I have been asked to comment on whether we can get back to the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and I have begun to discuss the problems not just of getting *back* to the original, but also of knowing even what the original *was*. In my previous post I pointed out the problems posed by the fact that Philippians appears to be two letters later spliced together into one. And so the first problem is this: is the “original” copy the spliced together copy that Paul himself did not create? Or is the “original” the product that Paul himself produced – the two letters that are not transmitted to us in manuscript form any longer, to which, therefore, we have no access (except through the version edited by someone else)?
But there are more problems. Here I’ll detail them, in sequence as they occur to me.
In what I am going to be saying now, I will simplify things by assuming that – contrary to what I’ve been arguing – Philippians is just one letter produced by Paul, not two letters later edited together into what we now have. At every point you should be reminding yourself that the problems I am now addressing are *doubled*(or worse) if in fact, as many critical scholars think, Philippians is two letters that have been modified and joined together. But let’s talk about the letter as if it were just one letter. What would it mean to speak of its “original”? (The same will apply to all of Paul’s letters).
Would the “original” letter be the letter that Paul himself produced when he sat down and put pen to papyrus one day to address some problems and issues that had arisen among his Christian converts in the city of Philippi? That would be unproblematic enough. Then all the later copies of the letter would ultimately go back (in a kind of genealogical line) to that letter that Paul produced.
But there’s a problem. There is solid and incontrovertible evidence that when Paul produced some of his other letters he actually dictated them to a scribe who wrote them down. This is clearly the case of his letter to the Romans, which includes a verse that almost certainly has puzzled readers over the years, Romans 16:22, “I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.” Tertius??? I thought *Paul* wrote the letter! Well, yes, Paul composed the letter. But Tertius is the one who wrote down the words that Paul composed. Paul dictated the letter to him.
The same applies to…
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Other than as a historical curiosity, what value would an “original” have over a later version that was eventually included in the New Testament? The search for originals is a grounded in a theological exercize — it’s an extension of the question “What did God REALLY mean?” It’s a bit like attempting to find the “best” translation of the Bible. If you don’t like what the scripture says, you find a different translation or even start searching backwards to find out what the Greek meaning is (or was) and what the earliest manuscripts say. You keep going until you hit paydirt that confirms your view, and that becomes the “truer”, objective meaning that others must accept.
It certainly can be that. But Shakespeare scholars would LOVE to have the “original” copy of Hamlet. All fields are like that. We want to know what an author wrote.
I understand all the issues that you presented. But unless Paul kept his working copies, which there seems to be no evidence for, wouldn’t you say that the ‘original’ letter would be the one that actually was delivered to the initial recipient, mistakes (if any) and all?
I’d say that was one of the options. WE don’t have that one either, so we aren’t in any better shape with that than with one of the copies Paul didn’t keep!
Add to that whether Paul dictated clearly what he actually thought about any particular subject. When looking over responses to my e-mails, I sometimes look at my original e-mail and think “Jeez, I could said that better. That is not what I meant to say.”. Maybe Paul is not always good at expressing the thoughts in his head.
Yup!!
As long as Paul’s letters are, it’s a bit hard to understand how they could have been dictated as we find them– I mean, he had his thoughts in order and all of his phrasing and vocabulary worked out in advance, or, it came off the top of his head as a coherent stream with no indication that he might have backtracked or decided to rephrase something, or lost his train of thought? Even if he paused and had his scribe read things back to him from time to time, it would have been hard to produce the letters as we find them in one take. Surely, there was a bit of polishing going on, which would have required quite a lot of editorial work (scratching out and re-writing) etc. And if that’s the case, it really complicates the issue of what is “original”!
I always assumed Paul wrote in big letters because of a lack of skill – isn’t that part of what a trained scribe provided, small but still legible script to save on expensive papyrus?
One random thought – in American business (at least in legal circles) it used to be common that if you dictated a letter to a secretary or typist but didn’t read it, the letter would note at the bottom “dictated, not read.” Among other reasons, it would let the reader know that any grammatical or punctuation errors were likely the fault of the transcriber. Was anything like that done in ancient times?
Nope! (and no dictaphones!)
Dr Ehrman, im wondering about the question of the use of secretaries in NT writings. Is there a distinction between Paul’s attested use of a secretary and the possibe use of them by Mark Matthew Luke or John ? I read Forged when it came out (I guess I should dig it out again) but I can’t remember if you covered this other than saying there’s no evidence for it. Is it that people skilled enough to take the Aramaic of the putative author/dictator (heh) of a gospel and translate it into educated Greek were very rare and unlikely to be available or willing to do it? I personally don’t think the people to whom they are attributed to actually wrote them but I’m curious.
I do have a discussion of it in Forged, and a slightly longer one in Forgery and Counterforgery. Look up “Secretaries” here on the blog and you’ll see some easy-to-access discussions. It’s not that this kind of scribe was rare: so far as we can tell they were non-existent.
That last sentence is beautiful.
“If they aren’t the original form of the text, then the original form of the text is NOT the first thing written but the corrected form of the text after the originals were written. So the original is not actually the original.”
These days I would would have summitted a public records request to Paul for all copies of Philippians, drafts and final so that I could easily see where the changes had been made.
Oh well, I guess research is much more satisfying.
Dr. Ehrman,
Of the seven original deacons appointed by the Apostles, (Prochorus, his cousin Stephen, Philip, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas and Nicholas), Prochorus, is said to be tasked, via direct requests from John (the Theologian), to write down of the words of John, including the Gospel of John and Revelations. Then there is also the non-canonical “Acts of John” that is tied to the pen of Prochorus. It seems that Prochorus was very active and may of been the most educated of the seven original deacons and was said to of been present at the burial/death of John. The requirements for becoming a deacon were only a) being full of the Holy Spirit and b) having wisdom, but I am assuming that the ability to read and write may have been underlying high-value skill for any of the church leadership positions. Do we have any clues that any of the other deacons had skills for participating in the writing/scribing of early Christian works? How much do we really know about Prochorus? I was surprised as to how much I did not know about him until recently (via Orthodox church literature).
All of these are later legends. None of the earliest references to the Johannine writings says anything about Prochorus, even the Acts of John.
Dr. Ehrman,
I was relating my comments to some research on the Sahidic Coptic version of the
Acts of John clavis coptica 0565), Pierpont Morgan M576 and two fragmentary White Monastery codices. The inclusion of a deacon/relative of Stephen into the topic of John’s written works would seem to be an attempt to explain and justify authenticity – but these Acts of John have some quite different story lines (e.g. bathhouse/Romana) and darker/eastern european type of themes than the more well known Acts of John. So there were later efforts (writings, artwork) made to include Prochorus and these stories towards the Byzantine audiences. Why Prochorus? I was hoping there was more of a logical reason and history for including (and ‘glorifying’) that specific character/deacon in later literature.
Yes, the Acts of John is late second century; off hand I don’t remember when these mss date — 5th century or so? I don’t know why that name was chosen. I’m not familiar with the differences between these mss and others offhand.
If you had THE original letter, document, gospel, whatever; how would you really know or be able to prove it?
You wouldn’t! Look for “original” as a word search on the blog: I’ve posted on that one before.
Who is on first?
What’s on second?
I don’t know’s on third ?
Reading some of the foregoing comments, I started to wonder whether Paul might have made a rough copy himself and because, as Dr Ehrman has said, his handwriting might have been substandard, a scribe then made a fair copy, perhaps working closely, with Paul as he did it. I guess, in that case, I would say that Paul’s rough copy was the original.
Bart;
on the ‘original’ text of Hamlet
https://stf-theatre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/HAMLET-%E2%80%93-the-1st-Quarto.pdf
Hamlet, alone of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in his lifetime in an ‘official’ edition (the 1604 second Quarto), with the clear intention of superseding the ‘bad’ 1603 first Quarto. So the second Quarto edition can be considered definitively from Shakespeare; but scholars agree that it cannot be the ‘original’ text first performed on the stage in 1600. Apart from anything else, it is a good deal too long.
While Shakespearean scholars would certainly ‘love’ to have the original acted text of 1600; that does not survive – Elizabethan England being short of video recorders. What they do have is the text that Shakespeare in 1604 wanted to be recorded for posterity.
Maybe finding the ‘original’ text – whether of Shakespeare or Paul – is not such a high priority.
Well, I’d say that is an unusual view of Hamlet.
Of the many books you have written, how would you define original? And this thought just popped into my mind: you have changed your mind and revisited a great many things regarding your understanding of the Bible between let’s say 1985 and the present. When scholars frequently reject authorship of one epistle vs another on the basis of a seemingly conflicting theology/ideology, do they consider the idea that someone’s position may have changed over time?
My personal definition of the “original” of what I’ve written is the manuscript that I sent off to the publisher. Other people have other definition. And yes, investigators ask all the time, as one of their major questions, whether the author has simply changed his mind about something.
Frankly, I find this discussion interesting but hair-splitting. Why try to nail down The Original of anything when (lower case) “original” can be combined with clarification to specify what is meant? What actually matters, I think, is which text best conveys the authors intended message at the time of composition. Not that that makes our quest any easier!
I think the point is that you cannot know what the author’s intended message was if you don’t know what he said — that is, which words he used.
Of course, and thanks for your reply. But my point is that we are so extremely unlikely to actually find the document that was once in the hand of Paul or his scribe – and to know beyond doubt that that is what we have – that trying to put the label The Original on anything is futile. We can only approximate what he said and I suggest we should focus on why we think some documents are more useful than others in determining that.