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Loading...I’ve been asked a good bit lately by readers of the blog and random emailers how we can know, or if we can know, what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote — if we don’t have their original copies. By far my best selling book (Misquoting Jesus) is about that, as is my best known scholarly book (The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). It’s the issue I first got most interested in (as an 18 year old!) when it came to serious scholarship, and its the field of study I devoted nearly twenty years to it as a scholar. So, well, I’m interested!
It’s been over seven years since I gave anything like a full explanation of the entire field of New Testament “textual criticism” (which does not mean what a lot of people think!), and I’ve decided it’s high time I go over it again. This will take a number of posts!
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The first thing to emphasize is that the term “textual criticism” is a technical term with a very specific meaning. Lay people often misuse the term, not knowing that it refers to a particular and highly specialized field of study. The term does *not* simply mean “the study of texts” or “literary analysis of texts” or anything similar. Thus, if someone is engaged, for example, in the interpretation of a text, that is *not* “textual criticism.”
Instead, textual criticism is the discipline that seeks to reconstruct the text that an author wrote when we no longer have his or her original, but only later copies. That is to say, it is the discipline that tries to establish what the original words were – or at least tries to decide which words to print if there are a variety of options. (In fact, it tries to reconstruct the text of the author even if we *have* the original. I’ll explain below.)
Suppose you have a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Wordsworth, or a history of Cicero, or a treatise of Aristotle. You don’t have
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If you have that situation, how do you know which word/sentence the author actually wrote? Someone – a scribe copying the document – made a mistake. If you have lots of copies and lots of differences, then probably lots of scribes made lots of mistakes. These may have been simply accidental errors (the scribe was sloppy, or inattentive, or distracted, or sleepy, or ignorant); others of them may have been made on purpose (the scribe thought something was wrong in the text and so changed it, or didn’t like what it said and changed it, or thought he had a better way of putting it and changed it, etc.).
So if you want to know what the author wrote – Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Cicero, or Aristotle — and you have copies that have mistakes in them, you need to figure out which copies have the mistakes and which copies have the original. And you almost never will have an easy situation in which one copy never has a mistake and the others all do have mistakes. Instead, one copy will be right in one place but wrong in another, another copy will be right in a different place but not another, a third copy will be right in yet a different place but not another, and so on and so on.
Textual criticism is the discipline that deals with this problem of trying to figure out what are the changes of the text and what are the words of the original text.
As it turns out, you need textual criticism for every book that has come down to us. Even if you only have one copy. Even if the one copy you have is the original. Suppose you have a short story written by the young Charlotte Bronte, and you have it in the very pieces of paper that she herself wrote (Last week I actually saw one of her short stories that she wrote in a microscopic hand as a young person, displayed at the Pierpont Morgan Library in NYC). But there are lines crossed out and marginal notes and rewritings found here and there. An editor has to choose which words to print and which to leave out. In other words, he has to do textual criticism.
When it comes to ancient works – Cicero and Aristotle rather than Charlotte and Anne Bronte – the problems are exacerbated because there are usually many, many more years separating the surviving copies from the originals. If an original was produced in, say, the fourth century BCE, but our surviving copies do not show up until the twelfth century CE, then obviously there is at least a 1500-year gap between the composition of the writing and its earliest surviving copies. The earliest copy will almost certainly not have been produced by a scribe who was copying Aristotle’s original copy. He will be copying a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original. But all the intervening copies (all of which will almost certainly have both reproduced mistakes of their predecessors and introduced mistakes of their own) will have been lost. As well as the original. All we have is the copy made 1500 years later (and the other copies from about the same time or even later).
Textual criticism is the technical and highly specialized discipline that works to reconstruct the original text and to figure out how, when, where, and why it got changed.
Let me stress several major points about this discipline.
- It needs to be applied to all literary texts that have come down to us from the past. This isn’t simply something done for one text or another. It’s done for ALL texts.
- That includes the books of the New Testament. We don’t have the originals or copies of the originals but only copies of copies of copies of the originals, as I will explain more fully in my next post or two.
- Scholars who engage in this work are not as a rule insanely pessimistic about the possibilities of getting back to a pretty close approximation of the original text in most cases. That is to say – some people reading my books have not picked up on this enough – there are good reasons for thinking that most of the time we can get back to a fair approximation of what ancient authors wrote, even if there are places (sometimes many places) (and sometimes many very important places) where there are real grounds for doubt.
- There are rigorous criteria that are used for engaging in this kind of analysis. It’s not guesswork. It’s pretty hardcore. That’s why very few literary specialists engage in this kind of work. I’ll explain more about the standard criteria that are used in subsequent posts.
Are the original texts of some New Testament books easier to reconstruct than others?
It seems to me that scholars won’t be able to improve or significantly improve on the textual criticism work you and Dr. Metzger have done.
Some texts are much harder to reconstruct than others; for the NT we have far more manuscripts than for other texts, but that doesn’t neesssarily make it easier. There are many texts much harder to reconstruct and others easier.
I want to go back to your post about peer review.
In a world in which we’re drowning in information, it seems like peer review is one of the best ways to sort out what has a good chance of being true vs something else, what’s worth reading vs what’s not, etc.
Do you think this is correct? Are there other academic/scientific/social processes that do a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff?
Without themselves trying to read and understand this work, where can laypeople go to get the fruits of this work? Are there journals that summarize what’s in scholarly journals?
Do you think that these processes have a noticeable tendency to ignore new or unpopular or minority views?
I wouldn’t say that peer-review is a guide to what is “true.” But it certainly is a better guide to what is based on real scholarship rather than guesswork and speculation. Yes, there are good places to go for getting scholarshiip on biblical studies written for layfolk. You might try the journal Bible Review, and especailly the online publication of th eSociety of Biblical Literature called “Bible Odyssey.”
Misquoting Jesus in Amazon costs 10 and The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture 30 (Kindle versions)
Is it worth reading “Misquoting” before “The Orthodox” ? or is it better to go right to “The Orthodox”?
Is there a way to purchase something like a “pack” of your books?
About “textual criticism”:
“if someone is engaged, for example, in the interpretation of a text, that is *not* “textual criticism.”
Ok, I see the point but I can’t figure out how you can “reconstruct the text that an author wrote when we no longer have his or her original, but only later copies.” without trying to interpret the text you are “reconstructing” , perhaps this will be explained in later posts …
Misquoting is much easier to read — it’s written for layfolk. Orthodox Corruption is much more advanced, but it is written so you can get the major arguments without getting down into the weeds (most of the detailed discussion is heavy duty)
What is – if there is- the most difficult,even frustrating aspect of engaging in such an industrious, relentless task? Your army of textual detectives is presupposed to possess the utmost devotion and patience.
When is ” the work” considered finished? When, for example, all manuscripts of any given book have been examined? Is this even possible for one person to do?
I am reading Mark and Matthew in pretty decent Hebrew translations ( they sound like the HB, made by very talented people), perhaps childishly hoping, in spite of the artificiality of the method, to catch the ” tone” of the sayings, as they might have sounded in a Semitic tongue like Hebrew or Aramaic. Perhaps it’s even just a musical quest!
For example, the ” Blessed be..” ( or is it “Happy are those…”?) of the Beatitudes is translated as Ashre(i) אשרי, a most idiomatic expression still used commonly today, which leans more to ” Happy” than to ” Blessed”, a word whose root would have been Barekh. ברך and not Ashrei. The translation as Ashrei sounds just right, authentic enough to suspect that it could not have been said in any other way.
O, well…… one word at a time…..
No, one person can never master all the data. There are WAY too many manuscripts, versions, patristic citations. A team of twenty people working full time for their careers couldn’t come close. BUT, the important tasks can be isolated and these can be performed, adn after a while it’s a matter of working out details rather than making bold and significant advances. My view is that we are already at that stage, which is why I no longer pursue research in that field.
Sorry Bart , you have to fix prices on Amazon !!!!
Look at that:
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why por Bart D. Ehrman – US$10.87
“Misquoting” Jesus? Answering Bart Ehrman (Solid Ground) por Gregory Koukl – US$0.99
A Rebuttal To Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus por Jeffrey Blevins – US$2.99
Misquotes in MISQUOTING JESUS por Dillon Burroughs – US$7.17
So I can purchase 3 rebuttals for almost the price of your work !
Could you recommend the best “rebuttal”?
Koukl’s work is the cheaper and it appears to be a solid work, but don’t know.
I have to confess I had previous bad experiences in buying rebuttals of your works.
After purchasing Did Jesus Exist? I bought “Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?”
Even skipping chapter 3 (The Phallic ‘Savior of the World’ Hidden in the Vatican) I literally felt asleep with the rest of the book …
I’m afraid I may be blinded, but I don’t know of an impressive rebuttal. You might check out my debates with Dan Wallace online though; they are much better than the books written to refute my views, even though I think he too is completely wrong.
What makes you think that the deliberate changes were made by copyist, rather than by other users of the manuscripts?
I’m not sure what you have in mind. Copyists were themselves users of the manuscripts. And users of the manuscripts who were simply readng them but not copying or correcting them didn’t change teh words on the page. If they did copy or correct them they were copyists/correctors.
We must distinguish between copyists and correctors/corrupters. They need not be the same people. A copyist made a new manuscript using an exemplar. Many other people could make changes to an existing manuscript. They could erase words or replace words or add words above the line or in the margin. Why do you blame the copyists for making the deliberate textual variants? Others could have made them, surely?
There were certainly scribes who functiones as a diorthotes. Is that what you mean? There are certainly later scribal hands in some manuscripts (Sinaiticus, famously). But the hands are almost always distinguishable, and of course these people were themselves copyists. If you are correcting a manuscript you are copying an earlier exemplar at that point (even if just one word) or implementing a change in a copy on your own initiative; to that extent producing a new copy (even if it’s a copy with only one difference from the manuscript you’re changing) and hence are a copyist. I don’t think there’s a controversy about that is there?
Perhaps we can communicate better if we discuss some examples. Consider the time when 1 Cor 14:34-35 was first added to a manuscript. I see no reason to blame a copyist. Anyone could have added the words to the margin of a manuscript. In doing so he was not copying. Or consider the first time that someone changed αυτης της to αυτου at Mark 6:22. This was not an act of copying and could have been done by anyone with a pen. And deletions did not even require a pen, and were not acts of copying either. The discipline needs to agree on a definition of copyist. I have always taken it mean someone who copied onto fresh papyrus/parchment/paper, thus creating a new manuscript. I suppose you could extend the definition to include those who added words to an existing manuscript from another source. But to me it makes no sense to extend the definition to include those who made any change to the text of a manuscript, even when that change involved no copying. How do most people define the word “copyist”?
I’d say he was doing exactly what a copyist does: he puts words on the page of a manuscript, either the words that was in his exemplar or those that he changes or adds. As it turns out, there is *not* an agreement among textual scholars on how to understand copyists. In my book Orthodox Corruption I argue that they are very much like redactors and even authors, in very important ways. Others disagree. But as to the issue of anyone with a pen making a change — again I ask, and it’s a genuine question: apart from “correctors” (diorthotes) of manuscripts (themselves scribes), do you know of instances where random people simply added to or altered the wording of manuscripts? Or are you saying that it seems plausible? If the latter, I’m wondering in what social context that would be happening (whose manuscripts? kept where? why are readers carrying ink and pen around with them)? I’m not disputing it — I think it’s an interesting hypothesis. But I’m having trouble imagining how it would work and if there is any evidence that it happened.
In most cases it is impossible to tell whether a deliberate change was made by a copyist or by someone else. Are there any that can definitely be blamed on the copyist? Schmid questions the tendency to default to blaming the copyist. See Ulrich Schmid, “Conceptualizing ‘Scribal’ Performances: Reader’s Notes,” in The Textual History of the Greek New Testament: Changing Views in Contemporary Research, ed. K. Wachtel and M. Holmes (Atlanta: SBL, 2011), 49–64. It can be found online there:
https://www.academia.edu/13312981/Conceptualizing_Scribal_Performances_Readers_Notes
Another example: “Western” manuscripts add words from 1 Cor 12:31 to Gal 4:17. It is hard to imagine why a copyist alone would make this addition. It seems more likely that a user added the words from 1 Cor 12:31 to the margin at Gal 4:17 to facilitate a sermon on zeal. A copyist later incorporated the marginal note.
What are a few of the major questions about the historical Jesus about which you wish there was more information or evidence?
Ha! What he really said and did!
What he really said and did …..
Indeed.
What striking is that Paul himself said almost nothing about what Jesus said and did !
What are a few of the current issues and controversies about the historical Jesus among critical NT scholars?
Again: what he actually said and did!
Hi Bart, On the topic of textual criticism, did you hear the Gordon Fee passed (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/october/gordon-fee-obit-bible-reading-worth-fire-pentecostal.html)? I recall you mentioning him on your blog. Best, James
I did. He was a great man. He influenced me massively as a young scholar. I almost went to do my PhD with him in Boston (before I decided to work with Metzger) and later we co-authored a book. But not on Pentecostal theology!
I know this not directly related, but how do we settle on a date of a book if it passed through many forms? Do we use the final form as a date? For example, the general consensus for the dating of Luke is in the mid-80s or into the 90s CE. Some scholars think “canonical” Luke was written between 120 and 150 CE. Is this the final form or should we still give the earlier date because proto-Luke was mostly written by then?
Ah, it’s a great and completely unresolvable problem! It depends whom you’re asking. But I’d say most scholars refer to the date of, say, Luke as the date that hte form of the Gospel that we now have was first put in circulation; earlier versions can be called “Ur-Luke” or “earlier editions of Luke,” but would not be considered Luke. But it’s a judgment call, obvoiusly.
This is very interesting, and leads to some reflections.
One reflection is: Textual criticism want to reconstruct the original version of the text, but is (was) there always a well defined original version? You mentioned the papers of Charlotte Brontë, and her rewritings and marginal notes. I suppose that she never published those papers, but if she had published some rewritten version of them, is then meaningful to ask which of the drafts she wrote prior to publication was the original version?
Likewise, take a biblical author, say Matthew, and assume that he wrote several drafts of his gospel, rewriting and adding new things to it – perhaps over time he gained new knowledge about Jesus, and that new issues arose which he wanted to address. Also, assume that several of these drafts were copied and spread, and that different still existing copies of Matthew’s Gospel (and parts of it) go back to several of these drafts. (All this doesn’t seem completely unlikely, right?) Is it then meaningful to say that a particular one of these drafts is the original one, which textual criticism wants to reconstruct?
Yup, these are massive complications — and there are many more; as a result of them, many many textual scholars have given up even talking about “the” original. What’s it even mean? And not just for the NT. What does it mean to speak of an original “Hamlet”??? There’s no way to get to it, or, in a sense, even to imagine it. A good book on this is David Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels.
What would you say is the oldest original written document we have?
Of the New Tesament? Probably the tiny fragment called P52, which contains parts of a few verses of John 18 and 19, and is usually dated to the first half of the second century, though some fine scholars are arguing now that it is actually much later than that.
Thanks, but I meant oldest of any type (not just Biblical), and, by ‘original’, I meant the autograph by the actual author (one last qualifier, though, I also mean something significant, beyond a tax receipt or some other record-keeping type of document).
Ah, I don’t know. The oldest surviving writings — including autographs — are precisely the record-keeping things you have in mind, or would rather not have in mind! Think: Sumerian writings on clay…. But as to autographs of literary works — I can’t think of *any* from antiquity.
‘Literary’ was the adjective I was trying to think of, rather than ‘significant’.
The answer to this question would be interesting, I think, as it gives context to whole argument about the ‘we only have copies of copies of copies…’ point.
If there are – literally – no original literary autographs from early CE – then that lends credence to the notion that scholars aren’t singling out NT documents for extra criticism…we don’t have anything truly original from the time period.
The implications of that, theological or otherwise, would be a separate discussion, but it would be interesting context.
I read may years ago (20 years?) that a fragment had been found which was believed to be from Mark, and it was believed to be from the (00)50s, which would be sensationally old if it was so. I don’t know what happened after that, but I think it was never established with any certainty that it really was a part of Mark.
Do you know what I am talking about?
Yes, it was announced in a public debate I had with DAn Wallace. I posted on it a bunch of times. Do a word search for “first century Mark” on the blog. It turns out it was totally bogus. (It WAS of Mark, though, but it was not first century. At all. And the person who originally pushed the idea was a famous papyrologist who is being charged with fraud and may well serve a significant prison term for it.
I have a question that may lie beyond Textual Criticism, if I understand it correctly, but is somewhat related. Even assuming that Textual Critics can reconstruct the original texts, does that necessarily support the author’s position on the topic, in perpetuity, even based on generally accepted interpretation of those texts?
First, did the author convey his position well in the text? In my undergraduate English courses, I recall one professor who would mark up my draft papers with a blue quill pen. During office hours, I would explain what I was “really trying to say,” and usually his response would be “just say that!” I’m sure you have the same process with editors of your book. After reviewing comments on your draft, you may realize, that you didn’t communicate yourself well. Did ancient authors have editors?
Second, did the authors change their position over the course of their life? I think that most people have changed their positions on subjects over time. Paul famously converted to be the primary advocate of Christianity. Could others have changed their perspective such that they no longer believed what they once wrote?
Great and important questoins! 1. No, what an author writes does not mean either that what he writes is true or, as you point out, even that he expresses himself clearly or represents what he actually thinks. Bummer! 2. Oh yes, ancient writers (including Xns!) changed their views over time. You can see that in some casees with Paul even as a Christian. In his early letters (1 Thess e.g.) he is convinced he will be alive when Jesus returns; in his later letters he realizes he may die first. What else did he change his mind on? There are debates about that; my view is that I wish we knew….
That is a great line of questions!
Sounds like a good topic for a post or two – or your podcast.
Good idea!