spin

Crossing language barriers we tend to take our habits with us. We've always had "th" thing for the same sound as theta.

ascii is an unhappy sign of internet necessity. I'm just not set up to use Greek letters on this forum so I use what I can, but Ben C. seems to have no trouble providing Greek letters directly. That way one wouldn't be stuck with such an ugly compromise as ascii. I would have thought Mounce wouldn't have used ascii for the Greek. Without any difficulty published works for the purpose provide the Greek alphabet as part of one's learning curve.


spin

spin

Umm, which Greek texttype did Jerome consult as a reference when he revised previous Latin editions and compiled his version of the gospels for his Latin bible? (Oh yes, when the Syriac was revised for the Peshitta, there was a Greek text as a reference as well.)


spin

spin

And still waiting for Steven Avery to justify his assertions (preferably without the logorhoea) about Hort's text and methodology and about modern translations...

andrewcriddle

It is difficult to tell which Greek texttype Jerome used for the Vulgate because we are not sure of his Latin base. However his text in the Gospels was probably an early Byzantine text with some Alexandrian readings. See Streeter's discussion Jerome

Andrew Criddle

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

When I give a Bible or early church writer reference here, I do not rummage around to what degree of mythicism and dating the person ascribes to, I simply give the reference.

The doctrinal ins and outs of Tertullian are not very relevant, he and Cyprian are two of a small number of prolific Bible quote citers extant from before 250 AD. The e-catena pages have them both referencing John 14:28 quite directly. (This may go against late dating theories popular here, but that is not my concern.)

On this forum .. theories of redaction are a dime a dozen, so you can get any answer to that you want.

For actual solid, factual manuscript information, ask Roger Pearse (perhaps the world's most informed individual on these issues, although he would be very reluctant to say anything like that, and one of the reasons I make an effort to stay on forum since my 'vacation') or do a bit of checking yourself. e.g. I found that the Irenaeus material dates to about the sixth century by reading a Preface to the material, often the more cogent writing on these topics is from over a century ago, thereby off copyright, thereby google-findable, no library trip necessary. Generally the actual manuscript extant is from some centuries later, could be centuries 5 to 10, without any specific evidences of change. A notable exception, Jerome's charge of Rufinus modifying Origen, coming to mind.

Right, however both he and Tertullian are considered to have Greek abilities as well, the question of their use of Greek manuscripts as well as Latin is one that has been discussed. (Knittel made an assertion that that Cyprian was using Greek manuscripts as well as Latin, whether there has been much scholarly followup I am not sure). For the actual English references you start with the Peter Kirby e-catena, which is also available on the Laparola textual pages. Then if you want the Latin you probably have to check Migne, or ask someone to help, as I occasionally do, in the few cases that the checking has real significance.

This is frequently true. Jerome, translating in Rome for the Bishop of Rome, Damasus, apparently to a large extent bypassed the Byzantine/Syrian manuscripts.

The victory of the Reformation Bible was precisely about cleaning up many errors in the Latin text of Jerome that was the Bible of the rcc. It is a fascinating study to read on one side men like Turretin and Whitaker and on the other the rcc vulgate folks like Bellarmine. The Reformation Bible is the sensible historical reconstruction of the original text by a very accurate and strong understanding of the Bible text, with the Greek and Latin manuscripts lines and the early church references and internal considerations being the central foci of analysis.

Thus you will find about half, even more, of the alexandrian dropped verses (by # of variants) also missing in the Vulgate, although not the two large sections.

(Note that the Vulgate is a far superior text to the modern version counter-reformation text, today the W-H text and its later tweaks is most used by the rcc, rather than the Vulgate.)

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Not simply a "Byzantine texttype". This can be seen by the fact that non-Byzantine readings are quite common in the Vulgate.

While he does have a lot of textual bias, you can generally get sound textual factual information from the Michael Marlowe site. For this he quotes the ISBE (1915) however they bypass the question.

Daniel Wallace wrote that the Vulgate has :

"a text-form closer to the critical text than to the majority text"
(The Majority Text Theory ... - Bibliotheca Sacra, cxlvi (1989), pp. 270-90.)
On the net with the title "Some Second Thoughts on the Majority Text"

Although Daniel Wallace is simply wrong this does show the mixed nature of the text.

Stephen Carlson -
"the Vulgate text looks like a mixture of a Western text and a text that resembles Codex Alexandrinus (A) - the Vulgate is a Western-early Byzantine mixture" (TextualCriticism Forum Aug 29, 2006)

Stephen Carlson is far more accurate than Daniel Wallace on this question (does Wallace know his paper is wrong? .. dunno). And along the same lines Wieland Willker also provided some number variant analysis that showed that Daniel Wallace was wrong, and concluded :

"The Vulgate lies (very roughly) about half way between the Western (Old Latin) and the Majority text. A particular Alexandrian influence is not visible." - Wieland Willker - (TextualCriticism Forum Aug 31.2006)

Fascinating.. first Daniel Buck made an interesting overall comment (emphasis added):

"It is a misnomer to call the mss Jerome used, which by his own description were "the earliest ones," by any of the text-type names we use now. The ink was barely dry on the "oldest and best" manuscripts behind the modern received text when Jerome began compiling what were "the oldest and best" of his day. (TC-forum Aug 31,2006)

Jerome referred to those Greek mss as the "fountainhead" in the Preface to the Gospels. (Letter of Jerome to Pope Damasus). What Daniel Buck is nicely saying is that Jerome is far more relevant to textual analysis than Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, for the 'earliest manuscripts'. And this is in fact the Reformation Bible view, that the Old Latin and Latin Vulgate Bibles are powerful auxiliary early Bible text evidences -- to be coalesced with the (Byzantine) Majority Greek lines which are the base, the fountainhead. (As written in the letter of Erasmus to Servatius relatatd by Dorpius). And this means that the couple of Alexandrian manuscripts have little or no historical relevance, as we note that even to Jerome their influence was "not visible" in 383 AD !

The rest of the Daniel Buck post is also very helpful, going into this more, please put your thinking caps on. (emphasis added).

===================================

"The Vulgate lies (very roughly) about half way between the Western (Old Latin) and the Majority text. A particular Alexandrian influence is not visible." (Stephen Carlson - above)

Daniel Buck -
This speaks very loudly to the effect that the Alexandrian text-type had not yet emerged at the time Jerome's "oldest and best" manuscripts were copied.

But for someone who assumes the original text to be wholly represented within the Alexandrian text-type, the above statement is counter-intuitive.

But consider this: The "oldest and best" mss of our day were available to Jerome, but they had no influence on his revision. INSTEAD he used what we would call a Byzantine text to correct the Western text of the Old Latin–and he called it "the earliest."

Try to consider the implications.

======================================

Daniel Buck's analysis is excellent, elegant in both simplicity and strength. To say Jerome used a Byzantine text may be an overstatement, with so many non-Byzantine readings in the resulting text and with Jerome saying he bypassed Lucian's texts, (also Hesychius) which were likely the most "Byzantine" of the day.

However if we want to allow this idea that the Vulgate shows either strong Byzantine influence (definitely) or arguably a direct Byzantine text in ancient Greek manuscripts (the latter thereby making spin's statement operative), then this is virtually proof positive that the alexandrian manuscripts are irrelevant to textual analysis.

Even if those couple of alexandrian manuscripts were not abjectly corrupt on a scribal level (which they are, as conclusively demonstrated by the Dean) they would be textually irrelevant. Hort's theory of alexandrian excellence and building from the alexandrian mss a supposed "neutral text" would again be disproved in yet another fell swoop. As Dean Burgon also demolished with the excellent pages on the Syriac Peshitta and the overall discussion of the manuscripts, augmented by the later Herman Hoskier study.

=====================================

Shalom,
Steven Avery

avi

Thank you Steven. I did seek to locate an answer to my own question, i.e. what is the date of the earliest extant Greek manuscript supporting the King James Version of John 14:28?
I am unfamiliar with the term e-catena. I will search to locate this resource.

I have not yet succeeded in finding an answer to the aforementioned question regarding the earliest date of any Greek manuscript (not Latin) supporting the King James Version, and would look forward to anyone offering a suggestion.

I am keen to learn more about the rationale Jerome had for translating into Latin, what appears to be, from this single line of text, a Greek text demonstrating compatibility with Westcott/Hort, rather than the translation found in the King James Version.

I looked at the information I could gather on the old papyrus sheets, and it seems that, unfortunately, John 14:28 is missing from P45, however, John 10:30 offers the same contradiction: i.e. The King James Version uses "My father", even though all other versions, including all of the Greek texts, and Jerome's Latin Vulgate, present (by implication, either the, or our) "father".

Does anyone on the forum have a personal connection with the library in Geneva, to learn whether John 10:30 from P45 accords with all of the other Greek texts, below, or alternatively, with the King James recipe--supporting the theory proposed by some in this thread, that "my" had been deleted in copying the original text, a result, most typically, of either carelessness or fatigue?

John 10:30:

I and the father are one. (except King James Version: I and my father are one.)

Westcott/Hort:
εγω και ο πατηρ εν εσμεν

Stephanus 1550 Textus Receptus
εγω και ο πατηρ εν εσμεν

Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus, & Byzantine majority, & Alexandrian:
egw kai o pathr en esmen

Latin Vulgate
ego et Pater unum sumus

None of these oldest texts employ "my" father. It is apparent to me, at least, (a novice for sure,) that "my" is a later addition, not based upon the original version.

We need then, if that conclusion is warranted, to have someone with a far more learned disposition to explain the historical and theological arguments associated with insertion of "my". I disbelieve the hypothesis that "my" was redacted, either through carelessness, scribal fatigue, or princely fickleness. I think that it was inserted, deliberately, into John 14:28, and John 10:30. What remains unclear, is why "my" was inserted, where none had been there, before? A clue may be found upon discovering the date of the oldest manscript containing "my", if the date of the manuscript is reliable...

Without the possessive "my" preceding father, it seems to me that "our" is implicit. To my simple minded notion, that would suggest that Jesus had been viewed NOT as a god, but a man, just like all of us....So, I envision an insertion of "my", where none existed, not because the "language evolved", or because of "scribal fatigue", but because the salesmen needed a better widget to sell.

spin

In short, you actually agree with me about Jerome. Given that Jerome's task was to work with the Old Latin versions (hence the visible relation with the "western"and doing a new translation from the Greek was not in his brief) and as a standard he used the Greek of something like A, ie he tended -- I didn't say "slavishly followed", but tended -- "to follow the Byzantine texttype". Thank you.


spin

spin

Roger Pearse's copy of the Latin text of Adv. Praxeas 9.2 plainly says:

pater enim tota substantia est, filius vero, derivatio
totius et portio, sicut ipse profitetur, Quia pater maior me est:

and again 14:9-10:

Facies mea est ille homo, et, Faciem mihi praestat?
Pater, inquit, maior me est: ergo facies erit filii pater.

Look kids, no meus! The old English translation of Tertullian has no qualms about inserting the "my" into Adv. Praxeas, obviously because that's the erroneous way the translator found the citations in the KJV.

While Tertullian is a witness for the form found in the earliest manuscripts, Steven Avery and his ilk are too busy using the translation which corrupts Tertullian's original text, a translation more influenced by the KJV to worry about what Tertullian actually wrote.

This is a nice example of circular reasoning. The KJV "my father" reading is right because the translation of Tertullian has "my father" because the KJV version has "my father".

In fact the translator of Tertullian does the same thing elsewhere in the same text. Ch.20.1, 22.10, 24.4, 25.1, citing Jn 10:30, has

"I and my Father are one;"

but the original:

"Ego et pater unum sumus"

Yep, another non-existent "my". And again, 22.8, citing Jn 8:28,

opera quae ego facio in nomine patris,
ipsa de me testimonium dicunt.

Oops, KJV unaccountably has another "my", but Tertullian obviously doesn't.

Tertullian here clearly and frequently testifies against the KJV and its thousands of late Greek supporting manuscripts in favor of the earliest manuscripts.

(Perhaps, Steven Avery will stop his biased cherry-picked usage of writers such as Tertullian, in favor of following a particular manuscript tradition rather than an individual reading, but that's like asking the snake not to bite the bird he's trying to get to carry him off the island.)

Worse still we see the danger of relying on late efforts, because the translator has followed them and corrupted the text of Tertullian.

Trying to rely on lots of late manuscripts as the KJV folks do is a formula for error.


spin

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

A little correction, and a bit more on Erasmus.

This usage was actually Dorpius (pro-Latin, questioning the Erasmus Greek NT enterprise) referencing Augustine wanting the Latin to be from the Greek fountainhead.

The Erasmus response to Dorpius is very helpful in understanding the development of the Reformation Bible.

"You are unwilling that I should alter anything, except when the Greek text expresses the sense of the Vulgate more clearly, and you deny that in the Vulgate edition there are any mistakes. And you think it wrong that what has been approved by the sanction of so many ages and so many synods should be unsettled by any means .... How is it that Jerome, Augustin, and Ambrose all cite a text which differs from the Vulgate ? How is it that Jerome finds fault with and corrects many readings which we find in the Vulgate ? What can you make of all this concurrent evidence—when the Greek versions differ from the Vulgate, when Jerome cites the text according to the Greek version, when the oldest Latin versions do the same, when this reading suits the sense much better than that of the Vulgate—will you, treating all this with contempt, follow a version perhaps corrupted by some copyist! .... In doing so you follow in the steps of those vulgar divines who are accustomed to attribute ecclesiastical authority to whatever in any way creeps into general use ... I had rather be a common mechanic than the best of their number."

Jerome talked of the Greek as the fountainhead (fontis unda purissimi) in an additional reference other than that of the Gospel Prologue above.

"I wanted to restore the defectiveness of the Latin versions which is proved by the diversity of all the books according to the Greek original from which they do not deny that they are translated. And if the water of the purest font does not please them, let them drink the muddy streams" - letter to Marcella

Shalom,
Steven Avery