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Loading...When scholars try to establish what an ancient author wrote, they can do so only on the basis of the surviving evidence. That seems, well, rather obvious, but the reality is that most people have never thought about that. It just seems that if you pick up a copy of Plato, or Euripides, or Cicero, that you’re simply reading what they wrote. But it’s not that simple. In none of these cases, or in any other case for any other book from the ancient world, do we actually have the person’s actual writing. All we have are later copies, and invariably these copies are filled with scribal mistakes. Scholars who are “textual critics” try to reconstruct the text that the author produced, to the best of their ability.
I have been talking about the challenges of doing that with the New Testament. In many, many ways we are much better situated with the New Testament than with any other ancient book (or set of books) from the ancient world. We have WAY more evidence – TONS more – for the NT than for anything else from antiquity. The reason is not hard to figure out. Throughout the Middle Ages, when most of our surviving manuscripts of every ancient book were produced, who was doing the copying? Christian scribes. Usually monks. And what would Christian monks prefer to copy? John’s Gospel or Plato’s Republic? No contest. John got copied hundreds and hundreds of times more frequently.
So we have way more manuscripts of the NT than for any other ancient book. But as I pointed out, we also have more differences among our NT manuscripts than for any other book.
Still, we are also fortunate to have two other kinds of evidence for reconstructing the text of the New Testament: the versional evidence and the Patristic evidence. These are terrifically valuable for us. They are also inordinately difficult to access and analyze.
The versional evidence involves…
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I can start to see what you mean when you said textual criticism is unbelievably technical and intricate and complicated. My head is still spinning! But your explanation was good, and I’m glad I read it. Maybe it helped awaken a few of my unused brain cells.
Wow! Very complicated indeed, but fascinating, and it makes one wonder why anyone could believe in the literal interpretation of an inerrant Bible since there are so many variations in ancient texts and translation problems. Obviously, there is no “the Bible” to interpret literally even if we wanted to do so.
I unfortunately disagree. Suvstantiate your proof. As a clergyman I strongly disagree with your opinion. I suggest you contact some theological seminaries of world renown to get the correct answer.
What is it specifically that you disagree with–that “there is no ‘the Bible’ to interpret literally even if we wanted to do so”?
Here’s a question that it surprises me that it took this long to occur to me. In the context of “Orthodox Corruption” do you personally/as a writer (as opposed to a textual critic) see a difference between edits made by Roger Freet to “How Jesus Became God” and changes that Ricardus Exiguus (or whatever the earliest scribe to copy a Pauline epistle might have been named) made to the letter to Philemon? In other words, is the modern practice of editing for readability/flow/fact at all analogous to corruption in that sense, or does the author’s approval/cognizance of the practice make it something entirely different?
There are *some* differences because we are dealing with a print culture. But the bigger difference is that when my editor makes suggestions for changes, he is not himself changing a text that is already published and in circulation.
Fascinating. Got a quick question: Say we have two copies of the same book in the same language, one says 1,2,3,4,5, while the other one say 1,2,4,5,6. How do we know whether there was 3 or 6 or neither in the original from which they copy from but is sadly lost in history? Similarly , say we have a surviving coptic text saying 1,2,3,4,5 and a surviving greek text saying 1,2,4,5,6, how do we know if the translator of the coptic added 3 and cut 6 when he was translating from the original which was later copied down the other line to the surviving greek text we have now? I have read your rationalizations in Misquoting Jesus.
Yes, that is precisely the set of questions that textual critics have to decide. I’ll explain the kinds of evidence appealed to in a later post.
The picture of what occurred during the corruption of the Scripture has started to form much more clearly for me now. I am looking forward to the what you have to reveal about this. Fascinating as always.
Kansas City’s Fringe Festival includes The Secret Book of Jesus, a one-man show based on the Protoevangalium of James, Infancy Gospel of Thomas and others. His reference books were part of the set and included your Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
phillip low, the writer/performer, will also be at the Minneapolis and Indianapolis Fringes. See MaximumVerbosityOnline.org for dates. Blog members will enjoy it.
hello bart
reading the article I came cross this
try to reconstruct the earliest from of the text (i.e., the Latin, Syriac, or Coptic texts), then make a retroversion of the translation into Greek – i.e., translate the earliest from of the Latin, Syriac, or Coptic into the Greek equivalents – and then compare that to the various surviving Greek manuscripts.
do you mean to say form of the text ……… the earliest form of the Latin
thank you
Yes, earliest “form” not earliest “from”
Take your time, Bart, lol. I don’t think any of us are in a big rush, here.
Many, many thanks for your posts! 🙂
love the detail you went into in this post. i don’t think you’re progressing slowly – it’s exactly this kind of detail that i find fascinating!