Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Simple question.

In this theory if the folks who willfully destroyed early uncial vellum manuscripts for doctrinal purposes, to keep away from sight the ancient texts, did not like the Byzantine readings in those manuscripts (e.g. Pericope Adultera) - why did they include those same readings in all the new minuscle copies they were making ?

The minuscles in Greek are uniformly Byzantine (in a general sense and large numbers of manuscripts). And in Syriac are a mostly Byzantine Text. And there is the mixed Latin Vulgate text and copying from the Old Latin line. The focus is mostly on the Greek but the others are significant too.

Shalom,
Steven

andrewcriddle

It may be that as old uncial manuscripts were copied in the new, fashionable, minuscule script that the old fashioned originals were no longer thought worth the bother of carefully preserving.

Andrew criddle

Nazaroo

These are critically important questions, Steven.

But before I address them, I'd like to take a moment to talk about modelling this kind of mechanism.

The first graph I posted probably doesn't accentuate the key problem as well as it needs to be articulated.


The Essential Model

For our purposes at the moment, we can put aside the question of text, and just talk about the number of MSS and the engine which generates them over time. Just as people have 'free will' which is limited by overriding constraints (like gravity preventing them from flying), so in this case, the mechanisms involved impose serious limits to the potential of the process.

Our case of manuscript generation can be modelled along the lines of a simple 'stock market' system. That is, a basic production process which has a small amount of iterative feedback, allowing for a limited 'runaway growth'. This is a classic 'Fibonacci' style series, similar to rabbit reproduction and a 'life cycle' for individuals in the MSS population.



Here in the first graph we can see net manuscript production as a result of the amount of new MSS made, from which is subtracted the # of MSS worn out or destroyed over a given time period. There is obviously the potential for 'negative growth' over short bursts, when MSS production cannot keep up with MSS destruction for one reason or another.

Most of the time however, MSS production will be greater than MSS loss.

Over these shorter periods, MSS production capacity will be relatively constant, limited by the number of production centers and available scribes, as well as the amount of resources available and scheduling of harvests (seasonal growth cycles for papyri) and slaughters (herding and butchering for meat and skins for parchment).

The effect of constant capacity over short time periods will be that fluctuations in production (measured best as a % of total MSS) will gradually be diminished by the ever increasing total numbers of MSS.




Just as in the simple Stock Market model, short term fluctuations and instabilites are absorbed and averaged out by longer term trends, in our case the steady increase in the total number of MSS.





In the long term however, the number of production centers and the quantity of MSS produced will increase alongside the expanding Christian population. This is a simple 'market driven' process, of supply and demand, limited by opportunity and resource management, and periodically affected by outside uncontrolled forces, like drought, short bursts of persecution, discovery of production centers or caches of MSS, and killing of key skilled personnel such as copyists.

However, these short-term instabilities in production and catastrophic bursts of MSS destruction will have a typical 'stock-market' morphology. Recently, physicists have analysed the stock-market in terms of Catastrophy Theory and similar models, in order to spot signs of instability and predict follow-up trends.

For our purposes, the point of interest is the tell-tale 'Saw-Tooth' shape of the market plot. Whenever there is a local short-term burst of instability in the model (which could be either production failure or destruction of MSS in our case), a Saw Tooth fingerprint will appear in the long-term trend plot:



What is important to realise is that this kind of 'catastrophe' has a distinct shape, which is determined by the nature of the feedback mechanisms of the model. It is not arbitrary but predetermined by the 'market' forces. In our even simpler case, variations from this pattern are even more difficult to produce.




The key point is that even allowing for severe short-term catastrophes, the overall trends and final overall curve is still the same. The largest displacement of the standard expected Fibonacci curve will be a short 'blip' in the shape of a sawtooth.

And this is the thing. This is precisely what we DON'T see in the actual data for the extant MSS. Instead we see a footprint, a signature for an entirely different kind of process: a LONG TERM universal process, or else a short-term DIRECTED universal process against MSS of a specifically selected age range:




This can only imply one of two basic situations:

(1) Either MSS were systematically and universally destroyed over a long period, from about 400 A.D. to about 900 A.D., or else,

(2) MSS were selected at the end of this period (about 900 A.D.) and selectively destroyed by age-range as the criterion.

In either case, this can only be a conscious, perpetrated and universal act of vandalism.


As to the choice of text which was destroyed, as Praxeus correctly points out, BOTH MSS with and without the PA were destroyed. There was no selection based upon the content or text-type, but rather age alone.

Riverwind

Certainly some interesting theories, Nazoo...

Here is what I understand about the point you are trying to make.

* You predict a certain amount of manuscript growth over time (how do you arrive at this growth prediction? ie. what are your inputs?)

* You use the number of manuscripts in existence and compare them against your predicted growth chart to posit negative growth, etc., at some period between the 4th-9th centuries A.D. What time in particular?

If I am understanding this correctly, which I may not be, then isn't comparing manuscripts in known existence today against a growth chart over time fallacious? Fallacious because the number of manuscripts we have for a given time period are only representative of what we have discovered and not necessarily representative in any proportional way to the number of manuscripts produced during that time period?

Nazaroo

The key thing to understand is that the copying and multiplying of MSS is a very simple Fibonacci process. There really is no 'choice of models' per se or the curves that will be generated. Remember we are here only modelling the physical copying process, not modelling the morphological or evolutionary changes to the actual text itself.

So the problem is just a simple 'curve-fitting' by stretching or compression along one axis or another to align it with the most reliable and complete parts of the data.

This allows us to extrapolate the existance (and rough sizing) of the missing data.

Thankfully, many things work in our favour to make the modelling reliable and reasonably accurate. For instance, the bulk of the late manuscripts are not hidden or unknown, but readily available and in the care of public museums, governments, religious institutions and private collectors. We don't even need access to the MSS themselves for things like a simple 'head count' for each century or rough dating-range.

Keeping in mind that the dating of MSS (unless they are actually dated internally) are + or - 50 years, using paleaontology. This sets up natural approximate segmentation into 'eras'.

Certain things then, like the approximate numbers of MSS copied in the last five centuries (1000 - 1500 C.E.) of copying are well known, and not in any serious dispute.

But the critical implications are provided by the copy process itself. Each known manuscript must have been copied from a previous one. So we can extrapolate backward rather confidently regarding the basic 'exponential' (Fibonacci) curve that must lie behind the known manuscripts from the late period. We are 'curve-fitting' against the most solid and reliable part of the data.

When other well-known factors (like the invention of 'moveable type' printing in 1500, and the decay and collapse of the Byzantine Empire) are taken into account, and these layers are peeled off of the raw number counts, we have a good idea of the size of the MSS count from the missing centuries prior to the 10th century.

Then when we compare the numbers of surviving MSS from the previous five centuries we can see quite clearly the approximate number of MSS which are actually missing, but are presupposed from the model and the physical copying process.

The actual data are taken from the latest collations and enumerations of NA27 and the recent work in Germany, and carefully documented by Maurice Robinson, century by century (which is as accurately as the MSS can be dated in most cases).

This is a good question, but one that can be easily answered for the later centuries. Not only did the Greek copyists flee the Islamic hordes, but the majority of them came to live and work in the Holy Roman Empire, where many of them were accommodated and continued to ply their trade copying Greek MSS. Thus it is no real secret the number of MSS actually produced during this last 500 years. We are not likely to have missed very many.

Some 5% of these may have ended up in the private hands of a few wealthy European monarchs and Dukes, but even these have been for the most part returned or donated to museums in our era. An even smaller percentage may have been destroyed by accident or neglect, but this won't significantly affect the basic picture of hand-copying of Greek MSS in Europe during the last few centuries before the Reformation.

There really is no more scientific procedure feasible than working backward from the known to the unknown.

The basic facts are rather transparent. Many MSS (of which there must have been thousands made in each century) dating from the 5th to the 9th centuries are simply completely missing.

And this corresponds quite well to what we know of other NON-biblical MSS from this period. They are missing because they were destroyed by church authorities.

The problem is not really in the question of the fact that the MSS are missing. This is rather obvious. The real question is HOW and WHY they were destroyed, and by exactly whom?

And everything points to a church unwilling to release education to the masses, and unwilling and resistant to the process of reform and change that inevitably came with or without their help.

Its the basic story of the Grinch who stole Christmas, but who couldn't stop Christmas from coming, even though he burnt all the MSS.

Nazaroo

Your idea here is almost inconceivable, in the light of the extreme cost and value of used parchment. This material was recycled at every opportunity, because of its extreme expense and difficulty in manufacture. What we know is that copyists would recycle anything they could get their hands on to save labour and resources.

And if any other fate is plausible it would rather be that older worn out copies would be gifted to poorer smaller churches or passed to missionaries working in the field, or given to families of church members. In this case, we should have expected that at least some several hundred uncials from every century would have survived, out of the thousands made.

This again is just sophistry, and goes against everything we know about the thinking and behaviour of early copyists. Jews, Jewish Christians, and even later Gentile Christian copyists treasured and carefully retired worn out MSS, as archeaological discoveries continue to demonstrate.

We continue to find "MSS burial grounds", places like caves, 'tombs', and sealed up walls filled with worn but carefully cherished and protected MSS, too frail to use, but that their owners were too reluctant to just throw away. The discovery of Codex Sinaiticus (and many other MSS) in a room under a collapsed roof is the paradigm of how ancient copyists in scriptoriums dealt with worn out MSS.

What has happened here in the 5th to the 9th century may simply be a part of a massive recycling program in the 9th or 10th century. A kind of 'emergency recycling program'. IT may be that perhaps many miniscule MSS yet to be more carefully examined may turn out to be palimpsests of previous Uncials sacrificed and simultaneously restored to circulation. In this case, we can presume that the text of the new 'Miniscules' is simply essentially the text of the recycled Uncials.

An explanation along these lines would go far in explaining both the ancient readings and the uniformity of text among the later Byzantine (traditional and popular) MSS of the 10th to the 15th centuries.

In this case, while most Uncials may have been sacrificed in a good cause; their texts were actually saved for the most part by re-surfacing and recycling of the best pages, while using their best representatives as master-copies or exemplars.

This may inadvertantly answer the mystery created by Praxeus' key questions, as best as they can be.

Julian

A very reasonable assumption in light of the many extant palimpsests, however, one must wonder what was the impact of Canon 68 in 691 at the Synod of Trullo:

The word 'useless' may be subjective but 'absolutely useless' seems much less so. I don't have the original language wording of this, does someone?

Julian

Nazaroo

Julian's observation here is quite astute. With rules like this in place as a result of previous waves of attack and destruction, its unlikely that scribes between the 6th and 10th centuries would be careless about old copies.

However, re-surfacing and restoring the text of a manuscript, saving both the material and the abstract content, would naturally be interpreted as not a 'destruction' of the MS but rather a kind of 'resurrection' of the MS, preserving and restoring its usefulness.

In this case, it seems that pragmatic administrators of manuscript production would enthusiastically recycle old manuscripts rather than simply shelve them or 'bury' them in storage.

This would be especially true in periods and places where certain materials like parchment might be scarce or prohibitively expensive. After massive catastrophes hit Europe, like the Great Plagues and ravages of wars, it is quite understandable that sacrificing 600 goats or deer for every new Uncial manuscript might appear impossible and insane.

Possibly with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the overrunning of its centers by Muslim hoards, and the consequent destruction of parchment and manuscript manufacturing centers, recycling of materials might be the only viable option for promulgating the Greek text of the NT.

These types of solution might be 'last minute' and ad hoc, and so would be poorly or even completely undocumented by historians as insignificant technical trivialities, or painfully obvious remedies hardly requiring comment or discussion.

RED DAVE

<snip>


RED DAVE

Nazaroo

Aren't you being a bit too conservative here?