Gamera

We simply disagree. History is a series of texts. The farther the extant text is from the time of the purported event, the more opportunity for all kinds of intervening factors (like officious scribes) to alter or fabricate content, and the more likely the original text itself is late and the author far removed from the event.

You seem to be assuming we know the events without the texts, and that of course is not true.

We know about Jesus because of the texts we have. Period. If the mss of those texts are young, we have less reason to accept the reliability of their content, if only because for all we know the narrative was written shortly before the mss. If all we had were 12th century AD mss of the gospels, it would not be irrational to conclude that the narratives were written in the 11th century AD and not the 1st. And that makes a big difference as to the reliability of the contents.

Now there may be other factors that indicate to us that a late mss is in fact derived from lost texts closer to the event. But that's no substitute for actually holding in one's hands a ms dated close to the event. There is no substitute for a ms written close to the event to overcome the problems of late mss.

Again, other factors exist in determining historicity. But frankly, a ms close in time to an event looms large as to the threshold question of what the author was likely to know about the event.

And to respond to your question about Herodotus, it would make a big difference if we had a early ms of Herodotus, because all we have now are indications that a Greek of unknown background purportedly wrote those texts near the event, without any real corroborating evidence (I beleive the closest ms we have is some 600 years or so after the events described). A ms written within a couple generations would more strongly support Herodotus's existence, and hence would be probative of the historicity of the events he claims to have witnesses or researched. Right now all we have are late references to late referernces in late mss about somebody who claims to have written Herodotus' works at the time of the events. For all we really know, Herodotus was a pious creation of Greek patriotism under Roman rule, nostalgic about lost glory. An extant ms from Herodotus's time period would disspell that possibility.

Roger Pearse

I think we aren't communicating, that is true. Probably we are coming at this from different angles. You want to emphasise the value of early copies of a text, and indeed it is very good to have these! Other things being equal, an earlier copy should have suffered less corruption.

But I want to protect our interest in less fortunate texts -- such as the Bazaar of Heracleides of Nestorius -- that (e.g.) only exists in a copy hand-written in 1910; and I don't really feel that I want to lose the precious, precious data that it contains.

Somewhere there is a balance in all this. My miserable inability to locate it probably precludes further useful discussion, tho.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Gamera

Who am I to detract from the Bazaar of Heracleides and the distinction between the mother of Christ and the mother of Jesus? I wouldn't think of it.

My point is simply the positive aspects of having early mss. At the very least they preclude speculation about the text being prepared in a later milieu where agendas not existent at the time (such as nostalgia) may have arisen to generate a particular narrative about the past.