Loading...There is one particularly interesting 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.” 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.
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There is a Jain sect which explains their own issues with variants and textual corruptions in scripture by the claim that the “original” divinely inspired text was lost and what survives was recreated from memory by the Jain sages! I’m doubtful this will go over very well but you might suggest this as a possible explanation for NT textual issues the next time you debate a Christian apologist.
Isn’t there a deeper theological undertone to what you’re saying Bart? Meaning, despite the scribal errors, mistakes in earliest and later manuscipts, and variant insertions or omissions; aren’t we still left with fundamental truths,? ie, that we end up possessing an historical and accurate account of the Gospel narratives?
My view is that historical accuracy is not the only thing that matters, and in fact probably not the most important thing at the end of the day. Not just with respect to the Gospels but with respect to all historical narratives. Knowing what happened is indeed hugely important to me; but so too are understandings of what it all means, even if the understandings are not rooted in historical realitis. Novels are at least as important to me as biographies, since meaning is never *directly* derived from what happened in the past.
I don’t get it. Your opponents argue that the original wording, at any particular point in the text, is likely extant in at least one surviving manuscript. You argue that not all the variants introduced by copyists have survived. But that is irrelevant, isn’t it? Your rebuttal misses its target, doesn’t it?
I’m saying that if all the variant readings have not survived, why would we think that the originals (which are, in fact, always variant readings — they just happen to be the original variants) have either. Moreover their argument makes no sense. How can we know that the original survives in at least one witness? Seriously, how could we know that?
You are assuming that the original is just as likely to become extinct as any other variant reading. That is not the case. Let’s take your example of the original copy of Mark being copied 10 times. If one of the copies changes a word, it is unlikely that all the other 9 copies would make the same change. When each of the 10 copies is copied 10 times we would likely have many 10s of copies with the original reading. The original reading has a numerical advantage over all later variants, simply because it was the original. I’ll put it another way: Some manuscripts leave no surviving descendants, so variants introduced by them do not survive. But the original HAS left many descendants. The original reading is not equivalent to any other variant (in terms of the probability that it will leave descendants. So, while your debate partners cannot claim with mathematical certainty that the original always survives, their argument is valid. Makes sense?
Your case is stronger when it comes to interpolations. This is because of the tendency for interpolations to spread through mixing.
No, I’m not assuming it is just as likely. I’m assuming it happened sometimes.
You wrote, “No, I’m not assuming it is just as likely. I’m assuming it happened sometimes.”
So it seems to me that there is not a big gap between you and your opponents on this issue. You are a “glass partly empty” guy and they are “glass nearly full”.
on academic biblical reddit somebody made this argument against mcclellan
quote:
However, what McClellen doesn’t say is that what text critics know about manuscript copying is the exact opposite of “things going missing,” the evidence shows things don’t disappear, they get added too. This is why one criterion for textual criticism is “the shorter reading is the preferred reading.” So, the evidence of the manuscripts show us that texts and verses get longer, they get added to, not that things disappear, this is why text critics believe we have what was “originally written.”
end quote
can a shorter preferred reading help a scholar decide how the text looked like in the first century?
by missing , i think mcclenna could be interpreted to mean that “not all of the variants have survived,” so they have been written out of existence by the dominant readings?
I’m afraid the criterion that the “shorter reading is to be preferred” has been convincingly shown not to be reliable by James Reese’s massively documented study of Scribal habits, at least in the early centuries of copyinging. He demonstrats conclusiviely that texts were more often shortened.
You wrote, “I’m afraid the criterion that the “shorter reading is to be preferred” has been convincingly shown not to be reliable by James Reese’s massively documented study of Scribal habits”.
Actually, more recent studies have shown that Royse’s data does not actually overturn the “shorter is to be preferred” conclusion. Royse detected the influence of a copyist by listing singular readings. There are two problems with this. Firstly, it has been shown that most singular readings were not the creation of the copyist, but were in the exemplar. Secondly, a text would get longer when an omission was corrected, but this correction would not show up as a singular reading, so there is a problem in the methodology. For more on this, you could consult the work of Elijah Hixson and Alan Taylor Farnes.
I would put it this way, “The shorter reading is usually to be preferred, unless it can be explained by parablepsis or a known bias.”
You may know that I published Hixson’s work and Farnes was my student.
a: they said nothing to anyone
b: they said nothing to anyone except peter
apologists want the exception b to exist in the gospel of mark. so aren’t apologists admitting that in the “original mark” reading b was eclipsed by reading a?
I’m on the road and don’t have a Greek NT with me. Are they saying that there are manuscripts that have “except Peter” in them? Which manuscripts would those be? (Or are they saying that they imagine this is what Mark originally wrote even though there is no evidence of it? If that’s the case, why bother with a view they are simply imagining??)
Dr Ehrman, thats not what i am saying.
the argument was that a text gets longer, the person said :
the evidence of the manuscripts show us that texts and verses get longer, they get added to, not that things disappear
but my point was that christian apologists BELIEVE that mark originally wrote :
the women said nothing to anyone , except peter and the other disciples.
but this “except peter and the other disciples” was omitted making the reading shorter
“they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid”
Well, they can certainly believe things that have no evidence. The question is why anyone should agree with a view that they would like to be true but has no evidentiary basis (other than their personal preferences).
Do we know how long a manuscript physically lasted? Could the ‘original’ copy theoretically still have been around in the year 150 or 200 or 300? And do we absolutely know that the earliest surviving manuscripts were not even the 1000th copy made after the original?
Thank you!
It completely depended on how much they were used, how they were stored, the climactic conditions (esp. the humidity) of where they were kept, etc. etc. We have mss from 2000 years ago, so they could in theory last a long time. Much longer if they were written on parchment than on papyrus.
Dear Bart,
Do we have a way to estimate how long the original texts survived? I ask, as I’m curious to know if a scribe wished to make a copy of the autograph, rather than one of the copies, or copies of the copies, how long would we give them until this was no longer possible?
Obviously, we don’t know for sure, but what would you say is a reasonable guesstimate?
Many thanks.
In theory they could have lasted till today. So far as we know, no one ever thought about making a copy from the autograph as a desideratum, as strange as that seems. Even though ancient Christians sometimes talked about scribes, no one says anything about that.
Interesting. I think I’ve found two instances which may, or may not, reference the autographs. The first is Jerome (Illustrious Men, 3):
“Matthew, also called Levi, apostle and aforetimes publican, composed a gospel of Christ at first published in Judea in Hebrew for the sake of those of the circumcision who believed, but this was afterwards translated into Greek, though by what author is uncertain. The Hebrew itself has been preserved until the present day in the library at Cæsarea which Pamphilus so diligently gathered. I have also had the opportunity of having the volume described to me by the Nazarenes of Berœa, a city of Syria, who use it.”
What’s unclear is whether “the Hebrew itself” (ipsum hebraicum) is referencing the autograph or a copy of it.
The second is the Jerusalem Colophon:
“[this gospel] was copied and corrected from the παλαιῶν ἀντιγράφων (ancient exemplars?) from Jerusalem preserved on the holy mountain.”
Again, I’m not sure whether παλαιῶν ἀντιγράφων should be considered the autograph, or just a very old copy. What would you say?
Yes, these do show that there was an awareness of older copies, but neither speaks of an original manuscript. I have a vague recollection of someone referring to one/them, but I can’t remember where it was (if it was).
“And here is the key point. We don’t have ANY of those thousand copies, or the 110, or the 10. Or the original. The original is lost. And the hypothetical first ten. And the hypothetical first hundred. And the hypothetical next one thousand one hundred.”
Dang! That certainly puts it in perspective!!
If there were 10 copies made of the original it would be unlikely that there would be any point at which all 10 copies made an error in the same place. So in all places the original would survive in at least one of the copies. The more copies made of the original the better.
Though there may not have been an ‘original’. The author may have dictated to two scribes who both wrote down slightly differing ‘originals’!
Dr ehrman, have you said anywhere that the apostles of jesus or some of his apostles believed that jesus was identical to yhwh ?
there is this guy on twitter who said this :
Theophilus
@Theogeopol
·
16h
Thats not what paul believed. Even Bart Ehrman agrees that the other apostles of Jesus believed that Jesus is God
It’s a modern idea. The apostles clearly differentiated between God the Father, YHWh, and his son Jesus.
I have read John 3:16 is an example of textual add, or modification.
John 3:16 seems to hang out there out of context. Some scholars say it was edited by Martin Luther to reinforce his theory, or the mistaken interpretation of his theory, that one only had to believe. There is argument over who said it, Jesus or the narrator. There is clearly a linguistic shift from first person to third person. It is often erroneouly used to put an end to anything beyond that—-no transformation , no deeds etc. etc.
Was John 3:16 likely a late insert?
No, I don’t think anyone claims Martin Luther changed the wording of the text, and there aren’t any textual specialists who think it was added by a scribe. It’s original to John. Different people *interpret* it differently, but everyone agrrees it was originally there. (There’s a very big question of whether Jesus is saying it or the narrator of John; different translations put the closing quotatoin marks in different places.)
Bart,
I don’t disagree in any regard with what you wrote, but I just want to suggest that there may be another reason a scribe might write vary a text of an anonymous document he or she is copying. The is no reason to believe that there were not other anonymous writings by early “Jesus followers” in circulation in ~70 AD the copier might have read something in another document that he or she believes would fit nicely in the document being copied. In other words, some alterations may have been deliberately made.
Bill Steigelmann
yes, that’s right. Luke suggests there were in fact other such books floating around (1:1-4: “many”), and even apart from that it seems certain their must have been.
So, excluding spelling error we’re dealing with words.
Some words are variants some are not.
Scribes from the middle ages copied variants accurately
Thus they copied non variants accurately.
If P then Q. If you posit an operative mechanism ( perhaps Christian zeal) it seems to work.
But, only for P. The “originals” (conveniently) call them O are not demonstrated to be P in this syllogism or by the medieval mechanism of dedicated faultless scribes. O is earlier than P
O may or may not = P
O may or may not = Q.
You have frequently argued that detecting the mistakes of early, less competent copyists is not especially difficult. The far greater obstacle to discerning what the original gospel authors actually wrote must be in attempting to reverse-engineer the surviving record to identify *intentional* revisions by theologically-driven redactors.
Such purposeful emendations would be as consequential and insidious as they are subversive to the quest of the historical Jesus.
One doesn’t have to be a scholar capable of sifting through ancient, fragmentary manuscripts to find proof of this.
Given that the recognized canon of scripture — as it exists today in *every* Bible — includes both a gospel source text (Mark) AND transcriptions of most of it by the first, two copyists (Matthew and Luke), even we novices can easily compare the nominal “original” with the two, subsequent replications to see how faithfully each preserved it.
It should be noted BTW that none of these canonical authors was wanting for compositional skills. Any divergences, therefore, are not attributable to mere “mistakes” made by inept copyists.
How do Bible Inerrancy apologists deny, evade or rationalize away what are *irrefutably* clear and deliberate emendations by at least one of them — specifically, Matthew — when these are legion?
Submitted in evidence…
They typically say they were inspired to do so and the emendations are not contradictions but imspired ways of conveying a slightly different perspective.
Exhibit A. Matthew “corrected” the awkward prologue to the Rich Young Man pericope he got from Mark (Mk 10:17-18) — that was accurately replicated by Luke (Lk 18:18-19) — by moving the word “good” from the interlocutor’s salutation to his question, and then earns the Blue Ribbon for Chutzpah by *rewriting* (😳) Jesus’ answer! (Mt 19:16-17)
Exhibit B. At Jesus’ baptism Matthew creates from whole cloth a preliminary exchange between Jesus and John the Baptist (Mt 3:14-15), presumably to redress the obvious problem of how a divine baptizee could somehow be subordinate to a mortal baptizer — a unique bit of dialog that couldn’t possibly have been overheard by the yet-to-be-recruited tax collector. Oddly, Matthew’s theological troubleshooting here didn’t extend to the equally vexing issue of how it could be that the Son of God needed ritual baptism “for the forgiveness of sin” in the first place! 🤔
Exhibit C. Matthew also attenuates (to put it charitably) a number of Jesus’ more challenging injunctions by, for instance, adding disclaimers to his absolute prohibition of divorce (Mk 10:9//Lk 16:18) — in two, different places! (Mt 5:32 and19:9)
Matthew, likewise, *corrected* the sayings of Jesus he got from the Q source…
Exhibit D. It appears Matthew provided his own addenda to Jesus teachings drawn from Q about the blessings that — according to Luke’s version — he said were bestowed upon “you who are poor” (Lk 6:20) by adding the words “in spirit” (Mt 5:3), and to “you who hunger” (Lk 6:21), the words “for righteousness.” (Mt 5:6)
These “Beatitudes” were not recorded by Mark; and since Q is a long-lost, hypothetical text that is perforce unavailable for comparison, I’m deducing that it was Matthew — not Luke — who has revised their other shared source.
But sanding off the sharp edges of Jesus’ teachings is not only Matthew’s well-demonstrated MO, but both of these lines *are* independently attested — albeit, not within the canon — in the miraculously resurrected Gospel of Thomas! (Th 54 and 69)
All the examples that occur to this unlettered amateur (scholars could probably cite others) are from Matthew. But what about Luke?
Aside from replacing the second half of the Psalms 2 quotation — pronounced by the “voice from Heaven” at Jesus’ baptism — with the more theologically commodious line from Isaiah, are there indications that Luke might also have “corrected” his sources in the process of transcribing them?
All over the place! Get a Gospel harmony and read all three synoptics side by sdie and you’ll see tons of places.
this from the 3rd-5th paragraph was undecipherable. but dr Ehrman u kept on supporting those statements.
In the Local Church when I was in jr & high school, most everybody didn’t understand Witness Lee messages edited & delivered from Anaheim, but we sat there in agreement to the message as if it was from God in puzzlement.
From Genesis, the Lord [God] did not clearly or even tell Eve [or Adam] to NOT eat that tree [they lacked either the ability to understand] or as we know- certain things have to be repeated before I oblige.
going thru genesis-Revelation: holySpirit or God & even Jesus were awful communicators as the text even says.
thank u for making sure we understand what u mean clearly Dr Ehrman!