “orthodox”.
Your math is actually off a bit and it may or may not be important. If Mark produces 1 original and then 10 copies are made you have 1 autograph and 10 second generation copies. All of the second generation copies may or may not be identical (most certainly not 100% identical, but for the sake of simplicity let’s assume they are more or less identical). Then if everything is copied is copied 10 times again you’ll have:
10 second generation copies
100 third generation copies
copied again 10 times we get:
100 third generation copies
1000 fourth generation copies
and so on. My point though is that at any given time you’ll have roughly 10^x +10^(x-1) copies where x is the generational number of the copy. This means that roughly 10% of the copies at any given time would be closer to the autograph than all the rest.
Maybe that’s something important. I don’t know.
I thought that was the math I was applying!
No, I actually did the math wrong myself when I wrote that, but the point I was trying to make was that you’d almost always have a small percentage of very early copies in circulation. I’d think a statistician could come up with a model to determine how many 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation etc. copies were in circulation at any given time given all of the factors you’d have to worry about.
As to the numbers, what your calculations don’t take into account is the copies that were used to make the next generation of copies. You didn’t count those. For example:
In year 0 there is only the autograph
In year 1 there is the autograph plus 10 copies
In year 2 there are 121 in total because you need also count the 11 from year 1 that you used to make the 10x copies. Your math shows 110 in total, but you forgot to add the first 10 copies that were used to make the 110 copies. I also include the autograph because there’s no reason you can’t keep copying that one.
If my math is correct you’d have 1331 in year 3. The math you use only accounts for 1100 (I think).
Again though, my point is not the math, but that there are a certain (small) percentage of very early copies (not to mention the autograph) that are still out in circulation.
Thanks!
You and Bart are making different assumptions, thus you got different numbers. He assumed each manuscript was copied a total of ten times during its lifetime. You are assuming each manuscript is copied ten times each year. However, since it was just an example, not a real model, the difference doesn’t really matter.
To actually come up with a model, you would also have to know the rate at which manuscripts disappeared or fell apart or were otherwise lost.
Thank you for a very easy to understand and pedegagical way of describing the tradition of the NT text and how the problem with the texts started with the first copies, even if the copies was better done in later Church history. To me that was very clear.
Can you say something about what you know could be different with the way copies where done by Jewish Scribes, copying their old Hebrew texts from the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Biblebooks of Tanakh?
We don’t know much about Jewish copying practices from the ancient world — not nearly as much as from the medieval period,where they were *incredibly* accurate. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls (over a thousand years earlier than our first full Hebrew ms.) are very close indeed to the later mss; others represent a text that is 15% different in length. So some scribes apparently copied rigorously, and others not.
Making it even more interesting, can you as an historian and well known in the ancient writings of the Greek/Roman world, try to expand some more about the possible difference between the greek NT copies, compared to the copies of Hebrew Bible Tanach?
I have heard the Hebrew letters in writings also are Quality Assured, in that every letter has a number. I have heard they could go back and count and so secure every scroll was rightly copied. As I understand it, as the copyists by this more correctly could know if they copied the text rightly, this one thing could give more credibility to the copying process of the Hebrew Tanach, than the NT.
At least this is partly vindicated from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as for ex the Isaiah scroll they found there was perfectly as they expected it to be, compared with the Hebrew text of Tanach of today. Of course the very earliest copies, of for ex the first original of Isaiah himself, must have benefited the trust worthiness from this practice.
I feel this benefit we even today have the best Thorah and Tanach text possible. The Greek copies of the NT can never be compared with the Quality Assurance of the Hebrew Scriptures. This seems to make the Jewish Bible totally unique in this matter.
Can you agree?
In the Middle Ages Jewish scribes took scrupulous care to copy the Tanak without changing a single word or letter. But it wasn’t always that way. The scroll of Jeremiah found in the Dead Sea Scroll is based on an edition that was about 15% shorter than the one known in the Middle Ages — as one example.
I’m wondering whether those arguing for tenacity of the tradition are actually needing to emphasize that every one of the changes made in the early days have been preserved somewhere in the ocean of manuscripts, or if they’re merely content to argue that even if every single change to have been made wasn’t, at least the original reading is (put aside for the moment the “what is original” question).
I’m still not sure they could argue that there is any absolute assurance of even that, nonetheless, because I could imagine a scenario where the “original” reading manages to vanish from all later extant manuscripts — though I’m not qualified to speculate on the probability of this. I would love to see a hypothetical calculation nonetheless… something like:
If 10 copies of the autograph were made, and it is x% likely that either an error or deliberate change is made by any given copyist of a particular passage; Then 10 additional of each of those, and some chance again, and so on. Say it’s “more likely than not” that a scribe accurately copies any given passage, so at least half of the manuscripts might have the original reading. Then of the 10 copies of each of those, same assumption. Eventually we have a decent number of manuscripts that do have the “original” reading. The means for the original reading of a particular passage falling out of the tradition would seem to be a fairly high percentage of errors and/or edits while the “original” ends up on the wrong side of the scribal lottery. So I see no way of having certainty, but it does leave me wondering whether the odds are still on the side of that original reading being *somewhere* in the collection of extant manuscripts today. Or if ranges of probabilities could even be reasonably worked out.
My speculation has probably failed to consider something. I also do not think that the conservatives have done much to salvage their larger case (of “knowing” what the original text looked like) even if a reasonably good probability can be assumed for the original being *somewhere* among the extant manuscripts, because they simply cannot get around the lack of consensus regarding a large number of passages.
And one last thought on the “can we guess at the probability of the original reading being *somewhere* among the manuscripts” question — would the assumption of a high probability be thwarted by the existence of certain passages for which the best reading happens to be some variant for which there are very few witnesses? I can’t recall any examples right off hand but I’m certain I’ve read of passages where there is something approaching a consensus that some not-very-well attested reading is probably the best reading.
YEs, there are lots of passages like that (where only one or two manuscripts support the reading most likely original). What if those manuscripts had been lost??? And there are some places where scholars do think that none of the manuscripts really makes much sense and need to be “corrected”.
Not sure if this is on everyone’s same “page” here, but in my usual naiveté, I’m entirely perplexed about “tradition”. I understand about information as instrument readings in the physical sciences. Then there is history, the technicalities of which I’m unfamiliar with, but is another mode of information. I mainly hear about tradition from modern and other proto-orthodox Christianity or religions in general. However, I’m not at all clear about tradition insofar as information goes (for example, in physics there is the history of the famous Bohr-Einstein debates, but nothing called tradition about anything I’m aware of.)
My impression at one time was that religious tradition was curiously like the “telephone” game of “inside” information to be passed along, e.g., in the recesses of the Vatican. My present speculation is something like bits and scraps of just plain old HISTORY that hasn’t turned up in an official volume or “codex” or some such.
A perfectly naive example might be the 1 Clement or Didache documents now known as history. Since proto-Christianity seems to have “traditionally” incorporated certain of what’s contained in these over the ages, one would think there was also at one time a legitimate “history” consisting of the content of 1C or D floating around, perhaps scraps of paper/parchment stuck between pages or in pigeonholes and under paperweights on tables. (Otherwise, what sort of definable ‘history’ is informal, off the cuff, well-neigh for all intents actually unwritten – to be guessed at later on??)
What especially strikes me is how certain of religion appear to talk about what they term ‘their traditions’ as a special source of ‘truth’ that’s apart from and implied as somehow superior to history.
Unless there is a useful definition somewhere, “tradition” seems a specious term at best in these contexts.
Prof. Ehrman,
In a recent PhD thesis (Univ of Edinburgh, 2015), “Textual Stability and Fluidity Exhibited in the Earliest Greek Manuscripts of John”, the author provides strong evidence which opposes some of the views you (and others, for example Colwell) expressed here in regard (a) the number and nature of variants contained in the earliest papyri in comparison to later (majuscules) mss, and (b) the habits and skills of copyists. Have you learned these new conclusions? What is your take on this? And would these findings alter your view on the transmission attitudes of “orthodox” vs “non-orthodox” scribes in the first four centuries?
Thank you.
I believe the thesis compares the papyri to early majuscule manuscripts. It would have been interesting to see what would happen if the comparison were made with manuscripts in teh middle ages. I have collated a whole bunch of early papyri and later majuscules, and I can say for a fact that the latter group agree together WAY more than the earlier do. So I”ll be interested in exploring the authors methodology and conclusions!
i have off topic point to make
imagine if we did not have the gospel of mark in our canon and we discovered an ancient reading of matthew which read:
“they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid”
now, would we say that this is a CHANGE to the text which was copied again and again later on ?
so we have matthew
A: they ran from the tomb and reported…
vs
matthew
B:they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid