Peter Kirby

Yes.

Yes.

This is all correct. Way too much is made of p52.

OK.

Thank you for this information.

What I mean is that it is unlikely, say, a version of John was going around without the 21st chapter, or with a now-lost miracle story. There are of course textual variations, and some of them are theologically significant. The idea is that it isn't the case that we have no idea what the "most recent common ancestor" of all these copies of John contained. They had the poetry at the start, they had the wedding at Cana, etc. Whole passages weren't being excised and added at this time (with the notable exception of the story of the woman caught in adultery).

Correct.

Yes.

(More neutrally, theologically motivated differences exist between p66 and other mss.) Yes, I am making no point about whether these verse-level and word-level alterations are theologically important. (Some of them are! Bart Ehrman went over this well in his book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.)

No. "The more recent is not [necessarily] the more inferior." I wouldn't call the other manuscripts different "recensions" either. To me, a recension implies that a distinctly different document results. These are all recognizably copies of "The Gospel According to John" with the same sentences in the same order with largely the same content [even when you compare, say, Alexandrian to Byzantine]. Different recensions would describe, for example, the shorter and longer (and Syriac) editions of Ignatius.

I said nothing about these opinions being considered. I just wrote them in the library before I had to hike off to class.

best,
Peter Kirby

Amlodhi

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the clarification. I have no argument with that statement.


Yes, Bart Ehrman's work is precisely what I had in mind. The pertinent factor being that the nature and target of these alterations reveal their purpose; i.e., to make the existing text better conform to the prevailing (orthodox) theology.


OK, I understand the distinction you are making. To me, however, "recension" implies only that a given copy includes critical revisions.


Again, thanks for taking the time to clarify your position on these points.

Amlodhi

dost

Hello Peter.



Yes, but as you are well aware Peter, p52 really does not contain much text. I think its slightly bigger than a credit card, with no consecutive sentence. So how fruitful would be a comparison of a third century manuscript with p52? Since the amount of text in p52 is so small, coming from (I was told) an uninteresting part of the gospel, a comparison with the substantial manuscripts does not tell us if the gospel has been accurately transmitted or whether it lacks corruptions.

Furthermore, and correct me if I am wrong, but is there not a concensus among scholars, or at least the majority view, that chapter 21 is a later addition into John's text? This, I read, is based upon literary analysis. Though all mss contain chapter 21 as part of John, most scholars have concluded it is not. This means that the original or its very first copy did not contain this chapter. Moreover, all the extant mss contain this corruption. How can one assert they don't contain any more? As such, in my opinion, we cannot confidently assert that the text of the John, as it now exist, lacks substantial or theologically major corruptions. That the gospels do contain such corruptions is more than probable since we have no mss evidence from a period when it is said that the texts were casually altered.

Now, putting John aside for a moment and for arguments sake accepting it is authentic, would you not agree that the above would certainly hold true when it comes to the synoptic gospels? The earliest fragment of Mark (p45 third century) is over 150 years removed from the autograph, and the earliest fragments of Matthew and Luke are also over a century removed from their autographs. Second, as Prof Ehrman demonstrates in his "orthodox corruption of scriptures", the text of the synoptic were altered for theological and doctrinally motivated reasons in the second and third centuries. Now if the period before the second century was more creative, and since we have no mss from this crucial time period, why is it not reasonable to conclude that the present texts are more than likely to contain important corruptions? Some may come to light if more material is discovered, but many have become a permanent part of the text since all known mss contain them. Does this not make sense?

dost

Just read the recent posts by Amlodhi and Peter after sending in my last post. Thanks for the info Amlodhi!

Peter Kirby

As you can see, I was supposed to type p66 (not p52), which is Papyrus Bodmer II. This was already mentioned.

best,
Peter Kirby

Peter Kirby

You did not read me closely. I am aware of scholarly opinion on the 21st chapter (as also the prologue, 1:29b, 2:17, 2:22b, 4:2, 4:9b, 4:22, 4:44, 5:28-29, 6:4, 6:51c-58, 6:64b-65, 7:39, 10:1-18, 10:26-29, 11:2, 11:5, 11:51-52, 12:6, 12:24-26, parts of 13:1-20, 12:23-26a, 13:34-35, 14:14-15, 14:24, 16:2-4a, 16:15, 17:3, 17:12b, 17:16, 17:20-21, 18:13-14, 18:24, 18:28, 18:32, 19:26, 19:34-35, and 20:2-10). [See the above reference to "The Gospel of John had a redactor who added material (such as the 21st chapter)." as one of the ideas, not mutually exclusive, about the source criticism of the fourth gospel.]

My statement is that these additions (and relocations), if they are such, were "pre-publication," as it were, i.e., that there was not a copy of John floating around the various churches that didn't contain chapter 21, as this would result in manuscript variation (as we do see with Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11). There was a "most recent common ancestor" upon which all our Greek mss. are based, and this document contained the same sentences in the same order with largely the same content, with variation on the word, phrase, and rarely the verse level (again with the obvious exception of John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery, which was added to the Greek mss. at a very late date). And yes, many of these word/phrase/verse level variations are theologically significant.

Once again, the aim of text criticism is to achieve a reconstruction of what was contained in the "most recent common ancestor" of all the known manuscripts. This is probably close to what was the text of the document when it was released to the wider world and was copied in geographically distant areas, as explained above: "There was no centralized Christian power in the first three centuries that could monitor the transmission of texts. And in the fourth century, when the patristic literature explodes in volume (with plenty of internicene dispute and dispute with "heretics"), and when we get many more complete manuscripts (in the fourth and fifth centuries), there is no trace of any type of cover-up with regard to the essential text of the four Gospels." Theories on what was contained in a synoptic gospel before its widespread transmission--e.g., the idea that there was an "L" source that was expanded into the "Gospel of Luke"--belong to the realm of "source criticism," not text criticism. (To use another example, Josephus says that he wrote Wars originally in Hebrew or Aramaic and translated that into Greek. Text criticism can hope to get at the form of the Greek text when Josephus submitted it to his patron and to various scribes to copy it. The Hebrew/Aramaic version could contain signficant differences.)

The main exception here (within the New Testament) is the Acts of the Apostles, as the "Western text" is quite substantially different from the text of Acts in the Byzantine and Alexandrian text types. This has been the cause of scholarly discussion for a long time. Robin Lane Fox suggests that Luke wrote both versions, while most others think that someone got ahold of Acts in the second or third century and made some changes, which resulted in those changes being evidenced in the manuscript record (because more than one recension was being circulated).

best,
Peter Kirby