aChristian

A more accurate game description that parallels the manuscripts would be if one person whispers the same thing to 500 people and they all start their own chains. In our game we have samples from the different chains. We have the message from 20th person told from chain 1, the 100th person told from chain 2, the 500th person told from chain 3, the 400th person told from chain 4, ... . We find that 95% of the message is identical from everyone from all the different chains and the difference is from the eighth person from chain 10 and the 12th person from chain 100 and they disagree wildly with each other. The best way to get the original message is to get what was consistently passed down through 500 different chains 90% of the time rather than go with a couple of early messages that disagree with each other and have other other internal evidences of being unreliable reporters.

Your story of the traveling scribes doesn't have any history behind it. In addition, and this is the main problem with your theory, they have compared manuscripts from the same monasteries and were unable to find any tradition, or manuscript family. They were all, with a very few exceptions, lone copies, not taken from one another.
The scribe can't carry a tradition with him because there were no traditions that we have evidence of.

Because when they try to group them into 'traditions', their grouping falls apart. It just doesn't work because they differ to much to be put into logical groups. The manuscripts are almost all orphans.

As I said, the traditions are figments in the minds of textual critics. They can't logically group them because they all differ too much individually to be divided into groups. The only 'group' you can make is the majority text group. Everything conforms to this group with the exception of a few outsiders that contradict each other. Those within the group have enough small individual differences that you cannot group them into logical subgroups.

Problem is, as I said above, even manuscripts from the same monasteries can't be grouped into their own traditions.

No we see European survivor manuscripts disagreeing with each other enough to show they are not direct copies, but agreeing with each other in >90% of their contents which shows they all got it from the same original whisperer.


However all those manuscripts derive from an ancient original copy.

aChristian

Hi Avi,
I am a guy by the way.
I am not committed to the KJV, just to the majority of manuscripts. Where the KJV departs from the majority, I'll go with the majority. To clear up the state of the majority I'll quote Pickering.

"There is just one stream, with a number of small eddies along the edges.[39] When I say the Majority Text dominates the stream, I mean it is represented in about 95% of the MSS.[40]

Actually, such a statement is not altogether satisfactory because it does not allow for the mixture or shifting affinities encountered within individual MSS. A better, though more cumbersome, way to describe the situation would be something like this: 100% of the MSS agree as to, say, 50% of the Text; 99% agree as to another 40%; over 95% agree as to another 4%; over 90% agree as to another 2%; over 80% agree as to another 2%; only for 2% or so of the Text do less than 80% of the MSS agree, and most of those cases occur in Revelation.[41] And the membership of the dissenting group varies from reading to reading. (I will of course be reminded that witnesses are to be weighed, not counted; I will come to that presently, so please bear with me.) Still, with the above reservation, one may reasonably speak of up to 95% of the extant MSS belonging to the Majority text-type"

So Avi,
100% of the manuscripts agree to 50% of the text,
99% of the manuscripts agree to 90% of the text,
95% of the manuscripts agree to 94% of the text,
90% of the manuscripts agree to 96% of the text, and
80% of the manuscripts agree to 98% of the text.
We are able to determine what the original text was. In the case of John 14:28, since it is not called out in Green's appendix or the NKJV footnotes, it is doubtful that the KJV disagrees with the majority text in this verse. As Steven Avery helpfully looked it up, it is supported by the Byz text and so is probably in 90-95% of the manuscripts. That is good evidence that the mou was there when John wrote it.

The problem with your bird example is that the manuscripts do not show genealogical descent like the birds. They are all orphans. Read my reply to spin. Also, you can read Pickering's book online if you want at http://www.revisedstandard.net/text/WNP/

I hope you have a nice day today.

aChristian

Hi spin,
You misunderstand my position on the KJV. Please read my post #162 for an answer to your question. I support the majority text, not the KJV. The KJV just happens to be much closer to the majority text than all the new translations, except for of course the NKJV which points out where the majority text disagrees with the KJV.

spin

There are differences between the process of speaking and writing. You have physical support so my analogy falls down there and yours merely verges on histrionic. You basically missed the logic of the fact that humans make errors through communication and errors are to be expected, so trying to boggle people with fictitious percentages will not hide the errors that exist.

There are obviously text families that represent scribal traditional reproduction. Why do people talk of Caesarean texts or Alexandrian or Western or Byzantine texts??

What is your evidence for this last claim??

How do you explain the fact that most ancient texts don't have the Marcan ending? Why is it that most Byzantine texts don't have Acts 8:37?

This doesn't deal with the fact that you can show groups of traits that are shared by certain manuscripts and other groups of traits shared by other manuscripts. You seem to discount most of the work done in the last century.

Why are there a couple of thousand differences between the majority text group and the TR?

This seems to be simply not looking at the data.

With the sort of requirements you seem to be working with the texts which reflect the majority text from before, say, the twelfth century are all orphans as well.

This notion of "orphan" is ultimately an abnegation of responsibility to deal with the manuscript in itself.

You forget that the manuscripts that have survived are not all that were made in antiquity. And you are still attempting to overwork the whisper analogy in an obviously false manner.

Which doesn't help you say anything substantial. You simply try to sidestep the means of showing you that your claims about big numbers are in themselves meaningless and you will not justify the use of merely late texts against the earliest ones available, those that have a lower probability of scribal error having passed through fewer scribal hands.

Would you like to propose that manuscripts that are more recent in the copying chain less probably contain scribal errors?


spin

spin

Thanks for the clarification.


spin

avi

Here are ten different, currently extant, sequences of ten groups of triplet ascii characters. All of the sequences contain errors compared with the original group of sequences, (the non-extant "template" below,) a result of carelessnes, or fatigue, or malintention in copying the sequences, from the template.

Which sequence is closest to the original ("template", below)? I would argue that it is Sequence One. According to Professor Pickering, however, it is Sequence Two, since 90% of the extant sequences show a 90% correlation of three character pattern match with the template.


............................................Three Digit Match Quantity

Template Sequence:...................Versus Template..Versus "Two"

abc444ppp678bny111xxx945wsx381......... 10/10...........2/10

Sequence One:

abc123ghi678bny111xxx945wvx282..........6/10...........2/10

Sequence Two:

nnn789uuu222bny444yyy945pxz977..........2/10...........10/10

Sequence Three:

nnn789uqw222bny444yyy945pxz977..........2/10...........9/10

Sequence Four:

nut789uuu222bny444yyy945pxz977..........2/10...........9/10

Sequence Five:

nut789uik222bny444yyy945pxz977..........2/10...........8/10

Sequences Six, Eight, Nine, and Ten:

nnn789uuu333bny444yyy945pxz977..........2/10...........9/10

Sequence Seven:

nnn789uuu222bny444yyy945pxz977..........2/10...........10/10

If I then inform you and Professor Pickering that the (forever lost) original template was designed in the calendar year 202CE, and Sequence One copied from it, or from a copy of it, in 302CE, and that Sequences Two-Ten were copied from copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies made seven hundred years later in 1002CE, which Sequence are you going to adhere to as most likely representing, most faithfully, the original Template, given that you have 90% confidence in the probability of error IN ALL EXTANT sequences, errors compounded, and expanded, with each passing century of copying?

Let us suppose that we possess an additional 7,985 total sequences, each of ten triplets, all created in the years 1100 to 1800CE, and further, let us suppose that these additional ~8,000 sequences correspond at 90% with the triplets shown in Sequence Two, and, on the other hand, let us suppose the existence of only three additional Sequences of ten triplets, dating from the years 400-500 CE, each of which corresponds to only 70% of the pattern of triplets from Sequence One.

Then, the question for you and Professor Pickering, and the point of this exercise, is this:

Which group, the one with 8,000 sequences, or the one with four sequences, is most likely to yield an accurate reconstruction of the original template? I hope it will be clear to you, that 8,000 essentially incorrect sequences does not yield a more precise image of the original template than a mere handful of copies adhering more closely to the original sequence. The fact that we possesses a larger quantity of false information, will not assist us in attempting to reconstruct the original template.

But, how do we know for sure, which sequences are accurate, and which inaccurate, if we do not have the original template? To me, the only logical recourse is to use the oldest extant copies, assuming, perhaps in error, that the oldest are more likely to retain the most elements of fidelity to the original. For sure, it is still just guesswork. But, the point of this example, is that merely having a high degree of correlation among a very large sample, in no way ensures accuracy.

Thanks for sharing your reference to Professor Pickering...
regards,
avi

aChristian

I understand there are differences between spoken and written. I was just making the game analogy closer to how I understand the manuscript history.
Chapter 4 from Pickering is has more examples and quotes, but here is a sample.
"After careful study of P46, Zuntz makes certain observations and concludes:

One would like to think that observations like these must put an end to time-honoured doctrines such as that the text of B is the 'Neutral' text or that the 'Western' text is 'the' text of the second century. If the factors of each of these equations are meant to be anything but synonyms, they are wrong; if they are synonyms, they mean nothing.[32]

Klijn doubts "whether any grouping of manuscripts gives satisfactory results,"[33] and goes on to say:

It is still customary to divide manuscripts into the four well-known families: the Alexandrian, the Caesarean, the Western and the Byzantine.

This classical division can no longer be maintained. . . .

If any progress is to be expected in textual criticism we have to get rid of the division into local texts. New manuscripts must not be allotted to a geographically limited area but to their place in the history of the text.[34]

After a long discussion of the "Caesarean" text, Metzger says by way of summary that "it must be acknowledged that at present the Caesarean text is disintegrating."[35] Two pages later, referring to the impact of P45, he asks, "Was there a fundamental flaw in the previous investigation which tolerated so erroneous a grouping?" Evidently there was. Could it be the mentality that insists upon thinking in terms of text-types and recensions as recognized and recognizable entities?[36] Those few men who have done extensive collations of manuscripts, or paid attention to those done by others, as a rule have not accepted such erroneous groupings.[37]"



See the quote above. Also, here's another quote,
"The work of Lake referred to by Colwell was a collation of Mark, chapter eleven, in all the MSS of Mt. Sinai, Patmos, and the Patriarchal Library and collection of St. Saba at Jerusalem. Lake, with R. P. Blake and Silva New, found that the "Byzantine" text was not homogeneous, that there was an absence of close relationship between MSS, but that there was less variation "within the family" than would be found in a similar treatment of "Neutral" or "Caesarean" texts. In their own words:

This collation covers three of the great ancient collections of MSS; and these are not modern conglomerations, brought together from all directions. Many of the MSS, now at Sinai, Patmos, and Jerusalem, must be copies written in the scriptoria of these monasteries. We expected to find that a collation covering all the MSS in each library would show many cases of direct copying. But there are practically no such cases. . . . Moreover, the amount of direct genealogy which has been detected in extant codices is almost negligible. Nor are many known MSS sister codices. The Ferrar group and family 1 are the only reported cases of the repeated copying of a single archetype, and even for the Ferrar group there were probably two archetypes rather than one. . . .

There are cognate groups—families of distant cousins—but the manuscripts which we have are almost all orphan children without brothers or sisters.

Taking this fact into consideration along with the negative result of our collation of MSS at Sinai, Patmos, and Jerusalem, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the scribes usually destroyed their exemplars when they had copied the sacred books.[48]"


Quoting an appendix in Pickering,
"The passage in question is contained in every extant Greek manuscript (about 1800) except three: codices B (Vaticanus) and À (Sinaiticus) and the twelfth century minuscule 304. It is also contained in all extant lectionaries (compendia of the established Scripture lessons linked to the ecclesiastical calendar)."
It doesn't appear in these three texts because they are bad texts. They are probably still in existence because everyone thought they were trash and didn't bother to use them and wear them out.

Because it was inserted later by someone, otherwise the > 90% (99%?)majority would have it.

see my quotes above and,
"Kurt Aland[51] sums it up:

P66 confirmed the observations already made in connection with the Chester Beatty papyri. With P75 new ground has been opened to us. Earlier, we all shared the opinion, in agreement with our professors and in accord with NT scholarship, before and since Westcott and Hort, that, in various places, during the fourth century, recensions of the NT text had been made, from which the main text-types then developed. . . . We spoke of recensions and text-types, and if this was not enough, we referred to pre-Caesarean and other text-types, to mixed texts, and so on.

I, too, have spoken of mixed texts, in connection with the form of the NT text in the second and third centuries, but I have always done so with a guilty conscience. For, according to the rules of linguistic philology it is impossible to speak of mixed texts before recensions have been made (they only can follow them), whereas, the NT manuscripts of the second and third centuries which have a "mixed text" clearly existed before recensions were made. . . . The simple fact that all these papyri, with their various distinctive characteristics, did exist side by side, in the same ecclesiastical province, that is, in Egypt, where they were found, is the best argument against the existence of any text-types, including the Alexandrian and the Antiochian. We still live in the world of Westcott and Hort with our conception of different recensions and text-types, although this conception has lost its raison d'être, or, it needs at least to be newly and convincingly demonstrated. For, the increase of the documentary evidence and the entirely new areas of research which were opened to us on the discovery of the papyri, mean the end of Westcott and Hort's conception.[52]"



Scribes didn't copy perfectly, but as I said before,
100% of the manuscripts agree to 50% of the text,
99% of the manuscripts agree to 90% of the text,
95% of the manuscripts agree to 94% of the text,
90% of the manuscripts agree to 96% of the text, and
80% of the manuscripts agree to 98% of the text.
So though there are differences, with this kind of agreement you should have very little doubt as to the true text 98% of the time.


As the quotes above show (and there is more in Pickering's book) orphans just describes the state of the manuscripts. They can't be grouped into text types, except for majority text with a few oddballs here and there.

The manuscripts that survive are a reflection of those that were made in antiquity. If 30% could be grouped together as obvious similar copies of some original (because they consistently had many of the same errors) and they all came from Egypt, another 40% were obvious copies of some other original and all came from Turkey, and the remaining 30% all matched and all came from Italy, then you could logically imply that there were three major variants from the originals that started in their respective areas. However, the manuscript cannot be grouped that way. They show every indication of being orphans scattered around the ancient world, 99% of them agreeing in 90% of the text. The logical implication is that the originals were copied and carried all over the world to different churches early on and that copies from these were made in different parts of the world for centuries. In each part of the world, small mistakes would be made that would not usually match the mistakes made in other parts of the world. Thus everyone all over the world would stay close to the original text with individual differences leaving orphans. We find orphans.

No. However the oldest copies we have are junk. The majority agreement shows that they are better copies of the originals that were passed down to them than the few old extant copies that disagree with everyone else and each other.
If you want more info, read Pickering's book.

aChristian

In the example you gave, one type was correct and no one else copied it. How do you explain that? How did everyone else all over the world copy a text that disagreed with the one old extant one? In addition, the few old copies we have are sloppily done, I think one is a palimpsest, and they disagree with each other. Also, we have writings from church fathers who lived before the old manuscripts and they often quote the scripture in agreement with the majority text.

avi

I think if you reexamine the data provided in the hypothetical example, post from 04 September 2009, you will see a "template", representing the ink drying on John's document, and ten copies of this template, made at various times thoroughout history.

Note that "Sequence 1", created, hypothetically, within the first century, maintains most of "Template", altering only four of the ten triplets. Now, why were these four triplets altered? That, we don't know.

We attribute the change to scribal error, or, to fatigue, or to malevolence. But, we really don't know, why the copies are different from the original. What we do know is that NO TWO copies among the ~800 extant copies of the letters of Paul are identical. It seems that EVERY time a copy of the text was made, changes accompanied the new edition.

So, to answer your question, I think there is a misunderstanding of what my silly example of ten triplets reproduced in ten different sequences was supposed to illustrate. I intended to show, schematically, what has been written about those 800 Greek manuscripts in which Paul's letters are found, the vast majority of which were written after the tenth century, namely, the fact that EACH copy begets NEW errors, until the advent of the printing press. So, in brief, then, the explanation for why the "First Sequence" was not duplicated, i.e. your question, is that it was duplicated, but, it was duplicated erroneously, thus, successive sequences do not display the same pattern.

And, here, aChristian, we need not one iota of faith, despite having no citations to furnish. One can simply look to the hundreds of various Christian sects, each of which has disagreement with all the other sects, based not solely on personality dislikes, nor on doctrinal misinterpretation, but on genuine, physical differences in the text from which the doctrine is derived. That was really the point of my insistence on asking about John 10:30 and John 14:28, with extra "mou" inserted in both passages in SOME, but not all, ancient Greek manuscripts. I don't know why the revised KJV did not copy Sinaiticus. I cannot explain it. It is a complete mystery to me.

yes, well, here is a little exercise. Please try to copy those ten sequences in the hypothetical illustration from a couple of days ago. Now imagine doing that 12 hours per day.... How do we know that the "old copies" are "sloppily done", but the "new copies" are both (a) not "sloppily done", and (b) conformant to the original text, whatever that may be?
I think you rely upon "faith" to guide your analysis. I agree with you, however, that the extant "old copies", (i.e. Sinaiticus,) demonstrate plenty of errors too....

Well, this is a bit touchy, as a subject, because some of us on the forum are paranoid, and doubt even the validity of some of those old manuscripts authored by the "preNicean fathers". But, I am persuaded, that, if Eusebius did not write it himself, i.e. if there really had been a genuine Tertullian, the Latin translation which he authored, conforms to the Greek version of Sinaiticus, or a similar version extant in those days, i.e. ostensibly mid third century. So, I would signal, contrary to your writing above, that spin has translated, at least to my own satisfaction, the citations from Tertullian, which confirm, at least to me, Tertullian's reading of the text of Sinaiticus, or its equivalent in the mid third century CE, and thus, Tertullian's words have repudiated, as far as I am concerned, the text of the "majority".

aChristian

The problem is that your hypothetical example is contradicted by the manuscript evidence. The hypothesis fails. See the rest of my comments below.
As I have pointed out before by Pickering's estimate, in 50% of the text, all 5000+ extant copies are identical (I assume this excludes unimportant differences like spelling errors on the same word, but I am not sure.). Thus when you say no two copies are identical, this is not true for 50% of the NT.
When you go to the next level his estimate is that in 90% of the text, 99% of the manuscripts are identical.

Here is where the evidence contradicts your theory. What you are calling the 'First Sequence', Sinaiticus, was not duplicated. There are no copies of it, just the one manuscript, Sinaiticus, that no one else copied.

It stands alone against the 5000+ manuscripts that agree with each other 90% of the time in 99% of the text.

If Sinaiticus was close to the original, why didn't anyone else anywhere pass down a similar copy.

It is much more logical to assume that the 5000+ manuscripts that agree with each other (and with most of the early church fathers' quotes) agree with each other because they all copied from different copies of the original that were much more accurate than Sinaiticus.

I can explain it easily. The vast majority of the manuscripts have the mou in them and Sinaiticus had nothing to recommend the accuracy of its reading. The SOME Greek manuscripts you mentioned is the overwhelming majority of all Greek manuscripts.
What I meant by sloppily done is that some of the oldest copies have 'nonsense Greek', Greek sentences that make no sense and are obviously mistakes.

Sinaiticus is a palimpsest. It was considered of so little value that they erased it in order to write some devotional material on it rather than have to buy fresh material to write it the devotional material on.

As far as faith, I think you are confusing the meaning of faith with blind faith. I think the evidence just supports my position. You can have faith in your position, but I think the evidence is lacking and you are holding your position in blind faith.
If you read Pickering you will see that the early Greek fathers witness to the majority text. If I have time later I will look into the Tertullian witness, but I am more convinced by the multitude of Greek fathers and most of all by Greek manuscripts than by translations into Latin..