Ben C Smith

I prefer Poul Anderson to Tolkien myself, and he provides another good modern example of authorial responsibility for textual variants.

Anderson first published The Broken Sword in 1954, but he extensively revised it for the 1971 edition. An assessment of the revisions is available online.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

I appreciate your kind words.

I think much of the feeling about the likely unreliability of ancient sources is perfectly sincere, albeit based on inadequate information. But then only manuscript groupies like me are going to be interested in this sort of minutiae anyway, so we can't very well complain when people just fall into a natural error.

It is certainly the case that transmission of information has problems; today, yesterday, and still more in the case of a vanished society which we can only know by what little has survived. But to discard that little...? This we must not do, I think.

We live in a society where the media agenda has for a long time suggested that whatever is old is likely to be wrong, and whatever is new and the latest is likely to be the best; where classical learning is fading. Few today will study Latin at school. The generation that grew up with the classics is gone. For that generation, the idea that books could not be transmitted, that Cicero was merely a dim image at the far end of a grimy medieval telescope, was absurd, because they knew him from their own reading.

This was not necessarily positive, of course. In Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim the headmaster 'is seen "taking, or rather hauling, the Junior Sixth through not nearly enough of In Marcum Antonium II," generating this address to Cicero's shade: "I'll patres conscripti you. I'll give you ut ita dicam. And what makes you so proud of esse videatur, eh? Shakespeare had your number all right." For a man so long and thoroughly dead it was remarkable how much boredom, and also how precise an image of nasty silliness, Cicero could generate. "Antony was worth twenty of you, you bastard,"' grumbled one of the students.

It would be idle for me to complain that a generation that had no opportunity to suffer in this manner does not take the classical world as a given. But that is a loss, to all of us so deprived.

Let us treasure the classical heritage. Not to repeat its follies and its vices. Every generation can manage that for itself. But to love it is a liberal education. To take a historical example of what to do, and what not to; if we must attempt to throw down the Austrian emperor, as they attempted to do in the 1850's, let us do so with the cleanly means of gunpowder and steel. Let us even endure the Hapsburgs, rather than poison the well of learning with captious and invented doubts as to whether we really can know much of Constantine's policies and person.

IMHO, of course.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

2-J

With respect, you're missing the only essential point.

It doesn't matter if other ancient texts are altered. I love Philosophy and I don't give two hoots if the Plato I'm reading is the same one as Plato wrote in ancient Greece. I enjoy the Plato we have and it stands up on its own two feet regardless of what was written years ago.

For Christians, even alterations in a word or two of the ancient texts could be crucially important for their beliefs.

Solitary Man

Why does that matter? You keep bringing this up like it means something. It doesn't.

2-J

It DOES mean something.

The 'defence' being offered to 'Christian texts might be corrupt for all we know' is 'so might other ancient literature, you wouldn't want to throw out assuming that was essentially well transmitted, would you?'.

But the situations aren't on all fours with one another.

It really doesn't matter if Plato, Cicero (yes, even his historical writings) etc have not come down to us exactly.

Depending on the alterations, it does matter to the Christian believer if the NT texts have been corrupted.

Solitary Man

You keep saying "Christian believer" like they ruled the world. Who cares? Why are you ignoring Roman paganists, Greek paganists, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims? How are you able to separate Christian texts from Cicero or Plato? How is any of it relevant to what we can know about ancient texts? I see a lot of assertion, but nothing of substance to back up any of your claims, and still nothing tying it in to topic.

thedistillers

What expectations? What are you talking about?

thedistillers

Why 1%? Where does that number come from? Why not 5%? Why not 10%? What methodology do you use to arrive at that number, 1%?

Isn't it what I keep saying? :huh: Ehrman position is the former, not the latter.

andrewcriddle

The Problem with the Didymus citation is that although there is obviously a close relation to the familiar story there are also substantial differences. Also Didymus does not make clear which Gospel contained the story. (It was not necessarily a canonical one.) IMO it is dubious to use Didymus as evidence for the presence of the familiar story in canonical John.


(Although the passage is largely ignored by Greek writers until c 1100 CE, it was certainly found in most Greek manuscripts of John written after say 700 CE. The absence of reference to the passage in late 1st millenium Greek commentators probably has more to do with the silence of the earlier commentators they were using as sources, than its absence in their own texts.)

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

I think The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture must be Ehrman's own coice of title. At least the text contains an interesting discussion of the popular meaning of corruption versus the technical meaning that implicitly refers back to the title.

Andrew Criddle