555

Ok well then who tainted it, when was it tainted, and how much was it tainted as obiviously there are original copies to compare and contrast to know it has been changed and what has been changed and who tainted it?

mens_sana

I'm not sure how "obvious" these original copies are. Can you link to one or give me a library reference?

RUmike

The Bible (old and new testaments) is not known in any original manuscript either in whole or in part. Every manuscript is a copy of a copy, which was likely a copy of a copy, and so forth.

The short answer: Scribes tainted the text. These were people who were literate enough to transmit the texts. For example, another community would request a copy of a letter, and so a scribe would furnish one and have it sent. The problem in early Christianity was that the scribes were not professionals. Whoever could copy a letter, even poorly, did so. Only in later centuries, when Christianity became the official religion of Rome, was there enough power and money in the church to be able to have trained scribes to do the job.

Most changes were unintentional. As Bart Ehrman reminds us in many of his works, ancient scribes could spell no better than modern people. They frequently made mistakes when copying a manuscript. For example, when a line ended in particular characters, and so did the next line, the scribe's eye would jump back to the second line even though the last line they had copied was the former. Other times, when manuscripts were dictated by one person and several others listened and transcribed, two words that sounded the same but were spelled differently (and obviously had different meanings) were confused (these are called homonyms, e.g. pea and pee).

The other major types of changes were intentional. Scribes wanted the text to align with their personal beliefs. For example, if Joseph was mentioned as Jesus' father, the text would be altered to remove the reference, since it was thought that Jesus had no human father. Other times the scribe thought he knew what the text meant or should have said, and innocently made the proper adjustment.

When looking at the many manuscripts for a particular passage, the job of the text critic is to determine which is the earliest reading, and thus has the best chance of being in the autograph (the original manuscript). Many things must be taken into consideration, such as the earliest manuscripts we have (which frequently have many differences between them), and early quotes by church fathers. More difficult readings are usually preferred to easier readings. The reasoning is that a scribe is more likely to have altered the text to be easier to explain theologically speaking, rather than make it harder to explain. An example is the one I gave above about Jesus' father being Joseph. It is easy to see why that would cause a problem with some scribes (who believed that Joseph was not really Jesus' father, except legally), but it is more difficult to see why a scribe would purposely add that Joseph was Jesus' father if it was not originally there.

I hope this helps answer the question at least a little bit.

Grim Shogun

If that was the case, couldn't you just look at these 'original' documents? And I too would like to see such documents, because I'm interested...

Knife

It is my understanding that we dont have any original documents. All we have are copies of copies of copies

RUmike

That is exactly right.

judge

Here is a portion of an ancient latin mss (fourth cent).

The footnote reads "fool and knave why can't you leave the original reading".

By the fourth century having the correct theology was so important that it seems at times come scribes changed some texts.

Of course not all the alleged changes have such strong evidence.

one allegiance

Well, we don't have to be condescending here...555 simply didn't know that there isn't any original texts. But if there were...we wouldn't be discussing this.

Further, the Bible has text copies CLOSEST to the original text than any other ancient text there is...ever.
http://www.carm.org/questions/Jesus_myth.htm

The table is near the bottom of the page.

Jack the Bodiless

This is, of course, not true.

There are numerous ancient texts where we have the original. In particular: cuneiform on clay tablets, or various texts carved on stone (e.g. Hammurabi's law codes).

BTW, a lot of that stuff on the CARM link is bogus. We certainly don't have 5600 copies of the New Testament from 130 AD as the table implies, for instance: or even ONE complete copy of the NT from the 2nd century. A small fragment of the Gospel of John is not a "copy of the New Testament".

And this was particularly amusing:
It is a well-known historical contradiction that Luke's census (during the governorship of Quirinius) took place a decade AFTER the death of King Herod. Either Matthew or Luke (or both) got Jesus' date of birth completely wrong.

Roger Pearse

This is true, but I think that some people might be misled by this statement. The "original" manuscript or "autograph" (if any -- remember that authors dictated to scribes) of no ancient and medieval literary text written prior to around the 13th century is extant today.

I'm not sure how we know who precisely made non-existant copies of non-existant copies. Some of this --probably most of it -- is speculation.

Scribal errors are a feature of every form of copying (including the preparation of printed texts today). To demand photographic-levels of copying of human beings is to consign all literature to the dustbin. But the problems of errors were just as well known to the ancients as to ourselves -- more so, in fact -- and they did what anyone would have done; they compared copies, they had other people read them and make corrections, and so on. None of this should be considered as a reason to disregard any text -- it is merely part of the nuts and bolts of how literature is transmitted to us.

Think of a piece of glass in a window. Most glass has some flaws, and looking at these is the job of the glass-worker. But most of us want to look through the window and see the world beyond. So it is with ancient texts. Damage has to be very bad for the view to be destroyed. After all, letters form part of words, words sentences and sentences part of trains of thought.

One example of this would be the closing chapters of Tertullian's Ad Nationes book 2, e.g. the last. If you look at the English translation, you see no breaks. Now look at the Latin text. You'll see that large chunks are missing. This is because the work has come down to us in a single 9th century manuscript (the Codex Agobardinus). At some point this got soaked, the margins rotted, and were cut off, so the ends and starts of lines are physically not there. Yet the meaning is clear enough, even if the words don't actually exist.

The damage is of great importance to text critics, of course, in determining which existing manuscripts are merely copies of other existing copies, and so can be ignored. Such methods were used by Emil Kroymann in 1897 to determine that nearly all the Italian manuscripts of the works of Tertullian were simply copies of one manuscript in Florence, for instance.

But for historians etc, it is unusual for such things to matter.

This can happen. But whether such a change is normal, and whether it survives comparison with other manuscripts is more than doubtful. Scribes generally wanted a copy, not to write a new book.

All the best,

Roger Pearse