andrewcriddle

Professor Ehrman is currently taking part in a possibly relevant discussion.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/textua...m/message/3804

Andrew Criddle

Roger Pearse

[Deleted]

Solitary Man

It's a random number to make a point. You'll have to actually bring up a certain text if you want harder figures.

Yes, and I don't know why you think you're the only one here with that position. You've mischaracterized Roger, since he also holds on to that figure. Most sane people do, but some people ignorant of the field and some people who have literally lost their minds try to make a case for the latter.

Solitary Man

The expectations that there must even be an "original text", or that without one Christianity falls apart, or that we have to have an autograph or else the text is unknowable.

Ben C Smith

Andrew has modestly neglected to link to some of his own work on this topic. Since I am handing out links, I may as well immodestly link to my own page on the pericope de adultera, which references that weblog by Andrew.

Ben.

-Jay-

Where are you pulling the 99% number from?

Solitary Man

This has already been answered.

2-J

It's on topic because it's a response to the position put forward 'wait up a minute, are you really prepared to say we're not fairly certain about what the original Christian texts said? If you do that, then you have to have the same position about other ancient texts. Surely you don't want to do that! So you must acknowledge that the Christian texts we have today are unlikely in the extreme to deviate from the originals substantially'.

That's a completely on topic position, and my response to that was also on topic. The response being that I'm not sure why any non-religious believer would really care too much about discarding the assumption that we can be very sure that any modern copy of an ancient text is true to the original. It just doesn't matter, not to Western culture, not to our cultural life. There is no substantial loss involved in dropping that assumption (which, as has been suggested here, has little to no foundation) unless you're a Christian (yes, OR one of the other categories you mentioned. I am concentrating on the Christian case since that's how the discussion came up, through Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities).

Solitary Man

Strawman much?

-Jay-

Hmmm. We need some precision in definition here.

By originals, are we referring to the version of a work that the author considered the finished work, that served as the exemplar for publication (vice a draft or an early revision)?

(Nice example of LotR, by the way...)

How are we defining the "process of publishing printed books"? We have to be careful here, because we have to distinguish between a number of different categories of changes:

1. Inadvertent human-introduced changes (e.g. simple typos) that don't change the meaning of the text.
2. Inadvertent human-introduced changes (e.g. misplaced punctuation, dropped words, or skipped lines) that do change the meaning of the text.
3. Inadvertent process-introduced changes (e.g. document reflowing) that don't change the meaning of the text.
4. Inadvertent process-introduced changes (e.g. misordered leaves in the binding of a book) that change the meaning of the text.
5. Deliberate human-introduced changes (e.g. corrected spellings) that don't change the meaning of the text.)
6. Deliberate human-introduced changes (e.g. additions or deletions of words or phrases) that do change the meaning of the text.
7. Translational issues where subtleties of the original meaning of the text are altered in the translation.

If we restrict ourselves to texts published before the widespread use of computers, then I would make the contention that very few published texts are 100% the same as the originals, mainly due to the human involvement at each step of the problem. Restricting ourselves to texts published before the invention of the printing press reduces that number further, since you've lost the repeatability of automation.

We've got to be very prudent in what sort of parallels we draw between ancient and modern texts, since the particulars of their transmission are so different.

regards,

NinJay