The Best Manuscripts and Social Justice: Readers’ Mailbag October 23, 2016
Question: When you say earliest and “best” manuscripts, what do you mean by “best”? Response: This question was asked in response to my statement, with respect to the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8 (where Jesus says, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her), that we know it was not originally in the Gospel of John in part because it is not to be found in the “oldest and best manuscripts.” And so the question is, “how do we know what the best manuscripts are?” It’s a great question and one that has, as you might imagine, occupied textual scholars for a very, very long time. In fact, for as long as there have *been* textual scholars (i.e., hundreds of years!) The problem, in a nutshell, is this. If we have hundreds, or thousands, of manuscripts (centuries ago we knew of hundreds, now we know of thousands), how do we know which ones are more likely to preserve the “original” [...]