Loading...I have begun to answer a series of questions asked by a reader about the textual history of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In my previous post I explained why some critical scholars maintain that the letter was originally two separate letters that have been spliced together. That obviously makes the next question the reader asked a bit more complicated than one might otherwise imagine. And it’s not the only complication. Here is the reader’s next question:
QUESTION: Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original?
RESPONSE: First off, my initial reaction that I gave a couple of posts ago still holds. I’m not exactly sure what the reader is asking. If he’s asking whether a copy of the original letter to Philippians is itself an original of Philippians, then the answer is no. It is not the original. It is a copy of the original. Big difference. But what if this copy was exactly like the original in every single respect – with no differences of any kind: wouldn’t it then be the original? No, then it would be an accurate copy of the original. But it would not be the original.
But the question does raise an important and virtually insoluble other problem – or set of problems. What, in the case of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, would it even mean to call something (a papyrus manuscript with writing on it) the “original.” Or rather, what would the “original” be – how could we imagine it? There are so many problems that it is hard to know where to begin.
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I’m getting flashbacks to theoretical philosophy here.
The Ship of Theseus 🙂
Maybe you’re going to address this, but I’ve heard scholars say that the manuscripts of the Pauline letters probably all derive from a collection made at the end of the 1st century. So we only have an edited collection version of the letters anyway. My question is: do the early manuscripts of Paul’s letters all have evidence that they are in a collection and that there wasn’t say a scroll with only Philippians in it and not other letters from 2nd century onwards?
There’s no *hard* evidence, no — that is, nothing that shows it absolutely had to be that way. But the argument is based on all sorts of inferences, including the sequence of the letters in sources that talk about them, which are hard to explain unless the letters were compiled nad circulated htat way. I have to admit, I haven’t looked at this issue seriously in many, many years, and so I’mnot sure where the discussion stands right now.
Excellent post, as always.
To what extent did Paul write with his own hand?
If he did not, if for instance he dictated, does this not further confuse the concept of an original?
If he dictated, do we have any estimate as to how faithful the written text was to what Paul said?
Do we have any clue as to whether either Paul or his secretary revised dictated letters?
Yup, he dictated. There are numerous indications of that, including Paul saying that he was signing off on his own letter in his own handin Galatians, and his scribe Tertius greeting the church in Rome in the final chapter of Romans. But that’s precisely the problem: we don’t know whether the person he dictated to got it completley right or if it got revised later. There’s simply no way to know.
I feel there’s a more subtle problem here. Lacan holds the idea that the subject himself does not recognize his fictional status within reality.
So an original is problematic from its start. An Author that is consistent with himself, is just caught in the frame of language, a symbolic system that generates the fiction of who he is.
Therefore, any original is a copy.
Are the portions of Philippians contained in P46 identical to the same sections in the Vaticanus, or are there differences?
Are you asking if there are textual variations between them? (i.e. differences in wording) Yes indeed.
Bart, your comment about “an editor/redactor/scissors-and-paste guy” made me reflect on a PBS show entitled “How Writing Changed the World”, which stated “Literacy was surprisingly widespread in Rome. it even extended to the large enslaved population in the city, which provided most of the scribes… So, copies could be churned out relatively quickly by the inexpensive labor … The materials were cheap too. That meant that a Roman bookshop would have something for almost every pocket”.
I would guess that higher literacy and cheap labor would naturally concentrate in cosmopolitan areas like Rome but might it have been a much more significant factor in which form of early Christianity became dominant, essentially control of the copying/dissemination of texts coupled with the higher literacy of the poor could have been an effective choke point for the spread of ideas. Your thoughts?
I don’t think the PBS claim is right at all. Of course there were educated slaves — but that was because that was their job as slaves, to become literate. Why? Becuase most people weren’t! The vast, vast majority of poor folk in the empire were illiterate. If you want to pursue the issue, I’d suggest starting with William Harris, Ancient Literacy.
Dr Ehrman, I can’t help wondering whether Paul, when composing his letters, actually dictated them to, say, two scribes in order to have a personal copy of the one sent to Corinth or Philippi or wherever. So in fact, there would be 2 originals. But, given scribal propensity for error, even the 2 original copies are unlikely to be absolutely identical. PS. I think I read somewhere that the only significant original document from the Ancient World, apart from inscriptions on walls, epitaphs etc. is the Copper Scroll from the Dead Sea Scroll collection as it was unlikely to be a copy of an earlier document. Thanks.
I wish we knew!
I wonder how we could ever know if we had a letter that Paul himself sat down and wrote? Even if carbon dating put it in the 50s CE, carbon dating is only accurate within years. So we still wouldn’t know if we had the actual letter that Paul sat down and wrote or if it was a copy written by someone else years later that could have changes in it.
Right! Even if we had a manuscript that miraculously could be dated to within a week of when Paul wrote the letter, we still wouldn’d know if it was the one Paul wrote. But if it didn’t have “large letters” (see Gal. 6:11) then we would suppose not!
Professor Ehrman, I watched a video of you years ago where you excellently explained the evolution of Jewish thought from 1) our problems are based on disobedience (God of Noah?) to 2) no, it is not disobedience that has caused these very bad things to happen to us, such as the Babylonian Exile to 3) well, if God will make us suffer beyond our disobedience, God will settle things later; and, that is how we get messianism ushering in apocalypticism in Judaism.
Hopefully I remembered your excellent lecture correctly.
Did that come from your video lecture series, “Historical Jesus,” The Great Courses, Lecture 12 Jesus in His Context or Lectures 14-16 that cover the Apocalyptic Prophet, Apocalyptic Teachings, and Other Teachings in their Apocalyptic Context?
In the Member Forum, Robert told me you wrote about the evolution of Judaism to apocalypticism in God’s Problem … Why We Suffer. I can imagine it being in that book, but I also can imagine it being in Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.
Thank you.
I”m not sure which video you were watching, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve talked about a long time. I do address it briefly in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet.
I don’t know if there’s an answer to this: what is the earliest “original” Christian text that we have? That is, one actually written by the author that has been passed down intact? I’m guessing it is fairly recent. And how would we even know if a document is truly the original?
Do you mean a text that is written in the author’s own hand, the copy he produced? Wow. I have no idea. Nothing from antiquity or late antiquity, and I assume nothing from the middle ages, but I don’t know about that….
Dr Ehrman
Im definitely not an expert in ancient Greek but wouldn’t the mistake be obvious to the reader. For example in English, if I was to write “the quick bron fox jumps over the lazy dog”. You know I misspelled brown and would make the corrections in the next copy of the letter and it does not change the meaning of the sentence. Do the mistakes in the letters we have change the meaning written? Then you could compare the letters to see which meaning is the real meaning.
Some are like that — and easily corrected to scholars who know Greek well. Others actually can change the meaning radically. I think I’ll post on that down the line!
“Others actually can change the meaning radically. ”
you mean something like “they went to the tomb and found no one”
vs “they went to the tomb and found a man sitting near the body”?
That would be a difference, yup, and a significant one.
I originally thought with respect to Q, that the most important thing about not having a copy/manuscript was what might be in “Q” that’s not in Mathew and Luke. The splicing of Philippians raises the possibility of “left out material” by a redactor (Correct use?) also. Does your academic world consider known edited/redacted material more at risk from deleted material than scribal copies? We know scribes did make additions so…. deletions were possible also.
Yup, almost certainly I would say. Look at how Luke “redacted” Mark. Left tons of it out. Same with 2 Corinthians, spliced together. Copyists didn’t do that kind of thing.
Wouldn’t it be fair to say that Paul undoubtedly wrote far more than seven letters (eight if you count Philippians twice)? Could he not have written eight or more just to the Philippians? Maybe these two were the only ones that the later scribe found interesting!
Yes!!! Oh boy I wish someone had kept them all….
Hi Dr. Ehrman,
Could you please elaborate on how would you know if you have found the original of any of the Gospels/Paul epistles etc.? What are scholars looking for when determining if a document is an original or a copy?
Thank you!
Ah, it’s a long answer. I’ve posted on it before — I think I’ll repost it! Thanks.