The boring thread on how we know what we know about what Jesus said and did
Lamb Chopped
Shipmate
in Purgatory
This thread is started in response to The_Riv's invitation below. It will doubtless consist of a bunch of boring numbers and citations and stultifying arguments; so run away now, while you still can.
Surely you've grappled with these ideas that plague me: we can and do know that ancient manuscripts are fragmentary, and that there are a myriad of discrepancies between them. We can and do know that many of those discrepancies are immaterial to the message they're conveying, but we also can and do know that some of them render significant contradictions and implausibilities, that there have been deliberate, purposeful alterations, additions, and deletions. We can and do know close approximations of the time gaps presented between the best estimations of when events in the bible happened and when they were first written about, by whom, and in what context. What we cannot and do not know is what Jesus actually said and did. Of course, the same is true of Socrates, but he didn't make the claims Jesus & Jesus' followers allegedly did. We can and do have a pretty good grasp on the idea that Paul (& others) didn't actually write all of the letters attributed to him (& them). That's a huge problem considering the harmful legacy of some of those disputed letters. There's the Apocrypha -- canonical to only a select collection of Christians. There are other Gospels and other books that have been removed from those traditions, but survive in others. And yet the Bible is a fundamental aspect of the faith(s), taken by many/most Christians only via the RCL which is a mere fraction of the whole text. So, I struggle mightily to think of it as anything more than an anthology of wonderful literature. Divine? Absolutely not. Inerrant? Absolutely not. Univocal? Absolutely not. Prophetic? Absolutely not. Historical? On the whole -- absolutely not. Can it be "true," then? True?! I don't see how.
Lamb Chopped wrote: »Okay, since you keep bringing this stuff up... Do you want me to start a separate thread where I can go through the many and various LOOOOOONGGGG answers I have to these questions? Because if I do it here, truly I think someone will bite my face off. And they'd be justified.
How could anyone decline such an invitation.
Comments
You say that ancient manuscripts are fragmentary. If by that you mean that they sometimes come down to us incomplete (not always), of course I agree with you. What else is to be expected after 2000 years? This is true for all history, not merely Christian history.
The standard way of dealing with a fragmentary manuscript is to hunt up as many copies of the same text as you can, and compare them together to establish relative ages, levels of trustworthiness, and which came first in the "family tree" of manuscripts. We call that "filiation." I had to do it for my dissertation topic (a variorum edition of a Renaissance characterbook), which forced me to evaluate 26 handwritten manuscripts (about half of them fragmentary) and also 12 printed editions, behind which lay more yet-unrecovered manuscripts.
The process of comparing texts is a gruelling one. First you gather them all, as many copies as exist in the world, which is freaking gruelling process which in my minor case required visits to both the East and West Coast and also several microfiche sent from Cambridge and Edinburgh. And you hope and pray that no collector refuses to let you see his rare treasure, or forces you to fly over in person to consult it, because this gets expensive after a while. Keep in mind that the manuscripts of the New Testament books are well up in the thousands. I stole the text below from https://hc.edu/museums/dunham-bible-museum/tour-of-the-museum/past-exhibits/biblical-manuscripts/.
Your job is to go and fetch copies of ALL of them. Yes, all, including the other languages, because sometimes translations preserve a very early text and how will you know if you don't look?
For the sake of pity, we'll allow you to establish an arbitrary cut-off date--nothing later than the sixth century, for example. But you're still going to have your life's work cut out for you. (and don't forget to find grant funding, these copies will cost you, not to mention the travel).
Let's assume that you've gathered everything, and now, a sadder and a wiser man, you sit down at a table stacked to the roof. Now it's time to read them all. Yes, ALL. Read them all, and then you pick a text that appears to you to be the closest to what the vanished author actually writ, based either on dating (consider the materials and the script used, and even where it finally came to light and any provenance it has) or historic testimony (I was lucky enough to have a handwritten autograph manuscript, although not as lucky as you might think, since the author continued to tinker with the text for years afterward, to the tune of adding 50% more to it--which forces you to try to discern authorial late changes from copyists' changes, intentional or otherwise. It sucks. Who'd be an editor?). You can also consider interior evidence, though if that's all you have, you may wind up changing your mind about manuscript priority halfway through, which kinda sucks too, as you've got to rewrite all your observations. The text that you choose to measure all the rest again may be called the key text, for the purposes of this explanation.
Why bother with a key text? Because you've got to have something to compare the rest to. That's the plain and simple reason. You need something to put in the lemma (see below). In the best of all possible worlds, you choose a text that ends up being so central / early that it's clear that most of the other texts variants are later errors or emendations. In the worst of all possible worlds, you choose poorly, and after finding a zillion, zillion variants in which everybody agrees but your key text, you realize the error of your ways and start over with one more suited to the role. Ahem.
You sit there with your copies spread out before you. You take your key text and compare it word by word with a single other manuscript, designating that other manuscript by a name, letter, or symbol, so the textual apparatus you are producing doesn't get too clunky. This is why so many New Testament manuscripts have numbers or letters to designate them, and not some long-ass name. Be sure to keep a table of your manuscripts and their designations!
AS you compare, you note every single variant in wording, punctuation, noun/pronoun/verb form (such as a future where others have a simple past). There's a process by which you note all this stuff down--you take the original reading of the key text and write it so:
In the beginning]
That is the lemma. That is the reading in the key text you are using as a foundation. Now you note all the variants after it, using a letter or number for each manuscript, and followed by the variant reading you found there.
In the beginning] 2,3,5,7,22; In beginning 3, 6 21; In the start 8, 9, 10; in principio 11, 12, 13...
This entry I've faked up for you shows what you might get if you had a key text that read "In the beginning" and you discovered that manuscripts 2, 3, 5, 7, and 22 agreed with that wording, while 3, 6, and 21 dropped "the" ("In beginning"). Manuscripts 8, 9, and 10 read "In the start", and 11, 12, and 13 read "In principio" at that spot.
This is a good start. Go on and note ALL the variants for this phrase for all 25000 manuscripts. When you're done, have a beer. You'll deserve it.
Now move on to the next phrase and make a lemma of that.
was the word;]
Annotate the variants and agreements for all 25K manuscripts on that; and keep moving in this way through the whole New Testament. You will fall on your knees thanking God whenever you encounter a fragmentary manuscript--say, one that contains only a few verses, or one that has the four Gospels but leaves out the rest of the New Testament. Because, of course, there can be no variants for you to labor over if the text itself is missing.
Anyway, carry on. By the time you reach "The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen." you will be white-haired and ready to retire. (That's why these things are done by committees. I was one woman dealing with roughly 38 sources, and it took me nigh on four years.)
This post is long enough, and I have had it for the night. I will just note in passing, though, that 25K manuscripts, more or less (because more are always being found) is an amazing amount of manuscript support for anything, including books like my own, which date to after Shakespeare's day. I believe we had THREE sources for Hamlet, one of which was obviously super corrupt, being the product of somebody trying to memorize the text so as to pirate it at the publisher's. Three. Just three, and the latest dating from 1628.
Think about that, the next time you want to bitch about the reliability of the New Testament text. There are Shakespeare scholars who would kill for a hundredth of the textual support, and they are 1500 years closer to us in time.
And in case the last para of your OP is directed at me, in no way did I bitch about anything, and you really ought to be more courteous re: a thread that you seem determined to put people off of.
Anything is possible with God. 😉
There are of course loads of better scholars out there than any of us here.
Which doesn't detract from your own scholarly achievements of course.
FWIW I'm impressed with your tenacity and I've learned things about the process of compiling and evaluating manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts that I didn't know before, although it is in line with my broad expectation as to how it's done.
The amount of material is an eye-opener. It's hardly surprising, though, that we are only going to have three Hamlet texts compared to gazillions of NT fragments. Hamlet never became a sacred text for a religion that spread over the then known world.
Had Shakespeare's plays become regarded as Holy Writ (that didn't happen until the 19th century 😳) we'd have had plenty of copies in circulation, along with apocryphal and alternative versions.
That observation doesn't undermine your point though.
I hadn't interpreted the challenge on t'other thread as an invitation for you to outline this process or your scholarly credentials but I'm glad you did - although it clearly took time, effort and a degree of exasperation.
For one thing, from an Orthodox perspective, it does help underline the role Tradition plays in this process. None of this happens in a vacuum. The texts don't fall out of the sky but are stored, sifted, arranged, collated, compared ...
And it's great that people like you help in understanding and transmitting that process.
I can understand a somewhat bristly reaction on your part - and which you've highlighted - as one of the few theologically conservative posters on these boards. I'm not sure I interpreted the challenge as a personal one - but then I'm not in your shoes and haven't been engaged in this kind of work nor had the experience you've had in mission.
I can imagine scenarios where my reaction would be similar to yours.
I think you deserve a beer or a cuppa after your very detailed response. Ultimately of course, the volume of extant fragments and the level of scholarly rigour that goes into the study of them isn't going to convince anyone in and of itself but it is interesting to learn more about the process and thanks for sharing this with us.
What's that got to do with the thread title?
Just as with evolution (*), there are still areas we can't be sure about but they don't cast doubt on the whole thing.
That doesn't of course tell you about the relation between Mark's text and the events it claims to describe.
(*) Are armadillos and elephants more closely related to each other than they are to us?
What @KoF said.
We share Hansen's disease with the former.
Apparently I always bring this stuff up.
However, like everyone else on this thread, I look forward to @Lamb Chopped’s expositions that detail the long, difficult work behind my elementary statements.
I am not even sure which English translation of the Bible is accurate so I will stick with what I have got.
I am painting a picture for you. I am hoping to rid your minds of the idea that we have scads and scads of ancient manuscripts, all very early, to support what we know of the ancient world. We don't. The following is a glimpse, but you are more than welcome to dig further for yourself, and I've left you as many signposts as I can. I'm hoping it will give you an appreciation for the multiple lifetimes scholars have poured into ancient manuscript work, and the care that has gone into it, on even the most minor and boring of the ancient writers. Also a small sense of the difficulty which attends this kind of work.
This super abridged list below is derived from a search around the Internet where I tried to avoid the obviously apologetic sites. I vouch for none of this from personal knowledge, as I've gone no further with ancient authors than reading Thucydides in the Greek (Dear Lord, was that a snorefest!) and claim no authority of my own. In what follows, I want you to see the kinds of numbers we're looking at for copies of ancient works--so I picked out a few representative authors (Homer, Plutarch, Caesar, Aristotle, etc.) and left you source pointers where you can go and look up scads more on your own.
Please note that anything listed as a manuscript may range from a complete copy, to (more likely) a fragment. Quotations from other ancient writers are also sometimes mentioned. So if you see "50 manuscripts," that does not mean "50 complete manuscripts," but rather "50 different copies, some of them whole and some of them much less so." Sources are provided if you get enthralled with Plutarch etc. and want to know precisely how many of the surviving works are whole, and so on and so forth. I haven't got time for those chases.
Please also note the incredibly late date on most manuscripts, compared to their text's time of composition. It is common to include all manuscripts available up through the Renaissance. That's necessary if we're to have more than a couple, in some cases.
* * * * * * * *
Apart from Caesar, and the later historian Plutarch's historiographies, who else is in the above? And there is just no quantitative or qualitative comparison with Caesar, a vast historical figure, and the magical non-historical Jesus character of the gospels and acts written over a generation after their subject by historically unknown authors. Where the Bible agrees with history, great. It doesn't have a very good record on that does it.
Does anyone take the reported actions of Caesar as a religious text? Is anyone trying to say that it is useful for ethical teaching and that disagreeing with it will lead to an eternity in hell?
If hell is what really bothers you, then you can just rest assured that there's a lot of disagreement about what that means and many Christians don't even believe in it.
But this thing about comparing New Testament fragments with other fragments seems to me like special pleading.
It's treating something that you think should be treated as a special case as if it's the same as the other cases.
What do you mean by special pleading?
The doubts about the accuracy of Caesar's account are based on whether Caesar was an unbiased reporter of his own deeds.
Yeah, I dig.
As long as it's a jazz reference and not a sulphurous Hell one ...
If you are talking about how to get as close to the original text, Lamb Chops description is accurate.
If you want to get to the original voice, you have to go deeper with methods like the historical critical method. But then you will find many of the sayings of Jesus were not all that original. The writers strung previous Bible passages together. They incorporated contemporary legends, they passed on what others remember Jesus said. As the Gospel of John ends there were many other things Jesus did. If one would write it down, the whole world could not contain everything
The facts are that Gaul was conquered and if Caesar didn't do it, who did ? BIB...A bit of an exaggeration me thinks.
Yes.
What I'm attempting to do is get rid of the foo-for-aw that people fling out in an attempt to make it sound like we can know nothing, absolutely nothing about Jesus, his words and actions, the times in which he lived, etc. etc. etc. and therefore we ought to just chuck the whole enterprise. Or, alternately, therefore we ought to be allowed to say whatever damfool thing comes into our heads, without being held to the standards of history.
That's wrong.
No doubt there is plenty of room for "we don't know" and "that's an interesting idea" AFTER we clear out the basic stuff; but the basic house cleaning's got to be done first. It's no good trying to find gold in your pan when you haven't even removed the obvious gravel. (explanation of metaphor here: https://www.wikihow.com/Pan-for-Gold)
Anyway, more probably tomorrow. I've got house cleaning to do tonight. Trust me, tomorrow's will be boring too.
All that to say that the only way I can be sure my deceased Gran used to play hockey and was a teacher is to accept the reportage of someone who saw her play (Which I saw in a newspaper cutting) or find an old lesson plan she wrote (which I have.)
If that is the way history is done then I can’t see too many reasons to dispute with Luke about, say, the fact that Paul was in a shipwreck and landed on Crete.
Your scholarship is most impressive, but why is it that so many fundamentalist Christians so fear scholarly investigations and interpretations of Scripture? Could it be because they fear the whole edifice will unravel when exposed for what it is? A lot of sayings of Jesus can be reasonably retrieved from the Q source, such as the Beatitudes the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer. And many of the kingdom sayings. Lovely as all this is, it isn't what developed Christian theology is about.
It's obvious from within Paul's authentic letters, and from Acts, that he was seriously at odds with the Jerusalem Church, led by James the Righteous (or Just) " the Lord's Brother." It could easily be that much of the theology on which Christianity is based, such as eating his flesh and drinking his blood, salvation through the shedding of his blood, and the abandonment of Jewish law, all come from Paul's interpretation of Christ's life. The Epistle of James, which Luther hated because of its opposition to his Sola Fide interpretation of Paul, is about right action, not faith without works.
Even when Jesus is at his most condemnatory as in Matthew 25, he condemns people for wrong action, not for lack of faith. Salvation by faith alone is never found on the lips of Jesus, who said that love of God and neighbour is the means of salvation, not assent to theological formulae.
You’re the only one taking about any of this being boring. I encourage you, heartily, to stop doing that.
I don't think it's fair to say that fundamentalist Christians are afraid of scholarly investigations; Dallas Theological Seminary is a fundamentalist, dispensationalist, nondenominational seminary that has quite strong scriptural scholars. (Also, Q isn't real
I don't think that Paul's letters reveal a major rivalry between Paul and the Jerusalem Church. There may have been some disagreements, but the idea that there was a significant fight between Paul and the other leaders of the early church seems to me to stem from an overwrought reading of the epistles and an importation of 20th century ideas about "church" into the past.
Jesus talks quite a bit about faith in Mark, for instance. He even rebukes the disciples for their lack of faith.
In general, I think reading the New Testament with as much of our 21st century ideas bracketed aside is best. The texts are far stranger and more rewarding, I think, when read on their own terms.
That matters because manuscripts circulate more slowly and checking manuscripts is harder and circulating responses to manuscripts is harder still.
I think we can say that if Luke was felt to be fundamentally unsound he would have been rejected, as the gnostic gospels were later rejected. But we can't say that the inaccuracy of details or of singular stories would have been corrected. The tricky bit is working out where that line is.
Probably somewhere around Herods, Quiriniuses and Censuses.
And that he never knew Jesus.
Also I'm not sure this imaginary scenario works. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there area number of small and geographically separated groups.
A letter appears say 20 years ago. As the group develops over that time, the letter is considered to be valuable and the contents are shared with others locally and eventually further afield.
Eventually the letter reaches a person who knows something personally about the events and says 'oi, no'
The thing has already spun out of control for a fair amount of time. The person in question likely has no ability to travel to the geographically distant groups to tell his story.
This is all imaginary anyway as there is little to show that the people in the story were alive when they began to widely circulate.
It's highly likely that there were various bits of material that were later edited and amalgamated.
Your thread inspired me to pull out a book on it and NT texts yesterday that has been lost in the shifting mounds of reading material. If anything seems relevant to the thread, I'll bring it up.
Thank you for doing this.
Take all the time you need. You're putting in real work, while the rest is mostly effortless banter.
That the evangelists collected and edited material some time after the reported events (allegedly) took place is not, I think, in dispute.
I don't think, however, that your first point has much, if anything, to do with your second. The textual evidence, in so far as I understand it, is that the individual books of the NT do seem to have each been written as a whole document, likely by a single author. There are exceptions, where a chunk doesn't appear to have the same style as the rest, but the evidence does indeed seem to support the idea that the complete books were distributed in a form pretty close to what we now have.
What is disputed is whether his account of the conquest is an accurate one.
@Kendel - hey, what's wrong with some effortless banter between friends?
@Lamb Chopped - no, it's not boring. I think we've all learned or gained something from the effort you've put in.
The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
This provides some explanation.
I assume there was a core of people with somewhat fuzzy boundaries between the inner most disciplines and those who were - say - part of the '72' but not part of the '12'. Presumably the NT writers describe the most memorable occurrences, and there were fairly long periods of time over the two/three years with fairly prosaic levels of teaching (similar to that between other rabbis and their followers), with people dropping in and out as they were able.