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Loading...I haven’t talked about the manuscripts of the NT for a while, and thought I should return to it for a couple of posts. This is a topic many people didn’t know anything about and certainly didn’t know they should *care* about until probably the past 15-20 years. But now it’s one of the issues I get asked about all the time.
When I was doing the research that led up to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (published in 1993), I came to see that the variations of our manuscripts were important not only because they could tell us what the original writers actually wrote in the books that later became the New Testament, but also because they could tell us about what was influencing the anonymous and otherwise unknown scribes who produced the copies of these books in later times.
For a variety of good reasons scholars have long thought that most of the intentional changes of the text (that is, the alterations that scribes made on purpose – at least apparently on purpose – as opposed to simple scribal mistakes) were made sometime in the first two hundred years of copying (one good reason for thinking so: the vast majority of changes found in late manuscripts already can be found in early ones; later scribes might *reproduce* a variant they had found, but they are less likely to have *created* one). If these changes were indeed made intentionally, then the scribes who made them must have had a reason for wanting to make them. They were consciously changing their texts in places.
They weren’t doing that in millions of places, but in some, here and there, and sometimes in key passages. Sometimes they made changes for fairly obvious reasons, among which are the following (these have long, long been noted by textual scholars):
- If the text scribes were copying appeared to contain a contradiction with another text in the Bible, they would often “correct” it.
- If the text had…
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Thank you Dr Ehrman. I find these posts on early NT manuscripts the most fascinating of all (not that the others aren’t brilliant as well). I suppose it’s an impossible question but have we any idea who was copying the manuscripts? Given the scarcity of even basic literacy skills in the Mediterranean world at that time, is it possible that the likes of Irenaeus and Justin were ‘helping out’ with some of the copying?
Yes we do. My student Kim Haines-Eitzen (now a senior professor at Cornell) wrote her doctoral dissertation on this; it wsa published as Guardians of Letters (Oxford Press). The earliest surviving mss were by scribes trained mainly in copying documents (for example legal documents) who happened to be in Xn congregations and so moved their skills over to literary texts (different styles of writing were used in the two). There’s obviously a lot more to be said about them! But ifyou’re interested, you might try to track down a summary of her book.
Or if Geoff has not read it, your Misquoting Jesus trade best-seller tells this background info. As i indicated to you in a recent post, the RSV is so far out of bounds on nearly all of your illustrative excerpts noted therein, wherein early locational (not professional) church copiers made corrections. But you have still not answered my question then: is there an english translation today that MOST NT scholars favor? Or yourself?
I don’t know about most. Probably evangelical scholars prefer the NIV? I’d say that most critical scholars prefer the NRSV. Taht’s what I always recomment, especially in an annotated edition such as the Harper Collins Study Bible.
There seems to an arrow of worsening anti-Semitism in the New Testament, presumably as a result of Jews refusing to accept Christianity. So did scribes change the texts to become more anti-Semitic over time?
In places, yes.
Further to your recent mention of the patriarchal bias which changed Junia’s name from feminine to masculine (perhaps because of a reluctance to acknowledge that women played a prominent part in the early Christian church) I have also read an article that claims that the Greek does not signify that Junia was preeminent or prominent among the apostles but simple that she was well known to them.
[Was Junia Really an Apostle? A Re-examination of Rom 16.71 MICHAEL H. BURER AND DANIEL B. WALLACE Dallas Theological Seminary, 3909 Swiss Avenue, Dallas, TX 75204, USA – New Test. Stud. 47, pp. 76–91. Printed in the United Kingdom © 2001 Cambridge University Press]
Please do you have any comment to make about this assertion?
I think it’s a misreading of the text. Not surprisingly the article is written by scholars who do not think women should have a prominent role in the church.
Professor,
Do you know if there have ever been attempts to change the English translation of “Jews” in the NT to something like Hebrews or Israelites? As an anti-racist Christian and after the horrors of centuries of anti-Semitic atrocities, I wince hearing this language, even though I know we are millennia removed from the context and it’s unlikely they were thinking in racial terms
Agh, meant this to be a follow-up to the comment above, not this one.
The main move is to change it to “Judeans” — i.e. the inhabitants of Judea. It’s a complicated issue….
It is definitely problematic !!
I guess there may be the same problmes in parallel Christian texts as the so-called” heretical” Gnostic texts. From the Bible scholars, John Turner and BIrger Pearson, who have written extensively on early Christian texts, claim that there has been a Christianization of the text, especially the Apocryphon of John. According to Peason, it appears that Apocryphon of John comes from an early Judaic myth and was Christianized by editorial editions (additions) and revisions, claiming that if one removes some of the Acopolyptic material at the beginning and end of the text and dialogue with Jesus, it is in basically nothing identifiable Christian in it.
If that is true, this would then not be corrections, but basically changing or bending it in line with another new religion, which would have a fundamental and huge effect on the whole meaning of the text.
Gematria was just discussed in several posts — one example was with the structure of several sentences of genealogy and one example was with the name “Caesar Nero” and the number 666. In each case, the gematria suggests a highly structured form of writing. Now when the subject moves to why scriptures were changed, the insertion or removal of gematria is not considered by scholars.
Great explanation of why scribes “fixed” the manuscripts they copied. Did these scribes have to get the approval of their uppers? Or were *they* the uppers?
No, apparently they didn’t need approval. And later there were superiors, yet, but not in the early centuries.
When I read this post I immediately decided to go on an online scavenger hunt for 2nd and 3rd C attestation to any of what in my humble opinion constitute biggies in n/t textual variants I.e. Matt. 24:36 “nor the son”, ending of mark, John 8 adulteress, acts 8 “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God”, 1 John 5:7… and all I found was the sound of crickets chirping.
Then it dawned on me: why am I trying to reinvent the wheel here? Haven’t the nestle aland bo-weez already traced these steps?
Are you saying that any meaningful variant like the ones I listed above present in TR has 2nd or 3rd C attestation?
If you were given absolute sway with nestle aland, what are passages you would edit based on these 2nd and 3rd C attestations you refer to?
No, not all variants can have attestation from thefirst three centuries since we don’t have full mss then. A prime example is 1 John 5:7. The familiar long ending does not have long Greek attestation until into the middle ages. What does have attestation is the reading *without* the Johannine comma. But not until the mid fourth century, because there is not any manuscript of the passage before then.
Quote – “Christianity went from being a tiny group of illiterate peasants ”
Off the top of my head here’s my reading of the Gospels:
Jesus middle class family business – educated and literate
Zechariah priest (John’s father) – rich, educated and literate
Anna (prophetess) – educated and literate
Matthew customs official – rich, educated and literate
Luke physician – well do to, educated, literate (one of the great historians of his age.)
Peter and Andrew – family owned business – well off
James and John family owned business – well off and literate.
Paul Pharisee – well off, educated and literate
Nichodemus Sanhedrin – rich, educated and literate
Zacchaeus man – well off, educated and literate
Mary and Martha – rich (re $100,000 plus alabaster box)
Centurion – rich, educated and literate
Joseph of Arimathea – rich
Plenty more in Acts, and in the Old Testament too.
Where we know SOMETHING about these people we see these followers of Jesus had higher standards of education and income than the average population. They were NOT “illiterate peasants.”
Yes, if teh Gospels had been written in the 20th century, these would be plausible deductions.
Yes, and Paul is the most important example (besides Jesus, imo). Maker of the orthodox platform, for the most part. Where i may diverge, as Dr. Ehrman knows, is who won out, and which books got in or excluded, and whom Jesus told his secrets to as an obvious apocalyptic, especially. Your list outlines middle to upper crusts, relatively, while Jesus social commentary and table-turning seems irrefutable, skewed to the lower. Are there pre-Pauline Gnostic secrets not just suppressed and burned out before Constantine, to be unearthed in jars? Marcion had money enough to launch his views, as did arguably Mani. Money talks- then and now. But mystics meditate on sayings and visions. They may even write. But what survives?
Thanks Bart; I agree that manuscript variants can provide valuable information on the presuppositions of early Christians concerned with reproducing scriptural texts.
Nevertheless might I propose that the term ‘scribe’ for these persons may be unhelpful? On this see Ulrich Schmid and Larry Hurtado. For one thing, ‘scribe’ is a well established term for interpreters of the Torah; who did not copy manuscripts. For another, the term conflates a range of different roles, likely undertaken by different persons; editors, readers and copyists.
Schmid proposes as an illustration of this; the marginal comment in Papyrus 75 to Luke 17:14 “I will. Be clean. And immediately they became clean”. This is a harmonisation to other leper narratives; but is in a cursive hand, not the bookhand of the manuscript copyist. Schmid proposes this ‘intentional’ variant as from a ‘reader’ or ‘user’.
Such intentional variants – the ones relevant to this discussion – are maybe more likely the accumulated responses of successive readers, recorded as comments or corrections. When a new copy was needed, some sort of editing may have selected those to be reproduced. But the copyists reproduced what they were told.
I’m pretty sure both Ulrich and Larry regularly use(d) “scribe” to desribe these persons, no? My view is that scribes are indeed readers and users, so I completely agree with that. In fact, I go farther than Ulrich is comfortable with, and think of them actually as editors and even authors….
Thanks for the clarification Bart.
As I understand the points being made by Ulrich and Larry, is that it is primarily the ‘readers’ or ‘users’ who are driving the process. “Using books makes their content popular and creates the demand for additional copies”. If I want to read a book in the era of manuscript reproduction, I must either borrow the text from a friend (or a library); or arrange for a copyist – often a slave professional – to create a new copy for my particular use. What they will copy for me will be what I ask them to copy (possibly with an editorial guidance as to marginal corrections or improvments). The copyists themselves may be more or less skilled – and so potentially introduce unintentional variants into the transmission stream – but intentional variants (the ones that are interesting for the purpose of this discussion) are not going to come from copyists; but from the users commissioning their work.
So it may be unhelpful to describe both groups of persons – users and copyists – with the singular term ‘scribes’.
Hurtado here:
https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/terminology-and-its-effects-e-g-scribes-vs-copyists/
Schmid here:
https://www.academia.edu/13313267/Scribes_and_Variants_Sociology_and_Typology
OK, I see what you’re saying. But of course, we don’t have access to the users apart from the scribes, or to what the users may have told the scribes, or even what the scribes thought they were doing or why. All we have are the products the scribes produced. Beyond that it’s guessing. But that’s more less the entire point of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
So how weren’t these ‘plausible deductions’ in the First Century? You said these people were illiterate peasants and I demonstrated that they weren’t.
I recall your *saying* they weren’t, but I don’t recall any demonstration. First century occupations were not like 21st century. Today you would not have ANY IRS workers who are illiterate. In antiquity, most tax collectors would have been. Carpentry was not a middle class occupation then, requiring literacy. It simply wasn’t. It may seem weird, but other cultures always seem weird. If you want to read up on what literacy and educastion were like in *that* context, I’d suggest you read the books of William Harris, Catherine Hezser, and Raphael Cribbiore, for starters. And there’s plenty more if you’re interested.
“… I demonstrated that they weren’t.”
If I may please, where exactly did you demonstrate that they weren’t?
Bart,
On a side note I’ve registered for the SBL virtual meeting this year Nov 29 – Dec 10 and was going to browse the guide and it’s like 260 pages !!! This thing is massive !!!
Are you giving a presentation this year if so do you know the day and time yet ?
Thx,
Steve
I’m not this year, as it turns out. Yeah, that’s a lot of scholarship!
Hi Y’all. I’m new here, writing from southern Mexico. This is my first comment:
I don’t know that we can discern why scribes changed the text, but it is evident that they did. Last week I finished reading a page-turner of a tome (828 pages), which has much to say about these changes: FATAL DISCORD, Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind, by Michael Manning. Both of these famous scholars worked hard at mastering ancient languages so they could unpack and compare the many early versions of the texts. Both were Augustinian priests; they became rivals. And it was an especially fertile period, as printing was quickly becoming industrialized. The demand for their books was lively. And both authors were exceedingly popular. It was an eye-opener to me for how we got the texts we read today, in the many variants offered. Bible publishing was born in a vibrant period with lively scholars attempting to grasp ancient wisdom. Rigorous comparisons were made and debated. Some caused serious social upheaval. Wow, the consequences!
~eric.
MeridaGOround
Responding again, late again, but I find Poohbear comments a little out of tune with those times. Most emigrants start a business because they cannot find a job. And the a Jews were emigrants in their own land. Most of these jobs are in the food industry. I see a woman at her Chinese buffet every Sunday, but she is there 365 days each year. Mexican restaurants out number McD’s. None of them are rich. Most of the professions mentioned were nothing more than trades, including Medical doctors. The rock Christianity is built on was not Petra, but the poor to whom Jesus preached.
How do we know Jesus was literate? Because the Gospels tell us he was literate.
“Middle Class” is a bit of a stretch – but Jesus and his father were carpenters and most likely worked in the nearby town as there was a lot of construction going on. Jesus was probably contracted for skilled work. Not rich, but not poor. But many of his followers were quite wealthy. And literature, as archaeology is showing, was more prevalent than is commonly supposed.
And many proud poor people rejected Jesus.
Well, there’s one Gospel passage (Luke 4) that indicates he was literate. Nowhere else though.
Do you consider the Luke 4 passage where it says he stood up in the synagogue to read from the scroll of Isaiah to be a later addition?
I think teh passage was originally in Luke, but I do not think it is something that actually happened (notice how the same story is told in Luke’s source, Mark)
there was a book called “5 Gospels” by the Jesus Seminar. It was approx 80 scholars going through the NT debating the authenticity of each verse and then they all voted giving it a ranking of authenticity with commentary.
“the five gospels what did jesus really say?”
I am wondering has there been any book done like this for the Hebrew Bible aka the Old Testament as well.
No. The Five Gospels was very controversial, in part because the small group of scholars who produced it claimed it was now the consensus view, and most of the thousands of scholars who did not produce it did not agree….
For a hermeneutics of what a ‘trade’ might have meant in the first century we could start with the two offered here: the emigrants perspective of timcfix or the petit bourgeois offered by poohbear?
The former seeks to find a bridge over a great distance, the latter a jet plane vaulting from the capitalist present to the economy of antiquity. The first helps me see. The latter closes my mind so I’m led by the nose to a familiar place taught by a prosperity gospel preacher.
The Jesus and the disciples of the gospels should also not be seen as inferior because they were illiterate; we should not apply 21st standards to first century Palestinian peasants.
Somewhere Bart has spoken about the claim that Jesus was referred to as Teacher or Rabbi. Wasn’t the literacy of Rabbi’s a later historical development?
We don’t actually know if “rabbi” was an official office in the time of Jesus, but probably not. The rabbinic sources that provide us the most information about early “rabbis” date from a couple of hundred years later. The term just means “teacher,” and in Jesus’ day that could have been much of anyone, literate or not
Its so great to be here Dr Ehrman….I have 3 questions:
1.Who was paying for these early manuscripts to be copied? As per Dr Metzger in his book “The text of the New Testament : its transmission, corruption, and restoration” the cost of complete NT to be copied was 30,000 Dinari which was more than the yearly earning of basic 95% population? What would this cost be like in 2020?
2. And just to follow the money trail even more closely, why would someone be paying for such activity?
3. When you say early or Proto Church, the impression comes to mind is of something similar church establishment we see around but wasn’t the Proto Church only home/barn based and must have been without any resources? and if not , where the money was coming from?
Utmost regards,
Kashif
1. We don’t know, but probably either a wealthy person in the community or a group of people pooling their resources. Idon’t know how much that is in today’s terms; 2. Because of their devout devotion totheir faith 3. The money came from the wealthy members. If here weren’t any, well, they got along without resources,just as many communities of faith still do today.
Sir, as I have learned from you already, the first ever mention of same list of NT 27 books which we have today was in the 39th festal letter of Athanasius in the year 367 but their sequence was out.
1. When was the earliest/first ever recorded same books and present sequence was ever found?
2. The books of NT were more or less finalized by the end of 4th centary but what was inside these 27 books was not finalized till 12th centuary( for example Gosple of John, the story of whoever has not sinned should lift the first stone)…Do we have a date of when this editing/addition/deletion of material of books of NT was finalized?
3. Why few words of Jesus were left in Aramaic while translating NT ( Eli, Eli Lama Sabacthani)
Apologies for not asking these questions in the most appropriate window….
Utmost regards,
1. The letter of Athanasius you mention (unless I’m misunderstanding you); 2. There was no official finalizatoin point 3. Probably to help make them sound authentic.
A topic that belongs into this bucket are alterations that had the goal to declare Mary, mother of Christ, as a Davidid. This is the underlying tone in Romans 1,3 if Jesus ‘was born of the seed of David’.
I mentioned the Doctrina Jacobi in another comment. The whole discussion evolves around a christian trying to find a proof text for Mary to be of the House of David. It would tie into the theory that, had Christ not ‘taken on flesh from the virgin’, and had the virgin not been of David, he would have had no claim to the throne.
Theodor Zahn, as well as Raymond E. Brown both state that this came from gentile christians unfamiliar with jewish law pertaining to tribal affiliation.
I agree there needs to be much more research there. Changes were squeezing the text into ‘orthodoxy’.
I would appreciate if Dr. Ehrmann would give input he has in the area of a levite Mary and scriptual corruptions seeking to change that.
I made my independant studies in this field and find a much deeper understanding revealed in scripture when Mary was a Levite – she carried a tabernacle for 9 months inside herself.
Thanks Bart for your work
1. The sequence of 39th is different from our present day NT, when did we first find a list with the present day sequence and present day books ?
2. So a book called Luke being used in 4th century Alexandria could be very different from a book called Luke being used in 4th century Antioch?
1. Even manuscripts provided different sequences, usually involving where that CAtholic, Pauline epistles, and Acts went.
2. Well, it certainly would have different wording in places, yes. But not MASSIVELY different. some differences would be significant for meaning, though (e.g. whether what we call Luke 22:19-20 was in the text; or Luke 22:43-44; or the important second half of 24:51; etc.)
Bart,
1. As you replied earlier to my question that who was paying for these Manuscripts to be copied that “probably either a wealthy person in the community or a group of people pooling their resources”.
I did some maths a using Bruce Metzger figure of 30,000 Denarii per manuscript copying cost and converted it into Present Value and it came out something close to $1.74 Million/manuscript.
( One denarius as a day’s wage for a common laborer (Matthew 20:2, John 12:5) and with $7.25/hr X 8 hours is $58/day and $58/day X 30,000= $1.74 Million)
Is it still possible that “copying Manuscripts” was possible in 4th century without State/Government sponsorship?
It was not only possible: it certainly happened! And continued to happen for centuries. There are very few instances in which the state got involved (famously, on one occasion Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Bible for various churches; that is very exceptional)
On the topic of variants, intentional or otherwise:
Is it true that every single verse that explicitly calls Jesus “θεός” (or God for us English speakers) has another manuscript that contradicts it?
(Confession: I”ve been wanting to specifically ask you, personally, this question since reading your books and I was stoked to find your blog.)
I’m not sure. I’m trying to think how many verses explicitly call Jesus God and I’m not coming up with much. Which verses do you have in mind?
Professor Ehrman,
In terms of resolving a textual difficulty and finding the difficulty to be the original:
Along the lines of that logic, Would it be correct to imagine that the scribes who were Catholic and Trinity adherents, would try to correct scriptures that contradicted Jesus’ deity? And that this is the reason that there are so many variants? By this logic, the contradiction to Jesus’ deity would then be the original?
Are there any cases of this?
Yes, that’s the topic of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. It’s not so much that there were verses that contradicted Jesus’ deity, but there were some that could be *read* that way, and those were often modified. An example would be Luke 3:22 (search for 3:22 on the blog and you’ll see a number of posts explaining the situation)
Dr. Ehrman,
What evidence, if any, is there that a literary “cleansing” took place to erase (burn?) as many documents as possible to erase views contrary to the Proto-orthodox view?
Almost none.
Hello, Bart! Do you think every church (or, at least most of them) throughout the empire had copies of the Gospels around the time 1 Clement was written?
Absolutely not. That would have been impossible, I should say.
Why impossible?
For one thing, they weren’t all in circulation yet. And some locations almost certainly didn’t have any Gospels for a long time. Antiquity simply didn’t have the distribution systems available today.