Camio

Hi,

I am finally through with Doherty's Neither God Nor Man. There is a buzzword which keeps coming at the end of the book: interpolation. Before commenting on this, I need to be enlightened on the matter.

I am aware of corrupted words (e.g. examples provided in Ehrman's OCS), forged documents (e.g. letters between Seneca and Paul), but I am not familiar with anything which would be in the same league as the TF (provided of course it was partially or completely forged) : short passages inserted into a broader corpus.

Could anyone provide me with such attested(*) interpolations, or point me to a thorough study on the subject?

Thanks,

Jean-François.

(*) ideal case: two versions of the document, the older without the inserted passage.

dog-on

Mark 16:9 -20

John 7:53 - 8:11

Two fairly uncontroversial examples.

spin

There are a lot of attested interpolations in the christian canon. A more scholarly translation usually relegates the attested ones to footnotes with a euphemistic comment, "Other ancient authorities add..." followed by the interpolation. Famous examples are 1) the ending of Mark, 2)the women taken in adultery in John 8, 3) the trinitarian addition in 1 John 5:7. But there are many more if you go through the footnotes, the sign on the cross written in various languages (Lk 23:35), the rule about releasing someone at the festival (Lk 23:17), check Luke's version of the lord's prayer for interpolations (11:2-4), Mark 15:28, 11:26, 9:44 & 46, and lots more.

We're lucky here because there are enough manuscripts to show the changes. Although we can't demonstrate interpolations in the earliest manuscripts (because there are no earlier versions), we can't assume that there were none, as there is a good precedent in the manuscript evidence for later interpolation and we have the willingness of two communities to totally rewrite Mark.


spin

Camio

Thanks for the examples, right on target. Though they make me realize that I had something a little different in mind. I came across this sort of reasoning while reading NGNM: "a copyist may have found astonishing that such a reference was not made in the text, so he inserted it". Leaving aside the "mind reading at centuries of distance" issue, I was wondering if this kind of "innocent" tampering was ever documented and proved, inside or outside NT and related texts.

aa5874

But, are we looking at "interpolations" in the strict sense or just "versions" of fictional stories from unknown writers?

There may be many versions of "Robin Hood" but the variations are not considered "interpolations."

The books of NT Canon are essentially a compilation of multiple non-historical accounts of a mythical entity with his 12 disciples and a character called Saul/Paul written over an unknown time period by unknown authors.

Perhaps, it was the latest "versions" that were canonised. The KJV Mark and KJV John are not the earliest version of gMark and gJohn.

Maybe the Church had the "latest version" or wrote their version very late and then canonised them but gave the impression that their version was the earliest and authentic.

DCHindley

There will never be conclusive proof of innoculous changes, just evidence of such changes produced by comparison of texts.

There are cases where a scribe has inserted his own commentary into the text, which is pretty obvious when it is encountered. There is one such case in the Corpus Hermeticum, where a scribe makes a disparging comment about something said in the text he was copying. I remember another case where a scribe suddenly starts describing a commotion in the scriptoreum that interrupted the reader, and then begins again with the text where the distation had previously ended. The guy may have been a kind of "court reporter" moonlighting as a copyist, and was in "autopilot" mode. For these type interpolations (the comments or marginal notes), try any of the many fine textual commentaries by the Alands and B Metzger, et al.

As far as a comprehensive list of possible intentional interpolations, good luck with that. You said it yourself that all sorts of passages have been proposed as such interpolations. I too have my own highly speculative and clearly oh-so-wrong ideas about that. Some of the "Dutch Radicals" of the late 19th century thought all the Pauline letters were pseudepigrapha and not from Paul.

Caulacau, Saulasau, Zeesar (Hippolytus 5.3 < Isa 28:10, Kî saw läsäw saw läsäw qaw läqäw qaw läqäw zü`êr šäm zü`êr šäm) "For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, there a little." (RSV)

Dave

Roger Pearse

I don't think the scribe inserted his own commentary into the text, tho -- that would be unusual, surely? Rather these look like cases of that well-known phenomenon, the marginal or inter-linear gloss which a subsequent copyist mistakenly incorporated into the text?

When copying by hand, it is easy to miss a line. In medieval texts, the missed line would be picked up by the corrector in the scriptorium, and written in the margin with a sign to indicate where it should be inserted. The next copyist would recognise this, and re-include the line

Unfortunately notes were also written in the margin. This left the next scribe to decide whether the items were notes or omissions. Scribes tended to be conservative, and included them, and this is the origin of the majority of interpolations into texts. If we have manuscripts from different families of the transmission, we can see them easily enough.

Intentional insertions are another matter. I was thinking of the forged decretals, where an existing collection of legal statements was worked over by a forger. But perhaps these really belong to the history of forgery, rather than interpolation.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

John Kesler

Camio, you may find of interest this list of NT textual variants, which is not even comprehensive. As an example of changes, look at the entry for 1 Corinthians and statements like "Some copyists and translators added the word..." and "Apparently some copyists failed to note that 'things that are not' is in apposition to 'the scorned things' and added the word..."

There are also interpolations which, though they appear in the earliest manuscripts, are obviously from a later hand. John 21 is an example. John 20's summary statement certainly reads like the original ending:

In the OT/Hebrew Bible two famous examples of textual changes are Deuteronomy 32:8 and Exodus 12:40. The former, in the DSS and LXX, states that the nations of the world were appropriated according to the number of gods/angels, but the reading was changed in the MT to say that the number of the "sons of Israel" determined the allotment process. This change was made to remove a vestige of polytheism. I go into more detail in this post.

Exodus 12:40 in the MT says that the Israelites were in Egypt for 430 years, while the LXX and SP say that the 430 years includes time spent in Canaan, an obvious attempt to harmonize disparate chronologies, notably the genealogy for Aaron found in Exodus 6:16-20. See here for more.

DCHindley

Roger,

I don't know that it has happened in copies of the NT or OT (except for the one that relays something about confusion in the scriptorium), but I do know it has happened in the Corpus Hermeticum Book 18:

When musicians undertake to make harmonious melody, then, if in the performance their good intent is thwarted by the discordance of their instruments, The writers argument is absurd; for when the instruments are defective, and fail to do what is required of them, the musician is bound to be jeered at by the audience one does not impute the blame to the musician's inspiration, but one ascribes the fault to the unsoundness of the instrument. (Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol 1, pg 275)

It looks to me that the interpolation (bold) is inserted in mid sentence, not at the end of the sentence where one might expert the insertion of a marginal note. This looks like an interjection of an opinion in the middle of a sentence he may have copied several times before.

DCH

Roger Pearse

Nothing in this suggests to me that the commenter originally wrote that in mid-sentence, tho. On the contrary, in fact.