The calling of the first disciples. I'm sure there was more to it that Jesus happening to breeze by and Philip and the others going, 'Got it! Here's the promised Messiah!' after some kind of spiritual speed-dating session.
What we've got in the Gospels are edited highlights and material selected for literary or theological purposes. That's what we've got to go on. We ain't going to come up with anything else, although unfolding scholarship will undoubtedly reveal further contextual insights etc. Oh, and there's the witness of the Churches too of course - developing on from that - unless we believe that the Apostle Paul messed it all up and took things in a completely different and wonky direction.
@Kendel - hey, what's wrong with some effortless banter between friends?
Nothing, dear @Gamma Gamaliel ! At last many times nothing. I just scroll past what doesn't interest me. : ) Or that I find wearing or grating or repetitive.
I banter plenty, when I feel like it. Like right now, eh? ; )
… 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.
Okay, having looked at variants and how you find and annotate them… in a field of 25,000 manuscripts, not counting quotations (Did I not mention quotations? I should have. Because this is another significant place to find early bits and pieces of the New Testament, particularly the writings of the church fathers. Somebody somewhere* has said that you could probably recreate the New Testament from nothing BUT the quotations in the surviving writings, if you didn’t have the actual manuscripts, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all. So if you’re worried about a doubtful reading in the 25,000 manuscripts, you could do a lot worse than to go see what some of the earlier (and more verbose!) church fathers have to say on the subject. But I digress….)
* Hey, if this style of citation is good enough for the author of Hebrews, it’s good enough for me. Just kidding. Sort of. Heh. Hebrew 2:6. (by the way, it was Psalm 8 s/he was trying to remember…)
Ahem.
Okay, let’s get on with the variants and the so-called “myriad of discrepancies.” [LATE NOTE: I GOT UTTERLY CARRIED AWAY WITH MY SERIES OF DIGRESSIONS, AND I APOLOGISE MOST HUMBLY, AND GROVEL, AND I’LL DO THE MAJOR VARIANTS TOMORROW, KAY? I’M ZONKED NOW.]
You do realize that the New Testament is a very human book, as well as a divine one, and was intended to be so from the start? Christianity never subscribed to all that “delivered on a set of golden plates nonsense,” unlike the Book of Mormon or the Quran (there not a set of plates but rather a delivery from the angel Gabriel). No, the standard explanation for the nature of the New Testament (and Old) is “that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20-21). Scripture has its origin in the work of the Holy Spirit, the Third member of the Trinity, speaking through very human people—and so you find both imprints, human and divine, all over it. And so we should expect. And this, of course, leads to endless scandal from those who would prefer a … purer… product? Who was it on the Ship who once said “People want thus-and-such, but God disappoints them with the Bible”? I had a go at the Quotesfile, but couldn’t turn it up. Maybe someone else will.
In any case, God—this God—seems to like things messy, or at least not to mind it. And so the coming of the New Testament into the world bears some resemblance to childbirth—a messy, bloody process, with pain and joy mixed. And probably a lot of swearing… You can see some of the frustration discreetly expressed in 2 Peter 15-16, where the author says, “15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” I believe it was Lewis who wondered ““I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him [St. Paul] so many gifts, withheld from him (what would seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition.” (Reflections on the Psalms)
Okay. So what have we got?
In what follows, I’m sticking to the traditional authorship. I’m doing it for reasons I’ll explain a bit later, and of course you-all will argue your heads off with me, and that’s perfectly fine.
We’ve got the four Gospels, two by disciples (that is, member of the Twelve)—Matthew and John. We’ve got Mark, which is usually considered to be by Mark, the young man who hangs around the fringes of Jesus’ late ministry (and is possibly the fellow who ran away naked from the arresting party in the Garden of Gethsemane) and who later ended up as the on-again, off-again junior helper of Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journeys. Tradition (not Scripture) tells us that he preserves Peter’s viewpoint and memories of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. And then we’ve got Luke, the writings of a Gentile who also spent a lot of time with Paul, who by tradition spent some time with Mary the mother of Jesus, and who says himself in his prologue that he researched everything as carefully as he could—and well he ought, seeing as he was not himself an eyewitness to the Gospel events (though he was there for much of Book 2, the Acts of the Apostles).
As you all know, there are arguments about which Gospel came first. The current most common belief is that Mark came first, and was used by both Matthew and Luke as source material, along with another unknown body of material usually designated Q (for Quelle, “source”) although this other body of material has never shown up in physical manuscript form yet. The ancient view was that Matthew came first, then Mark, then Luke, and John last of all (John being the one apostle who outlived the rest, and presumably had time to reflect on everything and leave his best thoughts before dying—esp. as it became evident that Christ would not be returning quite as quickly as they had all hoped.) I tend to hold to the ancient view myself, because I can’t help seeing that you can make it work perfectly well if you assume Mark edited down Matthew (a kind of “Reader’s Digest” of Matthew) and added material of his/Peter’s own; and then Luke, being a careful researcher, grabbed both manuscripts and went from there, along with material of HIS own; etc.
A principle I regard as sensible is to trust the ancients over the moderns wherever they differ on matters of fact simply because the ancients are that much closer in time and in culture to what really happened. It is not impossible that 20th or 21st century scholars might come closer to the truth than the early Christian writers; but it seems to me unlikely. And for what it is worth, I am myself a very minor literary scholar, as well as a writer myself; and my own experience upholds that of Lewis and Tolkien, namely, that when an author is living and capable of defending himself, he says that the critics have gotten it wrong almost all the time. I’m referring here to questions like “What made him write that” and “Doesn’t the x really stand for current event / person / place such-and-such”? Also statements like “She couldn’t possibly have really written that, it’s not her STYLE” or “It’s obvious that she wrote that piece years before the other one, there’s a definite progression in thought.” Um, no. Scholars just aren’t that good at guesswork, from my experience with a foot on either side of the creative/critical divide.
(( By the by, have you noticed the simply astonishing trend in literary criticism AWAY from critics doing creative work themselves? The critics up until about 100 years ago all had creative work to their names as well as critical work, so you could expect they understood the difficulties from both sides—heck, even WW. Greg wrote a book on dog ownership, and very odd it looked in his bibliography! But now we get folks who produce reams and reams and REAMS of criticism of other people’s creative work, and nary a work of their own to go with it. Seems odd to me—and suggests they might be lacking an important viewpoint, too. But anyway… Keep this in mind, because biblical scholarship is greatly influenced by ordinary literary scholarship, and one can often predict or get ahead of trends in biblical scholarship simply by walking to the other side of the library to see what the new, hot thing is in lit crit for Shakespeare et al. I’ve recommended this dodge—with heavy reservations—to a number of PhD candidates.))
But back to the New Testament.
Then we get Acts, which purports to be Luke’s Part 2 of the Gospel, and includes a number of ‘we’ passages that suggest strongly Luke was an eyewitness to quite a bit of it. And not the greatest reporter when it comes to reproducing speeches either, which is another rather homely (and to me delightful) aspect of God humbling himself to produce his Word through human beings. The man can’t summarize a speech in proportion to save his life. But that’s okay, just more of the human-ness leaking through.
And the we get the Letters—Romans through Philemon, all attributed to Paul, all met with more or less skepticism by various critics. I let that stuff go for the reasons I’ve explained above. I have not yet met the person who can tell the difference between my work and that of a colleague on a joint document, and they know us personally; and we know, by testimony of the text itself, that Paul had secretarial help, perhaps occasionally rising to actual dual authorship, who knows? So I try to maintain a proper humility in the face of arguments about authorship. If people can’t reliably tell my stuff from someone else’s (though they always claim they can), and I’m alive to say so… well…
Moving on. We get the book of Hebrews, written by an unknown who obviously has a mind like a steel trap when it comes to organization and authorship, which is the one thing that would incline me to believe it ISN’T Paul, although I’ve seen individuals rise to unbelieveable heights on rare occasions, so I’m going to shut my mouth up. Other candidates are Apollos and even Priscilla. I’m told but haven’t check the Greek that there’s a pronoun somewhere that indicates a male author, but I’ll not swear to it—I’m due to read it in Greek sometime next year, I think, but I’m just going on report here. This of course is one of the antilegomena (the “spoken against”), which is to say the texts that were not universally and pretty much immediately accepted by all the Christian churches everywhere as Scripture (those would be the homologoumena, the “universally acknowledged”). Eusebius lists them as Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and the Apocalypse (Hist. Eccl. 3.25) along with 3 others that failed to make it into the canon in the long run. Yeah, we’ll get to those.
After Hebrews in the most commonly used New Testament order, we get the General Epistles (that is, the letters by people not Paul) which are traditionally held to have been written by their namesakes: James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, and Jude.) Again, I don’t fuss about the authorship, because I have no reason to believe that anyone this far away from the events is going to do better identifying the author than those right.there.on.the.spot., so to speak, or within a century or so. There’s also another reason, which I’ll bring up in a mo.
Finally we get the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, which is in a class by itself. It’s the record of a vision, or series of visions, of John on Patmos, highly symbolic, prophetic, and people have been arguing about what it means from the get-go.
Theoretically the canon is still open; we have had no definitive word from the Lord saying “I’m done now,” but 2000 years is certainly a period, and I don’t know any Bible publishers holding their breath for a late submission.
You know, I’ve written way too much as it stands, and I think the formation of the canon can wait till tomorrow. Also what the major variants are (hint: there aren’t as many as you think!) and what difference they make (spoiler: basically none, I’m sorry!) to Christian doctrine.
Time for some wine for the scribe.
I just want to point out that scholars who don't subscribe to Pauline authorship for all of the epistles traditionally ascribed to him do cite more than just stylistic differences, although those are a major factor. They also point to seams in the texts (which I guess you could call stylistic issues but they're usually going for something else); chronological issues; and apparent contradictions in theology between some of the doubted and authentic epistles. Also, some people doubt certain Pauline epistles because it lets them maintain esteem for the Saint while skirting some of the thorny pronouncements made in the doubted epistles, i.e. women's orders and other things of that sort.
As for which Gospel is first, I'm in camp Mark although I generally think like you do about these things, LC, but the ancients very clearly didn't like Mark for stylistic reasons. I'm inclined to believe that the opacity of the narrative and the rough quality of the Greek put off some Fathers because of standards concerning "good literature" and that Mark clearly doesn't meet those standards. Also, Matthew provides bits that the ancients loooooved, like a genealogy! and who doesn't love a good genealogy!? There are other reasons, too, but I don't need to derail this into a "which Gospel came first" debate. Those are best had at AAR/SBL over drinks.
Seams in the text, ha. I've never known anybody capable of spotting THOSE in real life either. Not without a flashing red light saying "here is a seam, behold me!"
Sorry, it's the frustrated comp teacher coming out in me. As for disliking subject matter OR Greek OR genealogies etc, it seems to me a dishonest handling of the text to decide authorship based on what you WISH were true.
I don't think there's another work of literature that has been as closely read as Paul's epistles, and the Bible generally, in the whole of Western literature. These writings also aren't polished pieces of rhetoric. Paul was clearly in distress with the Foolish Galatians or the Incestuous Corinthians or what have you when he wrote, so it's a bit more like reading James Merrill's letters than it is reading any of his completed works, or pick a writer. So I think the seams that readers pick up are there. Does this mean Paul didn't write them? Not at all. For instance, I'm of the opinion that 2 Corinthians probably has several Pauline texts stitched together, for any of a variety of reasons. Paul himself could have done that, who knows.
I agree with you about handling authorship, which is why I think Mark is primary. I think the ancients were smitten by the Greek, genealogies, and general more "filledoutness" of Matthew and so gravitated towards that gospel over Mark. Of course, there's no way to ever really know which came first, but the picture seems clearer, to me, if we take Mark to be first.
I gather that the most ancient church fathers ascribe the gospel of John to a figure called John the Elder, who was an eyewitness of Jesus's ministry but was not the apostle of that name.
Having more than one significant figure of the same name is something that doesn't happen in fiction often, but happens quite a bit in real life
But why think they are stitched together, and not the product of a naturally untidy mind?
It could be the product of a naturally untidy mind, and the seams could merely reflect that untidiness. Paul could have set the letter aside and had some tea and then sobbed over the state of the church and then gotten back to it with a different mindset, that's perfectly possible. The abrupt shift in tone and subject matter in 2 Corinthians between chapters 7 and 8, for instance, looks like a seam. Similarly, the movement again between chapters 9 and 10; why would Paul remind his audience, 10 chapters into a long letter and with several chapters more to go, that he is writing to them? That move itself looks like the beginning of a letter, and chapters 10-13 are different in tone and rhetorical moves from everything before. That could be the product of an untidy mind, sure. It could also be the result of Paul working himself into a lather during the writing of the letter. It could also be the result of three Pauline letters circulating among the churches in Corinth, which we know were distressed to put it mildly, and these texts were compiled together into one letter called 2 Corinthians. It's impossible to say for sure, but I certainly think of 2 Corinthians as authentically Pauline.
Good arguments for the "stitched-togetherness" of 1 Timothy, for instance, is found in the textual witnesses where there is less agreement about the most stable form (1 Tim 3:1 is a thorny one in this respect). 1 Timothy overall reads far different from all of Paul, definitely, but also it just does read, to me at least, like a bunch of ethical maxims and church order maxims Maybe Paul wrote that could have been stitched together. Or maybe he was just untidy in mind, who's to say. I have much less stable views about the pastoral epistles.
You do realize that the New Testament is a very human book, as well as a divine one, and was intended to be so from the start?
So, your own scholarship cannot be discerned from your colleague's by those who know both of you and your subject areas very well, but complete strangers are supposed to understand the human/divine distinctions in scripture?
Scripture has its origin in the work of the Holy Spirit, the Third member of the Trinity, speaking through very human people—and so you find both imprints, human and divine, all over it.
One has to wonder if it was really The Plan for allegedly intimate revelations of the HS to be propagated to others, who, also supposedly have direct access to the same HS. Why does the HS need a human mouthpiece when it already has unlimited access?
...which is another rather homely (and to me delightful) aspect of God humbling himself to produce his Word through human beings. The man can’t summarize a speech in proportion to save his life. But that’s okay, just more of the human-ness leaking through.
For The God, this deliberately polluted route seems wholly irresponsible. Serious question: how much human leakage does it take to corrupt the message beyond meaning? Where's the line? Is there a line?
And rather annoying. I never would have done it that way. (Which, by the bye, is more evidence in favor of the basic honesty of those who record their encounters with the Lord / Jesus / the Spirit. Not proof, mind you, but something.)
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.
This is deceptive in so many ways, mostly because it ignores changes in technology between the time of Jesus and the time of Shakespeare and tries to fit rules of ancient manuscript analysis to documents produced using moveable type printing. Also because of Shakespeare's (relative) recency we have some idea of the production of the documents in question so what would be considered many different manuscripts in antiquity get condensed into one by Shakespeare's time. Let me explain.
The documents @Lamb Chopped is referring to are (probably) the First Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q1 or the "bad quarto"), the Second Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q2 or the "good quarto"), and the First Folio (a.k.a. F1). @Lamb Chopped ignores or, more likely, is unaware of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth quartos of Hamlet, probably because most modern scholars regard them as reprints of Hamlet Q2 with a few alterations. Of course, if these were hand-written manuscripts that differed slightly from each other they'd be regarded as separate manuscripts rather than multiple copies of the same manuscript.
The other issue is that printers of Shakespeare's day often engaged in stop-press correction, where someone in the print shop would notice an error, stop the presses, make a correction, and continue the print run. Unlike a modern newspaper when someone yells "Stop the presses!" the erroneous material would still be published (because paper is expensive and things like copyright don't exist yet.) Because of this the First Folio (or any of the Shakespearean Folios, for that matter) is not like a modern book. There are differences between books printed in the same run. For example, the first hundred books of a run might start off "In beginning" before someone noticed and changed it to "In the beginning". Once again, by the standards of ancient manuscript analysis this makes these two different "manuscripts", but modern analysis condenses them to a single one because we can resort to typography and have additional historical knowledge of the publication process of Shakespearean documents. Because of this we can group several Shakespearean "manuscripts" together and consider them one thing when they would each be considered separate entities under the standards of ancient documents.
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.
This is deceptive in so many ways, mostly because it ignores changes in technology between the time of Jesus and the time of Shakespeare and tries to fit rules of ancient manuscript analysis to documents produced using moveable type printing. Also because of Shakespeare's (relative) recency we have some idea of the production of the documents in question so what would be considered many different manuscripts in antiquity get condensed into one by Shakespeare's time. Let me explain.
The documents @Lamb Chopped is referring to are (probably) the First Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q1 or the "bad quarto"), the Second Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q2 or the "good quarto"), and the First Folio (a.k.a. F1). @Lamb Chopped ignores or, more likely, is unaware of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth quartos of Hamlet, probably because most modern scholars regard them as reprints of Hamlet Q2 with a few alterations. Of course, if these were hand-written manuscripts that differed slightly from each other they'd be regarded as separate manuscripts rather than multiple copies of the same manuscript.
The other issue is that printers of Shakespeare's day often engaged in stop-press correction, where someone in the print shop would notice an error, stop the presses, make a correction, and continue the print run. Unlike a modern newspaper when someone yells "Stop the presses!" the erroneous material would still be published (because paper is expensive and things like copyright don't exist yet.) Because of this the First Folio (or any of the Shakespearean Folios, for that matter) is not like a modern book. There are differences between books printed in the same run. For example, the first hundred books of a run might start off "In beginning" before someone noticed and changed it to "In the beginning". Once again, by the standards of ancient manuscript analysis this makes these two different "manuscripts", but modern analysis condenses them to a single one because we can resort to typography and have additional historical knowledge of the publication process of Shakespearean documents. Because of this we can group several Shakespearean "manuscripts" together and consider them one thing when they would each be considered separate entities under the standards of ancient documents.
Deceptive? You flatter me.
You need to read more carefully. In this case, in a very very long post, I was referencing Hamlet, NOT to prove anything about variants (my gosh, it's been 30 years!) but to indicate the surprising-to-most-people LACK OF MANUSCRIPT OR EVEN EARLY PRINTED SUPPORT FOR A HELLUVA LOT OF MAJOR DOCUMENTS on which Western culture rests. That's the only point I was trying to make with Hamlet.
My description of what variants are and how you find them and annotate them and what you do with them came from not Hamlet, but the characterbook I was producing a definitive variorum text for. In that particular case, there were twenty-some manuscripts (Yes, manuscripts; I had a lovely time learning to read secretary hand, etc. with all the abbreviations, usually on crappy photocopies) and then 12 basic texts.
I did not go into your point about how the 1628 edition might actually consist of 1628a, b, and c because I was not trying to teach the minutiae of analyzing early printed books. I could have done so--in fact, one such problem was the reason for my coast-to-coast trip, forcing me to visit Duke University and the Huntington Library to consult one-of-a-kind copies which differed in perhaps two details, and which I could not have reproduced in any way to spare me the trip. It kinda sucked.
If anyone WANTS me to expound on the incredibly boring details of Jacobean characterbooks, and especially print, instead of the New Testament which is the ostensible purpose of this thread, I am at your service. But you will regret it. My dissertation came to two volumes and over 600 pages.
Luckily for you, not being a Host, you can just scroll past posts or avoid threads that don’t interest you. If you find them boring you can just quietly bow out of the discussion.
I get what you are saying, @Lamb Chopped but I return to a point I raised earlier. I'm not accusing you of bad faith. I do wonder though, whether you are in danger of overstating your case or comparing apples and pears.
Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' isn't the key text for a major religion. So it's hardly surprising that there are far less copies or fragments around than there are of NT texts - and perhaps apocryphal writings for all I know.
I understand that you are attempting to counter the assumption that there are very few or incomplete copies of scriptural texts and cited the relative paucity of Shakespearean copies as a comparative example.
But it's not a direct comparison as I'm sure you're aware.
I hope you will have noticed that I said the same thing as you, already? These are sacred texts. Of course there are more examples. Nevertheless, the huge discrepancy is noteworthy. Believe me, you'd note it with tooth-grinding envy if you'd been in my field as a lowly graduate student...
And of course I'm citing Shakespeare, I did much of my graduate work on him. If I'd been a medievalist like I originally planned, y'all would have to hear me bore on forever about Piers Plowman. Be grateful...
Anyway, let's carry on. More suffering for the lot of you, who are kind enough to put up with me.
Okay, today let’s get to the New Testament variants.
You all know that the Greek of the New Testament is called Koine, right? That means it’s marketplace Greek. Common Greek. The stuff the guy in the street speaks, not the literary and gorgeous stuff that great writers like Thucydides (ugh) and so on use. This is Greek-as-a-second-language, written mostly by Jews whose first language is probably Aramaic and whose theological language would be Hebrew (closely related but not the same thing); and given that these followers of Jesus are a really mixed bag, you get educational levels ranging from elementary school to PhD level, and the Greek they use shows it.
This is a matter of lasting pain and shame to certain Greek scholars, who adore the language and also believe in Jesus and purely hate that God stooped so low as to allow the New Testament to be written in street Greek. Which kind of cracks me up. But I’m low-minded…
Anyway, this means that in the New Testament, you’re going to get very different reading levels—and this is a blessing for people like me, who are working their way through the Greek New Testament and are trying to do it on order of easiest first. Which generally means starting with John, God bless him, and winding up with people like the author of Hebrews in his/her erudition, and Paul with his participles, and Luke (probably a native speaker) who writes like he knows what he’s doing—and therefore can leave the beginner in the dust. Better to start with the lowly Greek-as-a-foreign-language writers… for me, at least.
Okay.
So, there are committees of scholars who have been producing standard Greek texts of the New Testament for some years now, and it’s basically an ongoing project. They produce one edition and then get on with starting the next one, because new manuscripts etc are turning up, and you can’t just sit on your hands if you want to have the best possible text for people. One group is, I believe, the United Bible Societies (UBS). They are on the 5th edition at the moment, I believe. The other is the Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentaum Graece people, who are on the 28th edition. Both give you the text for reading, and then the apparatus with it (Nestle-Aland prints it at the bottom of the page).
What do we mean, apparatus? This is the notation style I was talking about in my first post, where you get the verse number, then the lemma (that is, the word or short phrase they are taking as standard and that appears in the finished edited text you are reading up above on the page) and then a very condensed list of the variants for that particular word or phrase. Not gonna lie, this stuff is generally dull. Like, I kid you not, you get a zillion cases where some manuscripts write “Christ Jesus” and a bunch of others have “Jesus Christ.” That’s right, a simple word order reversal. Nothing doctrinal about it at all. And of course you can see how it happens, can’t you? If you’re an ancient person copying a scroll, and you hit “Jesus Christ” for the umpteenth time, and you get distracted for half a second, how easy is it to put it down in reverse order—especially since both formats are correct, and New Testament authors will use both formats at the drop of a hat. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to notice, are you? You’ve seen both in your copy till it’s coming out your ears. Another common kind of variant is where you do or don’t get an article before a noun. Koine Greek allows you to use articles (you know, “the” “a” “an”), or not, pretty loosely—a lot more loosely than English, I’ll tell you—and so you can get “the donkey” or just “donkey” and you supply “the’ when you’re translating because it won’t make good English if you don’t. But in Koine, especially Koine Greek written by a non-native speaker, you probably aren’t safe to build a huge mountain of meaning on the presence or absence of an article in most cases. There are things like Colwell’s Rule that actually do make a difference when it comes to articles and definiteness and so on, particularly in John 1:1, but this is well above the level of NT Greek that most of us are working with on a regular basis. (Plenty of stuff for y’all to study up on!)
Anyway. There are other problems. Punctuation exists in Greek, but is not used at all times and in all places, if you know what I mean. There are periods when the fashion was to write manuscripts IN ALL CAPS, and/or runningallthewordstogether, and you can just see how that’s going to produce difficulties for a copyist who is not at the top of his game that morning. So you’ll get variants where someone misread something, or wasn’t sure of the correct word division, or where the quotation marks ought to go in English (I don’t think Koine had any such thing; they had question marks and periods of their own sort (the question mark looked like this ; ) but not as far as I know quotation marks. Which makes life exciting when you’re trying to figure out how much of John 3 Jesus is represented as speaking, and where John’s own theological commentary cuts in.
Ahem. You will get some variants where the verb tense is messed up—maybe you’ve got an aorist where someone else has a perfect or an imperfect, and those have slightly different shades of meaning. Not enough generally to make a difference—I mean, it’s the difference between “Jesus rode on a donkey” and “Jesus was riding on a donkey” or “Jesus has been riding on a donkey,” it’s still past tense, right? Interesting, especially to Greek nerds, but of no real doctrinal significance. And in 25,000 manuscripts, quite a few of these things will turn up.
Here’s the important thing to remember: When a copyist screws up, his mistake will generally be repeated by all future copyists who use the manuscript he’s created, and so the error will travel downward in time. This is how you get families of manuscripts. Say Joe Blowius writes “Jesus Christ” where his original manuscript, the one he’s copying, had “Christ Jesus.” When Jane Doe borrows his new copy and makes one of her own, she’s going to repeat his error—unless by some fluke she recognizes it’s a mistake (if, for example, she has access to a second manuscruipt of the same New Testament book, right then and there, and can compare them) or if the mistake is so obviously dumb that she knows it can’t be that (for example, “Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a tiger”). Note: No such variant exists, I just made it up to be funny. Ahem.
In the tiger example, what might Jane do? One: She might smack herself in the forehead, curse Joe, and fix it back to “donkey,” based either on a second manuscript she has handy (very far-fetched; do you know how hard it is to arrange a loan of a valuable manuscript, especially for so long?) OR based on years of hearing the story told in church.
Two: She might, if she is hyper-conscientious, repeat Joe’s mistake and do the ancient version of putting an asterisk by it and adding what she thinks is the correct reading out in the margin. That’s what OCD-minded copyists do, because they’re worrying that maybe, just maybe, Joe got it right, and God forbid they screw it up because they think they caught a mistake in sacred text… The problem with this is that manuscripts are messy, and it happens that asterisked notes, footnotes, explanations and random scribblings occasionally get copied by a half-awake scribe into the text itself. Which is not good, and creates a whole new set of error possibilities….
Three: Or if Jane is particularly ditzy, she might come up with yet another mistake, a kind of half-correction: “Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a horse.” Which will then, given enough time, produce a family of manuscripts that have Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a horse, all traceable back to Jane’s half-correction half-mistake.
Note that when you’re figuring out the family line of a series of manuscripts, you don’t generally establish it based on a single glaring error (or variant, let’s be polite). You look for a pattern of variants that occur together. Ideally you’ll find maybe 20 or so variants that occur in Luke in THIS set of manuscripts and not in the OTHER manuscripts, and you don’t find a clashing set of variants that suggests a different way of lining them up—because if you do, that’s a guaranteed headache. That’s the sort of thing that leads to scholars postulating Q (Quelle, the un-discovered but theorized source for the passages that Matthew and Luke share almost verbatim but Mark has nothing to do with). I had a Q in my own character-book work. It was a nightmare. Shudder.
Your goal as a committee—no single scholar is going to live long enough or get access to enough rare and ancient manuscripts, especially with politics involved—is to take all the New Testament manuscripts you can and filiate them—that is, sort them into family trees, with the oldest at the top and each generation of manuscripts listed below it, just as human family trees go. If you do it right, using the methods of lower criticism (aha, you knew there had to be such a thing, right? There is. It’s this kind of grinding collation work, and it relies very little on speculation and very, very much on huge amounts of grind and elbow grease, and results in white hair). I say, if you do it right, you end up with the earliest and best manuscripts at the top of the tree, and the most corrupted and latest at the bottom. Keep in mind that “most corrupted” isn’t going to be very corrupted at all; this is a sacred text to the copyists, and most of them would rather die than make a mistake on purpose or in carelessness. Plus a lot of them are Jews, and if you want to make your head hurt, go look up the modern rules for those who handcopy the Torah. Truly obsessive, and well they should be.
Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that any of us will ever see the day that an autograph manuscript turns up. “Autograph” is the word we use to mean the actual text that Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul, etc. wrote out with their own hands, which is presumably free of errors and as good as you can get. And don’t we wish we had them! But as I said before, the Bible is both divine and human, and that means that human mischances happen to the autograph copies in this very broken world. Fires; floods; getting lost or stolen or buried; getting (God forbid) used as a meat pie holder for a hungry customer (no, wait a minute, that was Shakespeare. I’m sorry. Carry on).
The fact is, human beings in different cultures and different times have set very different values on autograph manuscripts. Shakespeare’s may have been used for pies, or for lighting a fire; nowadays people bid zillions of dollars for quite average authors’ first drafts. I don’t know how the early Christians would have regarded Paul’s autograph letters. Certainly they treasured the contents; but having made a sufficient number of copies, would anyone think to carefully preserve the original? They were, after all, expecting Jesus himself to return bodily at any time…
There’s also the fact that these were meant to circulate. There are instructions in Paul’s letters, for instance, telling the recipients to hand them over to other churches and read their letters in return (which is how we know that he wrote to the church of the Laodiceans, and we don’t have a copy, and Grrrrrrrr do I wish one would turn up somewhere!). These things are written on papyrus (early paper), or on animal skins (vellum etc.) They are perishable, though with good care they can last far longer than modern acidic paper. So while the text itself is preserved, the autographs are as of now still missing. We work to re-create them through the humdrum laws of lower criticism, that is, patiently piecing together the original readings in any cases of doubt, and noting every change we made, and where we got it from. After all, more evidence could turn up tomorrow to suggest that there really SHOULD have been a “the” in that verse…
At this point you are probably thinking the whole New Testament text is as corrupt as hell. It’s not. In fact, the major variants can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There’s an article here that does a basic summary on a more detailed level than I’m going into, seeing I’m running over character count yet again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Testament. But the only variants that really make a different in the New Testament (correct me folks, if I miss something) are these:
The ending of Mark (Mark 16).
This bit, the first part, is undisputed: “When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” 4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 6 And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
But at that point, the certain text ends. And it’s a weird place to end, isn’t it? Doesn’t look like a proper ending at all, except maybe to certain moderns with a taste for the Gothic. And who knows, Mark may indeed have ended there himself. After all, the fact of the resurrection IS included. Maybe he didn’t feel the need to go any further…
But most people DO feel there ought to be more. Some people consider that the end of the scroll contained more, and was destroyed in some way, being outermost and vulnerable to harm. And as a result, we have bits and pieces supplied by who-knows-who, which are all more or less doubtful, and so modern English Bibles will print one or all of them with a bunch of highly dubious footnotes warning you that they don’t appear in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts. And as a result, we cannot safely say they are inspired of the Holy Spirit, or canonical, and Christians are best advised not to try to build a doctrinal tower on the foundation of them. Here are the bits and pieces, as reported in the ESV version:
9 [[Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
Jesus Appears to Two Disciples
12 After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.
The Great Commission
14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.]]
Major Variant Two: the Pericope Adulterae
This is the story of the woman taken in adultery, whom Jesus rescues and forgives. It’s usually printed nowadays as John 7:53-8:11, with a cautionary footnote to tell people that it isn’t in the earliest manuscripts. Me, I think it rings true to what we know of Jesus; but then, it’s entirely possible that we could have true stories of Jesus that never made it into the New Testament, and in fact I’d rather expect that. More on that later…
This particular passage has been placed in other spots by other editors occasionally—the ESV writes, “ome manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11; others add the passage here or after 7:36 or after 21:25 or after Luke 21:38, with variations in the text.”
Major Variant Three: the Johannine Comma
This is a bit (a single verse) that turns up in the King James Version to the stupefaction of people like me, who rarely read it and when they do see that thing and go “Wh-a-a-a-a?” It’s this:
7For there are three that beare record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.] 8[And there are three that beare witnesse in earth], the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one.
— King James Version (1611)
I’m talking about the bit that mentions the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. It’s so very convenient as a prooftext for anyone who wants to ram the Trinity up someone’s nose, don’t you think? A bit too convenient, as it apparently doesn’t appear until the fourth century at earliest and is in very few Greek manuscripts at all. Modern English translations play it safe and leave the thing out, or at most put a footnote in. (Really, you don’t need it if you want to talk about the Trinity, there are far more substantial passages out there.) Me, I personally think someone made this one up out of whole cloth.
Major Variant Four: The ending of the Lord’s Prayer
This one is in Matthew 6. It’s the bit that goes For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen. The ESV says only “Some manuscripts add…” You can see how it would be easy for a liturgical response from church service to get added to the margin of Matthew right at the Lord’s Prayer, as a kind of FYI to the reader, and then to get mistaken by a future copyist for an actual part OF the Lord’s Prayer—if that’s in fact what happened. Or, perhaps, Jesus really did say it, and the error was leaving it out We don’t know. Therefore the variant.
Major Variant Five: The Angel in Gethsemane, Luke 22
This is what English Bibles print as Luke 22:43-44, and the ESV notes: “Some manuscruipts omit verses 43 and 44.” To me, that reads like the manuscript support for this one could swing either way. The disputed bit is this: “43 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
As you can see, the angel really adds nothing to the scene, doctrinally speaking. Jesus’ agony and decision remain the same whether the angel is there or not.
Major Variant Six: The Angel at the Pool of Bethesda, John 5:3-4
The accepted text reads “3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed.” The additional text, which is found in some manuscripts, in whole or in part is this: “waiting for the moving of the water; 4for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred the water: whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever disease he had”
Again, the footnote reads as if the manuscript support could swing either way. The content certainly makes sense—after all, if it’s not supplied, we’re left to wonder why so many sick people are going to the trouble of hanging out around a pool of water when they could stay quietly at home; and the guy whom Jesus heals does say that he tries to get into the pool whenever the water is stirred, though he doesn’t mention the angel. So you can see why the explanatory verses are attractive.
But it’s just that attractive-ness that makes them suspect. One of the rules of hermeneutics* is that, when in doubt, you should go with the more difficult reading and not be seduced by the easier or more attractive one. That’s because human beings like to add explanations, and we all know that. On balance, it seems more likely that someone added this bit about the angel, than that someone left it out. And so most Bibles will omit it, or add it with a footnoted warning.
Okay. That’s it. That’s the complete list of major variants in the New Testament—meaning ones that come to a verse or sentence or more, or have some actual serious content issues. And as you can see, none of them make a doctrinal difference worth a damn. If you leave every single one of them out, you still have Christian theology in all its fullness, exactly as it stands.
And I thank you all, you who have survived to read this far, for putting up with me.
More later (that’s a threat…) 😊
But not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow, we'll see. Having a procedure, and I'd appreciate your prayers...
Just to say how much I’m enjoying this ‘boring’ thread. Nothing much that I didn’t know (at least at some level) already, but I’d have had to spend a lot of time looking things up and checking to put it all down like this.
Just to say how much I’m enjoying this ‘boring’ thread. Nothing much that I didn’t know (at least at some level) already, but I’d have had to spend a lot of time looking things up and checking to put it all down like this.
Yes, me too. As a very rusty Classicist this is great reading as I'd forgotten lots of things!
Thank you @Lamb Chopped
Seems like there was a big debate in the early centuries of Christianity about the baptism of Jesus in Luke 3:22. Some argue that this is due to textural variations.
Also the end (or lack of) of Mark is important if, as many argue, it is a source used to write the other gospels.
Of course the level of importance of specific text variants is a matter of personal taste and scholarship.
I think these are both points arguably worthy of discussion, and if @Lamb Chopped wants to tackle them as part of her more general theme that’ll be fine. Otherwise, for those who do want to discuss them I’m opening threads in Kerygmania.
Seems like there was a big debate in the early centuries of Christianity about the baptism of Jesus in Luke 3:22. Some argue that this is due to textural variations.
Also the end (or lack of) of Mark is important if, as many argue, it is a source used to write the other gospels.
Of course the level of importance of specific text variants is a matter of personal taste and scholarship.
The majority of scholars think that Mark ended at 16:8 and that the longer ending is a mash up of the endings of Matthew, Luke, and John. This is because the long ending of Mark rehearses what Jesus does in those endings and there is a lot of linguistic overlap. The earliest textual witnesses don't attest to an ending after 16:8, and there's a whole argument to be made about the genealogy of that change and whatnot that gets quite boring quite fast.
Well, but... To me it doesn't matter much how similar or different the Gospels are to each other if the earliest one wasn't written until decades after Jesus' death and resurrection anyway. People were writing down unreliable memories from years ago - maybe not even their own memories, but a friend or relative's.
My high school chemistry teacher used to talk about about the difference between accuracy and precision - it doesn't matter how precise your answer is if it's incorrect in the first place.
To me, the best we can hope for from the text is to try and pick out the major themes from all the Gospels, try to see the overall direction of Jesus' life/death/resurrection and not worry too much about the exact words or events.
I have created a separate thread in Kerygmania for discussion about whether Mark appears in his own Gospel, including whether he is the Gerasene demoniac.
Well, but... To me it doesn't matter much how similar or different the Gospels are to each other if the earliest one wasn't written until decades after Jesus' death and resurrection anyway. People were writing down unreliable memories from years ago - maybe not even their own memories, but a friend or relative's.
And so one question becomes "how many sources do you have"? Memories are notoriously unreliable, at least in regard to details, but if several people independently remember the same detail, it's more likely to be correct. If those several people are just retelling the same story they've heard old Joe in the village tell in the pub, then there's really one source, and it's Joe.
To just wave your hands and dismiss the scholarship involved in understanding historical sources as "well, it was a long time after the fact, and people make mistakes, so it doesn't really matter" seems to be unreasonable. Because the point of the scholarship is to establish which things are more reliable, and which things are perhaps less so.
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.
This is deceptive in so many ways, mostly because it ignores changes in technology between the time of Jesus and the time of Shakespeare and tries to fit rules of ancient manuscript analysis to documents produced using moveable type printing. Also because of Shakespeare's (relative) recency we have some idea of the production of the documents in question so what would be considered many different manuscripts in antiquity get condensed into one by Shakespeare's time. Let me explain.
The documents @Lamb Chopped is referring to are (probably) the First Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q1 or the "bad quarto"), the Second Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q2 or the "good quarto"), and the First Folio (a.k.a. F1). @Lamb Chopped ignores or, more likely, is unaware of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth quartos of Hamlet, probably because most modern scholars regard them as reprints of Hamlet Q2 with a few alterations. Of course, if these were hand-written manuscripts that differed slightly from each other they'd be regarded as separate manuscripts rather than multiple copies of the same manuscript.
The other issue is that printers of Shakespeare's day often engaged in stop-press correction, where someone in the print shop would notice an error, stop the presses, make a correction, and continue the print run. Unlike a modern newspaper when someone yells "Stop the presses!" the erroneous material would still be published (because paper is expensive and things like copyright don't exist yet.) Because of this the First Folio (or any of the Shakespearean Folios, for that matter) is not like a modern book. There are differences between books printed in the same run. For example, the first hundred books of a run might start off "In beginning" before someone noticed and changed it to "In the beginning". Once again, by the standards of ancient manuscript analysis this makes these two different "manuscripts", but modern analysis condenses them to a single one because we can resort to typography and have additional historical knowledge of the publication process of Shakespearean documents. Because of this we can group several Shakespearean "manuscripts" together and consider them one thing when they would each be considered separate entities under the standards of ancient documents.
Deceptive? You flatter me.
You need to read more carefully. In this case, in a very very long post, I was referencing Hamlet, NOT to prove anything about variants (my gosh, it's been 30 years!) but to indicate the surprising-to-most-people LACK OF MANUSCRIPT OR EVEN EARLY PRINTED SUPPORT FOR A HELLUVA LOT OF MAJOR DOCUMENTS on which Western culture rests. That's the only point I was trying to make with Hamlet.
My description of what variants are and how you find them and annotate them and what you do with them came from not Hamlet, but the characterbook I was producing a definitive variorum text for. In that particular case, there were twenty-some manuscripts (Yes, manuscripts; I had a lovely time learning to read secretary hand, etc. with all the abbreviations, usually on crappy photocopies) and then 12 basic texts.
Your point is deceptive because you are using differing weights and measures in your analysis. You claim (via Houston Christian College) that the over 25,000 different manuscripts of various Second Testament scriptures mean we can have a very clear and accurate notion of the life of Jesus. The methodology here is to count each copy of a document individually. For comparison you cite Hamlet, but switch up your counting criteria. Instead of counting each individual copy of Hamlet you change over to counting each individual print run instead, and exclude several for reasons you leave unexplained. You also set a fairly arbitrary cut-off date of 1628 after which copies don't count. Shakespeare died in 1616 and probably stopped working in theatre around 1608. If you applied a similar rule to Second Testament of only counting copies of works produced within twenty years of the date of composition there would be very little left. I can understand that there may be reasons for treating printed documents differently than handwritten manuscripts but that's why it's a bad comparison. Presenting these claims side by side is to present them as being equivalent, and failing to acknowledge the very different standards being applied to what counts as a "manuscript" is highly misleading.
This also gets to the bigger problem of considering the number of copies made to be an indicator of accuracy. We can certainly say that, given the number available, that early Christians liked producing copies of their scriptures. This also is a bit historically contingent on the early Christian presence in Egypt. (The Egyptian climate away from the Nile is almost perfect for preserving papyrus and parchment. It might be interesting to compare the number of Christian scriptural fragments recovered from Egypt with the number of Books of the Dead recovered.) At any rate, number of copies, even number of matching copies, is no guarantee of accuracy. If Scriptorium A produces two copies of a work and Scriptorium ב produces fifty does that make Scriptorium ב twenty-five times more accurate than Scriptorium A? Accuracy depends on both scribal competence and how accurate the exemplar copy they're working from is, which are usually factors unavailable to modern analysis.
So what, that the printing technology of Elizabethan times meant that the means by which texts were created differed so fewer originals were in play. Fair enough to say that but wouldn’t the production of the NT texts by scribal copying..ie the huge number of them, accompanied by minimal variation suggest both how they were valued and that they are reliable? And, isn’t that is what @Lamb Chopped is saying? What am I missing?
Pablito 1954 wrote: 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
It isn’t obvious at all to me. Maybe you believe Bart Ehrmann on these matters? I do not but leaving that aside and just using the text itself of the Bible, Peter who was a key chap in that 1st Century Jerusalem Christian community refers to Paul as our beloved brother (‘who sometimes confuses us’(paraphrase)). So, where is the ‘seriously at odds’ issue? Paul seems to have successfully negotiated issues of circumcision and gentile conversion with the blessing of the eleven and James. It seems to have been a ‘boardroom’ discussion of policy.
On the rest of it, maybe you missed how The baptiser refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God and in the Apocalypse, a lamb comes forth from the throne ‘as if slain.’ John 6:51-3 is not Paul’s interpretation and neither is Heb 9:14 assuming current opinions on authorship of Hebrews, (IE that it wasn’t Paul,) are correct.
On a separate issue, the abandoning of Jewish law is a very complex thing because it was not actually abandoned completely for Jewish Christians was it? Paul did circumcise Timothy I think because he had a Jewish father but a gentile mother. (Someone check that.) The issue of circumcision was the trigger for the discussion regarding the extent gentile converts to Christ needed to copy observant Jews who converted. Paul himself was keen to show himself an observant Jew on that final trip to Jerusalem in Acts. It did not work of course. All that to say that this was a complex issue for the early Church which arose from Judaism.
So what, that the printing technology of Elizabethan times meant that the means by which texts were created differed so fewer originals were in play. Fair enough to say that but wouldn’t the production of the NT texts by scribal copying..ie the huge number of them, accompanied by minimal variation suggest both how they were valued and that they are reliable? And, isn’t that is what @Lamb Chopped is saying? What am I missing?
@Lamb Chopped is using one standard for Second Testament manuscripts (each copy is a separate text) and a different one for Hamlet (all copies of the same printing are a single text and later printings don't count as texts because . . . reasons) and uses this to argue that there are only three copies of Hamlet to verify the existence of this play. Using similar logic one could argue that there is only one copy of Gone With the Wind, despite it being the best selling English language novel of the 20th Century. This difference is wholly created by switching standards (each copy is a separate text vs. each print run is a single text, but only within 20 years of the initial date of composition) and then cited as an explanation for why Second Testament scripture should be considered well-attested. I happen to agree that Christian scripture is fairly well attested in the documentary record. I object to using a fairly transparent rhetorical switcheroo to make that case.
So what, that the printing technology of Elizabethan times meant that the means by which texts were created differed so fewer originals were in play.
It's more accurate to say that moveable type printing created more originals but fewer variants (but not no variants) than the hand copying techniques available in Antiquity. For example, there are still in existence 235 First Folios that we know of. For reasons I've already explained there are textual variations between First Folios, but far fewer than between (for example) the Codices Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. Not to mention that there aren't another 232 similar codices in existence.
You know, I'm going to leave that right there and let you all decide as you like. I'm way too tired, and not at my best today. Let me take up some other stuff.
And I'm warning you that going forward, we're going into more "woo woo" territory--like the formation of the canon. That's bound to be unsatisfactory to people who like statistics and such. I can't help it. God is messy.
You'll also find more holes in my knowledge, I expect--and I may express myself more poorly. I am right now waiting on a test to see if God forbid I've got cancer. Probably not, right, but still... And a bit freaked out by a couple other items in my personal life just now. Anyway.
Moving along.
The formation of the New Testament canon
During the first three-four hundred years, the New Testament books were written, copied, haphazardly circulated and recopied, recopied and gathered again, recirculated, etc. carried throughout the known world—and eventually ended up as a more-or-less standard set of 27 books. Before I go any further, may I say that the thing that amazes me the most is the relative peacefulness of this whole process? I mean, I’ve watched the assembly of a denominational hymnbook from up close and personal, and there was practically blood on the floor at some points. (okay, slight exaggeration. But it wasn't when it came to the ... never mind). The formation of the New Testament canon is by comparison a Sunday school picnic in the park.
Basically what was going on was this. People—that is, the young Christian church—realized that a record of Jesus’ words and deeds was needed, the more the better; and also that the letters to the various churches which were in circulation from leaders like Paul, Peter, James, John, etc. ought to be preserved and circulated to other groups as well. And they recognized some of these writings as holy. Specifically, they began very early to recognize them as being not only human (and DEFINITELY human, including shouting and swearing at times, much to the delight of my young confirmands), but also from the mouth of the Holy Spirit, and therefore deserving faith and obedience. This viewpoint is a direct result of Jesus’ teaching the night before his death (and knowing him, said many times before that too) to the effect that
“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live…. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me.
“These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” (John 14, 18-26)
You can see how this would prime the listening disciples to expect, not only to remember his words, but to pass them on, write them down, and publish them, expecting the help of the Holy Spirit in this.
And you can see the acknowledgement of the Spirit’s work as early as in 2 Peter (chapter 3:15-16) itself, where the author says, “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” So right there you’ve got probably the earliest known acknowledgement of one part of the New Testament as being Scripture.
Now to be sure, as I said before, the Bible is both a divine and a human book, and there were certainly disputes about what exactly belonged in the list (canon) of the New Testament. In the end it seems to have taken about 300 years, possibly a bit less—people didn’t get around to making official stamped and certified lists for quite a while, and when they did, they added comments like “this list, which agrees with what the bishops of long ago wrote us.” So of course we’re left to wish they’d given us the exact citation, with name and date… nevertheless, the earliest official list seems to be Athanasius’ list (yes, our current 27) in a letter of 367 AD, when he also used the word “canonized” about them. Various councils put official stamps of approval on the list for different parts of the Church Universal at different times, and the Lutherans have STILL not officially closed the canon, because we’re conservative buggers and figure why bother? Nobody asked our opinion anyway…
In any case, by the middle of the second century or so, things had shaken out into more or less the same books we have today, not by fighting, screaming and conquering by the sword, but more like the kind of process I’ve heard described as, “hey, you’ve got the same set of books I do, great minds think alike, what?” There were arguments, yes, but the magnitude is just not there. The greatest was over the antilegomena.
Of the 27 we currently acknowledge, 19 of them are homologoumena (“we all agree on these books, we all recognize them as from the Holy Spirit”) and 8 antilegomena (spoken against, “we have disagreements about these”). My understanding is that Eusebius first gave the name “antilegomena” to the disputed books. These are the books we call Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation. Basically, there were some people who had some concerns about them, and said so—and there are still people today who have some concerns, but as a whole, the church has settled down to them. You might get a tendency in some groups to shy away from liturgical use of Revelation, maybe. That kind of thing. Note: There have been other scholars since who have adopted the term “antilegomena” for their own groupings, but I’m trying to stay with the mainstream. So, no, don’t start with me about Luther, he’s free to have his personal opinions, but in the end he—and I—bow before the authority of the rest of the church.)
There were a handful of other books counted among the antilegomena by some, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and the Epistle of Barnabas. Ultimately the sense of the church was that these were good and helpful books, but not the voice of the Holy Spirit. And so they fell to the second rank, and you can turn them up in collections of early Christian writings, or even with the pseudepigrapha (see below).
The ”woo woo” aspect of this I mentioned is that what’s going on, this whole time, is an effort by the early Christians, alone and as a group, to recognize the voice of God the Holy Spirit speaking through these texts. They did look for things like apostolic authorship, yes; but claimed authorship was not enough to force a book’s way into the canon, and the lack of it was not enough to keep it out. In the end they were listening for the Voice they knew. A little more of what Jesus had to say on that subject, from John 101-16:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep… I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”
This entire process of canon formation comes down, in the end, to listening to that Voice. That’s all.
Keep in mind that each of these things we call “books” was written independently, by different authors at different times, and then copied by hand and more or less carried all over the ancient world to the various young Christian churches. This means that probably nobody had a complete set (so to speak) very early. What you might have, if you were a young church, would be copies of a Gospel (more than one if you were lucky; some of Paul’s letters, and if you were really lucky, one that was addressed to you!; maybe a copy of Acts, or one of the antilegoumena, or a fragment of any of the foregoing (remember, not all manuscripts survive or get passed on whole); and of course as much of the Old Testament (and deutero-canonicals, no I’m not going there, this thread is long enough already!) as you can scrounge up.
Each manuscript represents nearly priceless wealth. I mean, to get it, someone had to beg the loan of an existing manuscript, obtain the working commitment of a decent, skilled scribe (and it takes a long time to handwrite these things, especially if you doublecheck your work properly), get the two in the same place, and provide ink and papyrus and/or skins/vellum. The latter were not cheap, except possibly if you were living in Egypt—elsewhere papyrus was imported. So this isn’t a photocopy we’re talking about—but of course you knew that.
A rich man or family might own one or more books. A congregation might, too, after the manner of a Jewish synagogue. They would of course be subject to the risks of persecution and loss, as well as the more ordinary risks of flood and fire. And then there would be other Christian groups begging you to lend them your copy of Hebrews, or what-have-you…
The result of all this was a pretty ramshackle collection of books for quite a while. Because you couldn’t just order up any manuscript you wanted to make a copy of, you might find yourself with gaping holes in your collection for quite a while—maybe you’d be missing two of the Gospels, or several of Paul’s letters, or what have you. Chance would play a large role in what you could get your hands on. Personal interest would play a role, as well. Suppose you’ve got a person who has money and wants a complete collection of the Johannine writings—well, there’s nothing to prevent him making one, provided he can gather the raw materials! Nobody’s going to say to him “But wait, you need to stick in Matthew and Mark, too.”
Similarly, if his scribe gets to the end of Mark and realizes he’s got room to add a copy of Philemon or Titus, nobody’s going to say to him, “That’s out of order, you can’t do that, leave it blank.” Why waste good papyrus? No, his collection is going to be just what he likes and can get access to—and if the resulting volume (papyrus, codex) looks a bit random to our eyes, that’s our 21st century assumptions confusing us. The mere fact that several texts exist together in a single scroll or codex ought not of itself be taken as proof that the commissioner or users thought they all held the same authority, were of the same worth, or belonged in that order.
This is especially important when we consider the New Testament “fan fiction” that immediately began cropping up everywhere, because of course it did, when did human beings ever not make up stories? More usually called the pseudepigrapha, and there are some pretty ripping yarns in there, if you like to read them—the Protoevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Life of John the Baptist, the Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, yadda yadda yadda… I have a couple big volumes full of the things, they can be really interesting. And this kind of writing was going on during the intertestamental period and just got bigger and bushier with the coming of the New Testament.
Now you can find all sorts of stuff in there, from things that were clearly meant for the teaching and betterment of the churches, and NOT to mislead, to things that are just plain bullshit and heresy. The quality and intent is all over the place. And none of this is “hidden books of the Bible” like the tabloids regularly trumpet in the grocery store aisles—this stuff has been known about and talked about forever, you can get a copy of it from Amazon or from your own pastor’s bookshelf. So feel free to look for yourself. A bunch of it is listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament_apocrypha
But getting back to my point. It is entirely possible for you to run across an early manuscript that has three canonical books and one pseudepigraphical—for the same reason you might run across a copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Mrs. Beeton’s Fine Cookery. And that’s because the commissioner was looking to economize on parchment or papyrus, and had access and interest in those particular volumes, and wasn’t particularly intending to make a doctrinal statement about the relative value of the books in that manuscript.
So as you’re looking at early manuscripts, you want to be careful of 20th and 21st century assumptions… and it helps if you’re able to hear Jesus’ voice. Let the yelling commence. I'm having some more wine...
LC: I am sure we all hope that you do not have even a trace of cancer.
Yes indeed.
I'll confess that the "woo-woo" above does make my eyes roll back in my head. I struggle with the divine part of it, namely recognizing the voice of God and Holy Spirit distinctly from the voices of the actual writers. I just don't know how one can make such a claim or distinction. Another thread topic for sure, so let's not slip down that rabbit hole here.
I'll confess that the "woo-woo" above does make my eyes roll back in my head. I struggle with the divine part of it, namely recognizing the voice of God and Holy Spirit distinctly from the voices of the actual writers.
It doesn't have to be that 'woo' in practice. It could just be communities of individuals prayerfully thinking about things collectively and coming to decisions, most of time these things happen through fairly ordinary means.
Firstly, I hope, as we all do, that your results show you are clear of cancer @Lamb Chopped.
Secondly, I appreciate the time and effort you are putting into this when you have a lot on your plate.
I've only skimmed through your recent posts and not read them in depth but they seem very much in line with what my own Christian tradition/Tradition might say - although perhaps with some caveats and quibbles on probably minor points.
We didn't consult the Lutherans of course when formulating the canon in a collegial sense because you weren't around to ask ... 😉
But what's a millennium and a bit between friends?
On the 'woo woo' side of it, I agree with @chrisstiles. The presence and action of God the Holy Spirit in these deliberations doesn't necessarily involve pyrotechnics or signs and wonders. Heck, we Orthodox believe our Liturgy to be pneumatic, and that despite stumbling and untrained choirs making mistakes.
Equally, Baptists and other churches with a congregational polity believe that they discern 'the mind of Christ' collectively though the 'church meeting.' I'd not deny them that. In some ways I'd see it as a micro version or parallel of what was going on a macro level in some of the great Church Councils - for all the politicking and imperial involvement and interference etc etc.
Some Orthodox might find that a dangerously ecumenical comment but I'm not worried about that. I'm saying that the processes are analogous.
Baptist 'church meetings' aren't particularly noted for tangible 'woo woo' and spine-tingling special effects but when they work well they can work wonders.
Put simply, I think Chris is right and the 'woo woo' element needn't be an impediment unless we are inveterately opposed to the idea of divine/human cooperation in the way we Orthodox would see as 'synergia.'
Comments
Not that this ties up all the loose ends and resolves all the conundrums of course.
It's the Sunday of Orthodoxy today with the Gospel reading John 1:43-51 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+1:43-51&version=NIV
The calling of the first disciples. I'm sure there was more to it that Jesus happening to breeze by and Philip and the others going, 'Got it! Here's the promised Messiah!' after some kind of spiritual speed-dating session.
What we've got in the Gospels are edited highlights and material selected for literary or theological purposes. That's what we've got to go on. We ain't going to come up with anything else, although unfolding scholarship will undoubtedly reveal further contextual insights etc. Oh, and there's the witness of the Churches too of course - developing on from that - unless we believe that the Apostle Paul messed it all up and took things in a completely different and wonky direction.
Nothing, dear @Gamma Gamaliel ! At last many times nothing. I just scroll past what doesn't interest me. : ) Or that I find wearing or grating or repetitive.
I banter plenty, when I feel like it. Like right now, eh? ; )
Okay, having looked at variants and how you find and annotate them… in a field of 25,000 manuscripts, not counting quotations (Did I not mention quotations? I should have. Because this is another significant place to find early bits and pieces of the New Testament, particularly the writings of the church fathers. Somebody somewhere* has said that you could probably recreate the New Testament from nothing BUT the quotations in the surviving writings, if you didn’t have the actual manuscripts, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all. So if you’re worried about a doubtful reading in the 25,000 manuscripts, you could do a lot worse than to go see what some of the earlier (and more verbose!) church fathers have to say on the subject. But I digress….)
* Hey, if this style of citation is good enough for the author of Hebrews, it’s good enough for me. Just kidding. Sort of. Heh. Hebrew 2:6. (by the way, it was Psalm 8 s/he was trying to remember…)
Ahem.
Okay, let’s get on with the variants and the so-called “myriad of discrepancies.” [LATE NOTE: I GOT UTTERLY CARRIED AWAY WITH MY SERIES OF DIGRESSIONS, AND I APOLOGISE MOST HUMBLY, AND GROVEL, AND I’LL DO THE MAJOR VARIANTS TOMORROW, KAY? I’M ZONKED NOW.]
You do realize that the New Testament is a very human book, as well as a divine one, and was intended to be so from the start? Christianity never subscribed to all that “delivered on a set of golden plates nonsense,” unlike the Book of Mormon or the Quran (there not a set of plates but rather a delivery from the angel Gabriel). No, the standard explanation for the nature of the New Testament (and Old) is “that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20-21). Scripture has its origin in the work of the Holy Spirit, the Third member of the Trinity, speaking through very human people—and so you find both imprints, human and divine, all over it. And so we should expect. And this, of course, leads to endless scandal from those who would prefer a … purer… product? Who was it on the Ship who once said “People want thus-and-such, but God disappoints them with the Bible”? I had a go at the Quotesfile, but couldn’t turn it up. Maybe someone else will.
In any case, God—this God—seems to like things messy, or at least not to mind it. And so the coming of the New Testament into the world bears some resemblance to childbirth—a messy, bloody process, with pain and joy mixed. And probably a lot of swearing… You can see some of the frustration discreetly expressed in 2 Peter 15-16, where the author says, “15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” I believe it was Lewis who wondered ““I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him [St. Paul] so many gifts, withheld from him (what would seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition.” (Reflections on the Psalms)
Okay. So what have we got?
In what follows, I’m sticking to the traditional authorship. I’m doing it for reasons I’ll explain a bit later, and of course you-all will argue your heads off with me, and that’s perfectly fine.
We’ve got the four Gospels, two by disciples (that is, member of the Twelve)—Matthew and John. We’ve got Mark, which is usually considered to be by Mark, the young man who hangs around the fringes of Jesus’ late ministry (and is possibly the fellow who ran away naked from the arresting party in the Garden of Gethsemane) and who later ended up as the on-again, off-again junior helper of Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journeys. Tradition (not Scripture) tells us that he preserves Peter’s viewpoint and memories of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. And then we’ve got Luke, the writings of a Gentile who also spent a lot of time with Paul, who by tradition spent some time with Mary the mother of Jesus, and who says himself in his prologue that he researched everything as carefully as he could—and well he ought, seeing as he was not himself an eyewitness to the Gospel events (though he was there for much of Book 2, the Acts of the Apostles).
As you all know, there are arguments about which Gospel came first. The current most common belief is that Mark came first, and was used by both Matthew and Luke as source material, along with another unknown body of material usually designated Q (for Quelle, “source”) although this other body of material has never shown up in physical manuscript form yet. The ancient view was that Matthew came first, then Mark, then Luke, and John last of all (John being the one apostle who outlived the rest, and presumably had time to reflect on everything and leave his best thoughts before dying—esp. as it became evident that Christ would not be returning quite as quickly as they had all hoped.) I tend to hold to the ancient view myself, because I can’t help seeing that you can make it work perfectly well if you assume Mark edited down Matthew (a kind of “Reader’s Digest” of Matthew) and added material of his/Peter’s own; and then Luke, being a careful researcher, grabbed both manuscripts and went from there, along with material of HIS own; etc.
(cont. in the next post)
(( By the by, have you noticed the simply astonishing trend in literary criticism AWAY from critics doing creative work themselves? The critics up until about 100 years ago all had creative work to their names as well as critical work, so you could expect they understood the difficulties from both sides—heck, even WW. Greg wrote a book on dog ownership, and very odd it looked in his bibliography! But now we get folks who produce reams and reams and REAMS of criticism of other people’s creative work, and nary a work of their own to go with it. Seems odd to me—and suggests they might be lacking an important viewpoint, too. But anyway… Keep this in mind, because biblical scholarship is greatly influenced by ordinary literary scholarship, and one can often predict or get ahead of trends in biblical scholarship simply by walking to the other side of the library to see what the new, hot thing is in lit crit for Shakespeare et al. I’ve recommended this dodge—with heavy reservations—to a number of PhD candidates.))
But back to the New Testament.
Then we get Acts, which purports to be Luke’s Part 2 of the Gospel, and includes a number of ‘we’ passages that suggest strongly Luke was an eyewitness to quite a bit of it. And not the greatest reporter when it comes to reproducing speeches either, which is another rather homely (and to me delightful) aspect of God humbling himself to produce his Word through human beings. The man can’t summarize a speech in proportion to save his life. But that’s okay, just more of the human-ness leaking through.
And the we get the Letters—Romans through Philemon, all attributed to Paul, all met with more or less skepticism by various critics. I let that stuff go for the reasons I’ve explained above. I have not yet met the person who can tell the difference between my work and that of a colleague on a joint document, and they know us personally; and we know, by testimony of the text itself, that Paul had secretarial help, perhaps occasionally rising to actual dual authorship, who knows? So I try to maintain a proper humility in the face of arguments about authorship. If people can’t reliably tell my stuff from someone else’s (though they always claim they can), and I’m alive to say so… well…
Moving on. We get the book of Hebrews, written by an unknown who obviously has a mind like a steel trap when it comes to organization and authorship, which is the one thing that would incline me to believe it ISN’T Paul, although I’ve seen individuals rise to unbelieveable heights on rare occasions, so I’m going to shut my mouth up. Other candidates are Apollos and even Priscilla. I’m told but haven’t check the Greek that there’s a pronoun somewhere that indicates a male author, but I’ll not swear to it—I’m due to read it in Greek sometime next year, I think, but I’m just going on report here. This of course is one of the antilegomena (the “spoken against”), which is to say the texts that were not universally and pretty much immediately accepted by all the Christian churches everywhere as Scripture (those would be the homologoumena, the “universally acknowledged”). Eusebius lists them as Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and the Apocalypse (Hist. Eccl. 3.25) along with 3 others that failed to make it into the canon in the long run. Yeah, we’ll get to those.
After Hebrews in the most commonly used New Testament order, we get the General Epistles (that is, the letters by people not Paul) which are traditionally held to have been written by their namesakes: James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, and Jude.) Again, I don’t fuss about the authorship, because I have no reason to believe that anyone this far away from the events is going to do better identifying the author than those right.there.on.the.spot., so to speak, or within a century or so. There’s also another reason, which I’ll bring up in a mo.
Finally we get the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, which is in a class by itself. It’s the record of a vision, or series of visions, of John on Patmos, highly symbolic, prophetic, and people have been arguing about what it means from the get-go.
Theoretically the canon is still open; we have had no definitive word from the Lord saying “I’m done now,” but 2000 years is certainly a period, and I don’t know any Bible publishers holding their breath for a late submission.
You know, I’ve written way too much as it stands, and I think the formation of the canon can wait till tomorrow. Also what the major variants are (hint: there aren’t as many as you think!) and what difference they make (spoiler: basically none, I’m sorry!) to Christian doctrine.
Time for some wine for the scribe.
As for which Gospel is first, I'm in camp Mark although I generally think like you do about these things, LC, but the ancients very clearly didn't like Mark for stylistic reasons. I'm inclined to believe that the opacity of the narrative and the rough quality of the Greek put off some Fathers because of standards concerning "good literature" and that Mark clearly doesn't meet those standards. Also, Matthew provides bits that the ancients loooooved, like a genealogy! and who doesn't love a good genealogy!? There are other reasons, too, but I don't need to derail this into a "which Gospel came first" debate. Those are best had at AAR/SBL over drinks.
Sorry, it's the frustrated comp teacher coming out in me. As for disliking subject matter OR Greek OR genealogies etc, it seems to me a dishonest handling of the text to decide authorship based on what you WISH were true.
I agree with you about handling authorship, which is why I think Mark is primary. I think the ancients were smitten by the Greek, genealogies, and general more "filledoutness" of Matthew and so gravitated towards that gospel over Mark. Of course, there's no way to ever really know which came first, but the picture seems clearer, to me, if we take Mark to be first.
Having more than one significant figure of the same name is something that doesn't happen in fiction often, but happens quite a bit in real life
It could be the product of a naturally untidy mind, and the seams could merely reflect that untidiness. Paul could have set the letter aside and had some tea and then sobbed over the state of the church and then gotten back to it with a different mindset, that's perfectly possible. The abrupt shift in tone and subject matter in 2 Corinthians between chapters 7 and 8, for instance, looks like a seam. Similarly, the movement again between chapters 9 and 10; why would Paul remind his audience, 10 chapters into a long letter and with several chapters more to go, that he is writing to them? That move itself looks like the beginning of a letter, and chapters 10-13 are different in tone and rhetorical moves from everything before. That could be the product of an untidy mind, sure. It could also be the result of Paul working himself into a lather during the writing of the letter. It could also be the result of three Pauline letters circulating among the churches in Corinth, which we know were distressed to put it mildly, and these texts were compiled together into one letter called 2 Corinthians. It's impossible to say for sure, but I certainly think of 2 Corinthians as authentically Pauline.
Good arguments for the "stitched-togetherness" of 1 Timothy, for instance, is found in the textual witnesses where there is less agreement about the most stable form (1 Tim 3:1 is a thorny one in this respect). 1 Timothy overall reads far different from all of Paul, definitely, but also it just does read, to me at least, like a bunch of ethical maxims and church order maxims Maybe Paul wrote that could have been stitched together. Or maybe he was just untidy in mind, who's to say. I have much less stable views about the pastoral epistles.
One has to wonder if it was really The Plan for allegedly intimate revelations of the HS to be propagated to others, who, also supposedly have direct access to the same HS. Why does the HS need a human mouthpiece when it already has unlimited access?
For The God, this deliberately polluted route seems wholly irresponsible. Serious question: how much human leakage does it take to corrupt the message beyond meaning? Where's the line? Is there a line?
It's a good while since the Orthodox PlotTM was mentioned but I'm part of it now. Mwa ha ha ha!
Mind you, I shocked a Reader yesterday by saying I held more loosely to some extra-biblical elements than he clearly does.
And rather annoying. I never would have done it that way. (Which, by the bye, is more evidence in favor of the basic honesty of those who record their encounters with the Lord / Jesus / the Spirit. Not proof, mind you, but something.)
Work now, fun later.
This is deceptive in so many ways, mostly because it ignores changes in technology between the time of Jesus and the time of Shakespeare and tries to fit rules of ancient manuscript analysis to documents produced using moveable type printing. Also because of Shakespeare's (relative) recency we have some idea of the production of the documents in question so what would be considered many different manuscripts in antiquity get condensed into one by Shakespeare's time. Let me explain.
The documents @Lamb Chopped is referring to are (probably) the First Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q1 or the "bad quarto"), the Second Quarto (a.k.a. Hamlet Q2 or the "good quarto"), and the First Folio (a.k.a. F1). @Lamb Chopped ignores or, more likely, is unaware of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth quartos of Hamlet, probably because most modern scholars regard them as reprints of Hamlet Q2 with a few alterations. Of course, if these were hand-written manuscripts that differed slightly from each other they'd be regarded as separate manuscripts rather than multiple copies of the same manuscript.
The other issue is that printers of Shakespeare's day often engaged in stop-press correction, where someone in the print shop would notice an error, stop the presses, make a correction, and continue the print run. Unlike a modern newspaper when someone yells "Stop the presses!" the erroneous material would still be published (because paper is expensive and things like copyright don't exist yet.) Because of this the First Folio (or any of the Shakespearean Folios, for that matter) is not like a modern book. There are differences between books printed in the same run. For example, the first hundred books of a run might start off "In beginning" before someone noticed and changed it to "In the beginning". Once again, by the standards of ancient manuscript analysis this makes these two different "manuscripts", but modern analysis condenses them to a single one because we can resort to typography and have additional historical knowledge of the publication process of Shakespearean documents. Because of this we can group several Shakespearean "manuscripts" together and consider them one thing when they would each be considered separate entities under the standards of ancient documents.
Deceptive? You flatter me.
You need to read more carefully. In this case, in a very very long post, I was referencing Hamlet, NOT to prove anything about variants (my gosh, it's been 30 years!) but to indicate the surprising-to-most-people LACK OF MANUSCRIPT OR EVEN EARLY PRINTED SUPPORT FOR A HELLUVA LOT OF MAJOR DOCUMENTS on which Western culture rests. That's the only point I was trying to make with Hamlet.
My description of what variants are and how you find them and annotate them and what you do with them came from not Hamlet, but the characterbook I was producing a definitive variorum text for. In that particular case, there were twenty-some manuscripts (Yes, manuscripts; I had a lovely time learning to read secretary hand, etc. with all the abbreviations, usually on crappy photocopies) and then 12 basic texts.
I did not go into your point about how the 1628 edition might actually consist of 1628a, b, and c because I was not trying to teach the minutiae of analyzing early printed books. I could have done so--in fact, one such problem was the reason for my coast-to-coast trip, forcing me to visit Duke University and the Huntington Library to consult one-of-a-kind copies which differed in perhaps two details, and which I could not have reproduced in any way to spare me the trip. It kinda sucked.
If anyone WANTS me to expound on the incredibly boring details of Jacobean characterbooks, and especially print, instead of the New Testament which is the ostensible purpose of this thread, I am at your service. But you will regret it. My dissertation came to two volumes and over 600 pages.
Pray don't accuse me of bad faith again.
Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' isn't the key text for a major religion. So it's hardly surprising that there are far less copies or fragments around than there are of NT texts - and perhaps apocryphal writings for all I know.
I understand that you are attempting to counter the assumption that there are very few or incomplete copies of scriptural texts and cited the relative paucity of Shakespearean copies as a comparative example.
But it's not a direct comparison as I'm sure you're aware.
And of course I'm citing Shakespeare, I did much of my graduate work on him. If I'd been a medievalist like I originally planned, y'all would have to hear me bore on forever about Piers Plowman. Be grateful...
Anyway, let's carry on. More suffering for the lot of you, who are kind enough to put up with me.
You all know that the Greek of the New Testament is called Koine, right? That means it’s marketplace Greek. Common Greek. The stuff the guy in the street speaks, not the literary and gorgeous stuff that great writers like Thucydides (ugh) and so on use. This is Greek-as-a-second-language, written mostly by Jews whose first language is probably Aramaic and whose theological language would be Hebrew (closely related but not the same thing); and given that these followers of Jesus are a really mixed bag, you get educational levels ranging from elementary school to PhD level, and the Greek they use shows it.
This is a matter of lasting pain and shame to certain Greek scholars, who adore the language and also believe in Jesus and purely hate that God stooped so low as to allow the New Testament to be written in street Greek. Which kind of cracks me up. But I’m low-minded…
Anyway, this means that in the New Testament, you’re going to get very different reading levels—and this is a blessing for people like me, who are working their way through the Greek New Testament and are trying to do it on order of easiest first. Which generally means starting with John, God bless him, and winding up with people like the author of Hebrews in his/her erudition, and Paul with his participles, and Luke (probably a native speaker) who writes like he knows what he’s doing—and therefore can leave the beginner in the dust. Better to start with the lowly Greek-as-a-foreign-language writers… for me, at least.
Okay.
So, there are committees of scholars who have been producing standard Greek texts of the New Testament for some years now, and it’s basically an ongoing project. They produce one edition and then get on with starting the next one, because new manuscripts etc are turning up, and you can’t just sit on your hands if you want to have the best possible text for people. One group is, I believe, the United Bible Societies (UBS). They are on the 5th edition at the moment, I believe. The other is the Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentaum Graece people, who are on the 28th edition. Both give you the text for reading, and then the apparatus with it (Nestle-Aland prints it at the bottom of the page).
What do we mean, apparatus? This is the notation style I was talking about in my first post, where you get the verse number, then the lemma (that is, the word or short phrase they are taking as standard and that appears in the finished edited text you are reading up above on the page) and then a very condensed list of the variants for that particular word or phrase. Not gonna lie, this stuff is generally dull. Like, I kid you not, you get a zillion cases where some manuscripts write “Christ Jesus” and a bunch of others have “Jesus Christ.” That’s right, a simple word order reversal. Nothing doctrinal about it at all. And of course you can see how it happens, can’t you? If you’re an ancient person copying a scroll, and you hit “Jesus Christ” for the umpteenth time, and you get distracted for half a second, how easy is it to put it down in reverse order—especially since both formats are correct, and New Testament authors will use both formats at the drop of a hat. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to notice, are you? You’ve seen both in your copy till it’s coming out your ears. Another common kind of variant is where you do or don’t get an article before a noun. Koine Greek allows you to use articles (you know, “the” “a” “an”), or not, pretty loosely—a lot more loosely than English, I’ll tell you—and so you can get “the donkey” or just “donkey” and you supply “the’ when you’re translating because it won’t make good English if you don’t. But in Koine, especially Koine Greek written by a non-native speaker, you probably aren’t safe to build a huge mountain of meaning on the presence or absence of an article in most cases. There are things like Colwell’s Rule that actually do make a difference when it comes to articles and definiteness and so on, particularly in John 1:1, but this is well above the level of NT Greek that most of us are working with on a regular basis. (Plenty of stuff for y’all to study up on!)
Anyway. There are other problems. Punctuation exists in Greek, but is not used at all times and in all places, if you know what I mean. There are periods when the fashion was to write manuscripts IN ALL CAPS, and/or runningallthewordstogether, and you can just see how that’s going to produce difficulties for a copyist who is not at the top of his game that morning. So you’ll get variants where someone misread something, or wasn’t sure of the correct word division, or where the quotation marks ought to go in English (I don’t think Koine had any such thing; they had question marks and periods of their own sort (the question mark looked like this ; ) but not as far as I know quotation marks. Which makes life exciting when you’re trying to figure out how much of John 3 Jesus is represented as speaking, and where John’s own theological commentary cuts in.
Ahem. You will get some variants where the verb tense is messed up—maybe you’ve got an aorist where someone else has a perfect or an imperfect, and those have slightly different shades of meaning. Not enough generally to make a difference—I mean, it’s the difference between “Jesus rode on a donkey” and “Jesus was riding on a donkey” or “Jesus has been riding on a donkey,” it’s still past tense, right? Interesting, especially to Greek nerds, but of no real doctrinal significance. And in 25,000 manuscripts, quite a few of these things will turn up.
Here’s the important thing to remember: When a copyist screws up, his mistake will generally be repeated by all future copyists who use the manuscript he’s created, and so the error will travel downward in time. This is how you get families of manuscripts. Say Joe Blowius writes “Jesus Christ” where his original manuscript, the one he’s copying, had “Christ Jesus.” When Jane Doe borrows his new copy and makes one of her own, she’s going to repeat his error—unless by some fluke she recognizes it’s a mistake (if, for example, she has access to a second manuscruipt of the same New Testament book, right then and there, and can compare them) or if the mistake is so obviously dumb that she knows it can’t be that (for example, “Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a tiger”). Note: No such variant exists, I just made it up to be funny. Ahem.
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Two: She might, if she is hyper-conscientious, repeat Joe’s mistake and do the ancient version of putting an asterisk by it and adding what she thinks is the correct reading out in the margin. That’s what OCD-minded copyists do, because they’re worrying that maybe, just maybe, Joe got it right, and God forbid they screw it up because they think they caught a mistake in sacred text… The problem with this is that manuscripts are messy, and it happens that asterisked notes, footnotes, explanations and random scribblings occasionally get copied by a half-awake scribe into the text itself. Which is not good, and creates a whole new set of error possibilities….
Three: Or if Jane is particularly ditzy, she might come up with yet another mistake, a kind of half-correction: “Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a horse.” Which will then, given enough time, produce a family of manuscripts that have Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a horse, all traceable back to Jane’s half-correction half-mistake.
Note that when you’re figuring out the family line of a series of manuscripts, you don’t generally establish it based on a single glaring error (or variant, let’s be polite). You look for a pattern of variants that occur together. Ideally you’ll find maybe 20 or so variants that occur in Luke in THIS set of manuscripts and not in the OTHER manuscripts, and you don’t find a clashing set of variants that suggests a different way of lining them up—because if you do, that’s a guaranteed headache. That’s the sort of thing that leads to scholars postulating Q (Quelle, the un-discovered but theorized source for the passages that Matthew and Luke share almost verbatim but Mark has nothing to do with). I had a Q in my own character-book work. It was a nightmare. Shudder.
Your goal as a committee—no single scholar is going to live long enough or get access to enough rare and ancient manuscripts, especially with politics involved—is to take all the New Testament manuscripts you can and filiate them—that is, sort them into family trees, with the oldest at the top and each generation of manuscripts listed below it, just as human family trees go. If you do it right, using the methods of lower criticism (aha, you knew there had to be such a thing, right? There is. It’s this kind of grinding collation work, and it relies very little on speculation and very, very much on huge amounts of grind and elbow grease, and results in white hair). I say, if you do it right, you end up with the earliest and best manuscripts at the top of the tree, and the most corrupted and latest at the bottom. Keep in mind that “most corrupted” isn’t going to be very corrupted at all; this is a sacred text to the copyists, and most of them would rather die than make a mistake on purpose or in carelessness. Plus a lot of them are Jews, and if you want to make your head hurt, go look up the modern rules for those who handcopy the Torah. Truly obsessive, and well they should be.
Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that any of us will ever see the day that an autograph manuscript turns up. “Autograph” is the word we use to mean the actual text that Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul, etc. wrote out with their own hands, which is presumably free of errors and as good as you can get. And don’t we wish we had them! But as I said before, the Bible is both divine and human, and that means that human mischances happen to the autograph copies in this very broken world. Fires; floods; getting lost or stolen or buried; getting (God forbid) used as a meat pie holder for a hungry customer (no, wait a minute, that was Shakespeare. I’m sorry. Carry on).
The fact is, human beings in different cultures and different times have set very different values on autograph manuscripts. Shakespeare’s may have been used for pies, or for lighting a fire; nowadays people bid zillions of dollars for quite average authors’ first drafts. I don’t know how the early Christians would have regarded Paul’s autograph letters. Certainly they treasured the contents; but having made a sufficient number of copies, would anyone think to carefully preserve the original? They were, after all, expecting Jesus himself to return bodily at any time…
There’s also the fact that these were meant to circulate. There are instructions in Paul’s letters, for instance, telling the recipients to hand them over to other churches and read their letters in return (which is how we know that he wrote to the church of the Laodiceans, and we don’t have a copy, and Grrrrrrrr do I wish one would turn up somewhere!). These things are written on papyrus (early paper), or on animal skins (vellum etc.) They are perishable, though with good care they can last far longer than modern acidic paper. So while the text itself is preserved, the autographs are as of now still missing. We work to re-create them through the humdrum laws of lower criticism, that is, patiently piecing together the original readings in any cases of doubt, and noting every change we made, and where we got it from. After all, more evidence could turn up tomorrow to suggest that there really SHOULD have been a “the” in that verse…
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The ending of Mark (Mark 16).
This bit, the first part, is undisputed: “When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” 4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 6 And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
But at that point, the certain text ends. And it’s a weird place to end, isn’t it? Doesn’t look like a proper ending at all, except maybe to certain moderns with a taste for the Gothic. And who knows, Mark may indeed have ended there himself. After all, the fact of the resurrection IS included. Maybe he didn’t feel the need to go any further…
But most people DO feel there ought to be more. Some people consider that the end of the scroll contained more, and was destroyed in some way, being outermost and vulnerable to harm. And as a result, we have bits and pieces supplied by who-knows-who, which are all more or less doubtful, and so modern English Bibles will print one or all of them with a bunch of highly dubious footnotes warning you that they don’t appear in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts. And as a result, we cannot safely say they are inspired of the Holy Spirit, or canonical, and Christians are best advised not to try to build a doctrinal tower on the foundation of them. Here are the bits and pieces, as reported in the ESV version:
9 [[Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
Jesus Appears to Two Disciples
12 After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.
The Great Commission
14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.]]
Major Variant Two: the Pericope Adulterae
This is the story of the woman taken in adultery, whom Jesus rescues and forgives. It’s usually printed nowadays as John 7:53-8:11, with a cautionary footnote to tell people that it isn’t in the earliest manuscripts. Me, I think it rings true to what we know of Jesus; but then, it’s entirely possible that we could have true stories of Jesus that never made it into the New Testament, and in fact I’d rather expect that. More on that later…
This particular passage has been placed in other spots by other editors occasionally—the ESV writes, “ome manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11; others add the passage here or after 7:36 or after 21:25 or after Luke 21:38, with variations in the text.”
Major Variant Three: the Johannine Comma
This is a bit (a single verse) that turns up in the King James Version to the stupefaction of people like me, who rarely read it and when they do see that thing and go “Wh-a-a-a-a?” It’s this:
7For there are three that beare record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.] 8[And there are three that beare witnesse in earth], the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one.
— King James Version (1611)
I’m talking about the bit that mentions the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. It’s so very convenient as a prooftext for anyone who wants to ram the Trinity up someone’s nose, don’t you think? A bit too convenient, as it apparently doesn’t appear until the fourth century at earliest and is in very few Greek manuscripts at all. Modern English translations play it safe and leave the thing out, or at most put a footnote in. (Really, you don’t need it if you want to talk about the Trinity, there are far more substantial passages out there.) Me, I personally think someone made this one up out of whole cloth.
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This one is in Matthew 6. It’s the bit that goes For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen. The ESV says only “Some manuscripts add…” You can see how it would be easy for a liturgical response from church service to get added to the margin of Matthew right at the Lord’s Prayer, as a kind of FYI to the reader, and then to get mistaken by a future copyist for an actual part OF the Lord’s Prayer—if that’s in fact what happened. Or, perhaps, Jesus really did say it, and the error was leaving it out We don’t know. Therefore the variant.
Major Variant Five: The Angel in Gethsemane, Luke 22
This is what English Bibles print as Luke 22:43-44, and the ESV notes: “Some manuscruipts omit verses 43 and 44.” To me, that reads like the manuscript support for this one could swing either way. The disputed bit is this: “43 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
As you can see, the angel really adds nothing to the scene, doctrinally speaking. Jesus’ agony and decision remain the same whether the angel is there or not.
Major Variant Six: The Angel at the Pool of Bethesda, John 5:3-4
The accepted text reads “3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed.” The additional text, which is found in some manuscripts, in whole or in part is this: “waiting for the moving of the water; 4for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred the water: whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever disease he had”
Again, the footnote reads as if the manuscript support could swing either way. The content certainly makes sense—after all, if it’s not supplied, we’re left to wonder why so many sick people are going to the trouble of hanging out around a pool of water when they could stay quietly at home; and the guy whom Jesus heals does say that he tries to get into the pool whenever the water is stirred, though he doesn’t mention the angel. So you can see why the explanatory verses are attractive.
But it’s just that attractive-ness that makes them suspect. One of the rules of hermeneutics* is that, when in doubt, you should go with the more difficult reading and not be seduced by the easier or more attractive one. That’s because human beings like to add explanations, and we all know that. On balance, it seems more likely that someone added this bit about the angel, than that someone left it out. And so most Bibles will omit it, or add it with a footnoted warning.
Okay. That’s it. That’s the complete list of major variants in the New Testament—meaning ones that come to a verse or sentence or more, or have some actual serious content issues. And as you can see, none of them make a doctrinal difference worth a damn. If you leave every single one of them out, you still have Christian theology in all its fullness, exactly as it stands.
And I thank you all, you who have survived to read this far, for putting up with me.
More later (that’s a threat…) 😊
But not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow, we'll see. Having a procedure, and I'd appreciate your prayers...
Yes, me too. As a very rusty Classicist this is great reading as I'd forgotten lots of things!
Thank you @Lamb Chopped
Also the end (or lack of) of Mark is important if, as many argue, it is a source used to write the other gospels.
Of course the level of importance of specific text variants is a matter of personal taste and scholarship.
Here for Luke 3.22 and here for the end of Mark.
The majority of scholars think that Mark ended at 16:8 and that the longer ending is a mash up of the endings of Matthew, Luke, and John. This is because the long ending of Mark rehearses what Jesus does in those endings and there is a lot of linguistic overlap. The earliest textual witnesses don't attest to an ending after 16:8, and there's a whole argument to be made about the genealogy of that change and whatnot that gets quite boring quite fast.
My high school chemistry teacher used to talk about about the difference between accuracy and precision - it doesn't matter how precise your answer is if it's incorrect in the first place.
To me, the best we can hope for from the text is to try and pick out the major themes from all the Gospels, try to see the overall direction of Jesus' life/death/resurrection and not worry too much about the exact words or events.
BroJames, Purgatory Host
And so one question becomes "how many sources do you have"? Memories are notoriously unreliable, at least in regard to details, but if several people independently remember the same detail, it's more likely to be correct. If those several people are just retelling the same story they've heard old Joe in the village tell in the pub, then there's really one source, and it's Joe.
To just wave your hands and dismiss the scholarship involved in understanding historical sources as "well, it was a long time after the fact, and people make mistakes, so it doesn't really matter" seems to be unreasonable. Because the point of the scholarship is to establish which things are more reliable, and which things are perhaps less so.
Your point is deceptive because you are using differing weights and measures in your analysis. You claim (via Houston Christian College) that the over 25,000 different manuscripts of various Second Testament scriptures mean we can have a very clear and accurate notion of the life of Jesus. The methodology here is to count each copy of a document individually. For comparison you cite Hamlet, but switch up your counting criteria. Instead of counting each individual copy of Hamlet you change over to counting each individual print run instead, and exclude several for reasons you leave unexplained. You also set a fairly arbitrary cut-off date of 1628 after which copies don't count. Shakespeare died in 1616 and probably stopped working in theatre around 1608. If you applied a similar rule to Second Testament of only counting copies of works produced within twenty years of the date of composition there would be very little left. I can understand that there may be reasons for treating printed documents differently than handwritten manuscripts but that's why it's a bad comparison. Presenting these claims side by side is to present them as being equivalent, and failing to acknowledge the very different standards being applied to what counts as a "manuscript" is highly misleading.
This also gets to the bigger problem of considering the number of copies made to be an indicator of accuracy. We can certainly say that, given the number available, that early Christians liked producing copies of their scriptures. This also is a bit historically contingent on the early Christian presence in Egypt. (The Egyptian climate away from the Nile is almost perfect for preserving papyrus and parchment. It might be interesting to compare the number of Christian scriptural fragments recovered from Egypt with the number of Books of the Dead recovered.) At any rate, number of copies, even number of matching copies, is no guarantee of accuracy. If Scriptorium A produces two copies of a work and Scriptorium ב produces fifty does that make Scriptorium ב twenty-five times more accurate than Scriptorium A? Accuracy depends on both scribal competence and how accurate the exemplar copy they're working from is, which are usually factors unavailable to modern analysis.
@Lamb Chopped is using one standard for Second Testament manuscripts (each copy is a separate text) and a different one for Hamlet (all copies of the same printing are a single text and later printings don't count as texts because . . . reasons) and uses this to argue that there are only three copies of Hamlet to verify the existence of this play. Using similar logic one could argue that there is only one copy of Gone With the Wind, despite it being the best selling English language novel of the 20th Century. This difference is wholly created by switching standards (each copy is a separate text vs. each print run is a single text, but only within 20 years of the initial date of composition) and then cited as an explanation for why Second Testament scripture should be considered well-attested. I happen to agree that Christian scripture is fairly well attested in the documentary record. I object to using a fairly transparent rhetorical switcheroo to make that case.
It's more accurate to say that moveable type printing created more originals but fewer variants (but not no variants) than the hand copying techniques available in Antiquity. For example, there are still in existence 235 First Folios that we know of. For reasons I've already explained there are textual variations between First Folios, but far fewer than between (for example) the Codices Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. Not to mention that there aren't another 232 similar codices in existence.
And I'm warning you that going forward, we're going into more "woo woo" territory--like the formation of the canon. That's bound to be unsatisfactory to people who like statistics and such. I can't help it. God is messy.
You'll also find more holes in my knowledge, I expect--and I may express myself more poorly. I am right now waiting on a test to see if God forbid I've got cancer. Probably not, right, but still... And a bit freaked out by a couple other items in my personal life just now. Anyway.
Moving along.
The formation of the New Testament canon
During the first three-four hundred years, the New Testament books were written, copied, haphazardly circulated and recopied, recopied and gathered again, recirculated, etc. carried throughout the known world—and eventually ended up as a more-or-less standard set of 27 books. Before I go any further, may I say that the thing that amazes me the most is the relative peacefulness of this whole process? I mean, I’ve watched the assembly of a denominational hymnbook from up close and personal, and there was practically blood on the floor at some points. (okay, slight exaggeration. But it wasn't when it came to the ... never mind). The formation of the New Testament canon is by comparison a Sunday school picnic in the park.
Basically what was going on was this. People—that is, the young Christian church—realized that a record of Jesus’ words and deeds was needed, the more the better; and also that the letters to the various churches which were in circulation from leaders like Paul, Peter, James, John, etc. ought to be preserved and circulated to other groups as well. And they recognized some of these writings as holy. Specifically, they began very early to recognize them as being not only human (and DEFINITELY human, including shouting and swearing at times, much to the delight of my young confirmands), but also from the mouth of the Holy Spirit, and therefore deserving faith and obedience. This viewpoint is a direct result of Jesus’ teaching the night before his death (and knowing him, said many times before that too) to the effect that
You can see how this would prime the listening disciples to expect, not only to remember his words, but to pass them on, write them down, and publish them, expecting the help of the Holy Spirit in this.
And you can see the acknowledgement of the Spirit’s work as early as in 2 Peter (chapter 3:15-16) itself, where the author says, “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” So right there you’ve got probably the earliest known acknowledgement of one part of the New Testament as being Scripture.
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In any case, by the middle of the second century or so, things had shaken out into more or less the same books we have today, not by fighting, screaming and conquering by the sword, but more like the kind of process I’ve heard described as, “hey, you’ve got the same set of books I do, great minds think alike, what?” There were arguments, yes, but the magnitude is just not there. The greatest was over the antilegomena.
Of the 27 we currently acknowledge, 19 of them are homologoumena (“we all agree on these books, we all recognize them as from the Holy Spirit”) and 8 antilegomena (spoken against, “we have disagreements about these”). My understanding is that Eusebius first gave the name “antilegomena” to the disputed books. These are the books we call Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation. Basically, there were some people who had some concerns about them, and said so—and there are still people today who have some concerns, but as a whole, the church has settled down to them. You might get a tendency in some groups to shy away from liturgical use of Revelation, maybe. That kind of thing. Note: There have been other scholars since who have adopted the term “antilegomena” for their own groupings, but I’m trying to stay with the mainstream. So, no, don’t start with me about Luther, he’s free to have his personal opinions, but in the end he—and I—bow before the authority of the rest of the church.)
There were a handful of other books counted among the antilegomena by some, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and the Epistle of Barnabas. Ultimately the sense of the church was that these were good and helpful books, but not the voice of the Holy Spirit. And so they fell to the second rank, and you can turn them up in collections of early Christian writings, or even with the pseudepigrapha (see below).
The ”woo woo” aspect of this I mentioned is that what’s going on, this whole time, is an effort by the early Christians, alone and as a group, to recognize the voice of God the Holy Spirit speaking through these texts. They did look for things like apostolic authorship, yes; but claimed authorship was not enough to force a book’s way into the canon, and the lack of it was not enough to keep it out. In the end they were listening for the Voice they knew. A little more of what Jesus had to say on that subject, from John 101-16:
This entire process of canon formation comes down, in the end, to listening to that Voice. That’s all.
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Keep in mind that each of these things we call “books” was written independently, by different authors at different times, and then copied by hand and more or less carried all over the ancient world to the various young Christian churches. This means that probably nobody had a complete set (so to speak) very early. What you might have, if you were a young church, would be copies of a Gospel (more than one if you were lucky; some of Paul’s letters, and if you were really lucky, one that was addressed to you!; maybe a copy of Acts, or one of the antilegoumena, or a fragment of any of the foregoing (remember, not all manuscripts survive or get passed on whole); and of course as much of the Old Testament (and deutero-canonicals, no I’m not going there, this thread is long enough already!) as you can scrounge up.
Each manuscript represents nearly priceless wealth. I mean, to get it, someone had to beg the loan of an existing manuscript, obtain the working commitment of a decent, skilled scribe (and it takes a long time to handwrite these things, especially if you doublecheck your work properly), get the two in the same place, and provide ink and papyrus and/or skins/vellum. The latter were not cheap, except possibly if you were living in Egypt—elsewhere papyrus was imported. So this isn’t a photocopy we’re talking about—but of course you knew that.
A rich man or family might own one or more books. A congregation might, too, after the manner of a Jewish synagogue. They would of course be subject to the risks of persecution and loss, as well as the more ordinary risks of flood and fire. And then there would be other Christian groups begging you to lend them your copy of Hebrews, or what-have-you…
The result of all this was a pretty ramshackle collection of books for quite a while. Because you couldn’t just order up any manuscript you wanted to make a copy of, you might find yourself with gaping holes in your collection for quite a while—maybe you’d be missing two of the Gospels, or several of Paul’s letters, or what have you. Chance would play a large role in what you could get your hands on. Personal interest would play a role, as well. Suppose you’ve got a person who has money and wants a complete collection of the Johannine writings—well, there’s nothing to prevent him making one, provided he can gather the raw materials! Nobody’s going to say to him “But wait, you need to stick in Matthew and Mark, too.”
Similarly, if his scribe gets to the end of Mark and realizes he’s got room to add a copy of Philemon or Titus, nobody’s going to say to him, “That’s out of order, you can’t do that, leave it blank.” Why waste good papyrus? No, his collection is going to be just what he likes and can get access to—and if the resulting volume (papyrus, codex) looks a bit random to our eyes, that’s our 21st century assumptions confusing us. The mere fact that several texts exist together in a single scroll or codex ought not of itself be taken as proof that the commissioner or users thought they all held the same authority, were of the same worth, or belonged in that order.
This is especially important when we consider the New Testament “fan fiction” that immediately began cropping up everywhere, because of course it did, when did human beings ever not make up stories? More usually called the pseudepigrapha, and there are some pretty ripping yarns in there, if you like to read them—the Protoevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Life of John the Baptist, the Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, yadda yadda yadda… I have a couple big volumes full of the things, they can be really interesting. And this kind of writing was going on during the intertestamental period and just got bigger and bushier with the coming of the New Testament.
Now you can find all sorts of stuff in there, from things that were clearly meant for the teaching and betterment of the churches, and NOT to mislead, to things that are just plain bullshit and heresy. The quality and intent is all over the place. And none of this is “hidden books of the Bible” like the tabloids regularly trumpet in the grocery store aisles—this stuff has been known about and talked about forever, you can get a copy of it from Amazon or from your own pastor’s bookshelf. So feel free to look for yourself. A bunch of it is listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament_apocrypha
But getting back to my point. It is entirely possible for you to run across an early manuscript that has three canonical books and one pseudepigraphical—for the same reason you might run across a copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Mrs. Beeton’s Fine Cookery. And that’s because the commissioner was looking to economize on parchment or papyrus, and had access and interest in those particular volumes, and wasn’t particularly intending to make a doctrinal statement about the relative value of the books in that manuscript.
So as you’re looking at early manuscripts, you want to be careful of 20th and 21st century assumptions… and it helps if you’re able to hear Jesus’ voice. Let the yelling commence. I'm having some more wine...
Yes amen
Yes indeed.
I'll confess that the "woo-woo" above does make my eyes roll back in my head. I struggle with the divine part of it, namely recognizing the voice of God and Holy Spirit distinctly from the voices of the actual writers. I just don't know how one can make such a claim or distinction. Another thread topic for sure, so let's not slip down that rabbit hole here.
It doesn't have to be that 'woo' in practice. It could just be communities of individuals prayerfully thinking about things collectively and coming to decisions, most of time these things happen through fairly ordinary means.
Secondly, I appreciate the time and effort you are putting into this when you have a lot on your plate.
I've only skimmed through your recent posts and not read them in depth but they seem very much in line with what my own Christian tradition/Tradition might say - although perhaps with some caveats and quibbles on probably minor points.
We didn't consult the Lutherans of course when formulating the canon in a collegial sense because you weren't around to ask ... 😉
But what's a millennium and a bit between friends?
On the 'woo woo' side of it, I agree with @chrisstiles. The presence and action of God the Holy Spirit in these deliberations doesn't necessarily involve pyrotechnics or signs and wonders. Heck, we Orthodox believe our Liturgy to be pneumatic, and that despite stumbling and untrained choirs making mistakes.
Equally, Baptists and other churches with a congregational polity believe that they discern 'the mind of Christ' collectively though the 'church meeting.' I'd not deny them that. In some ways I'd see it as a micro version or parallel of what was going on a macro level in some of the great Church Councils - for all the politicking and imperial involvement and interference etc etc.
Some Orthodox might find that a dangerously ecumenical comment but I'm not worried about that. I'm saying that the processes are analogous.
Baptist 'church meetings' aren't particularly noted for tangible 'woo woo' and spine-tingling special effects but when they work well they can work wonders.
Put simply, I think Chris is right and the 'woo woo' element needn't be an impediment unless we are inveterately opposed to the idea of divine/human cooperation in the way we Orthodox would see as 'synergia.'