noah

Hi folks,


I've been doing a little reading and dicscussion regarding the original manuscripts of the bible, some of it with Christians. As far as I can tell, there are a number of questions that Christians need to answer (fully) if they hope to establish the credibility of the existing translations, past and present, of the bible as we have it today.

1) If you don’t have a document, an original document, and you have little or no information about that document, nor do you have any documents related directly to it from the period in which it was written, it seems clear to me that any speculation as to its content through use and analysis of surviving translations of that document are somewhat futile. This applies to Textual Criticism which attempts to establish a "source " document through use of existing translations and contemporary documents, which is then regarded as the "original" and the measure by which any other translations and versions of the lost or unreadable original are judged.


2) We don’t even know how many times removed from the original texts our existing translations are. We do not know who translated the texts or how good at translation these men, in fact, were. What condition were the original texts in when they were translated?


3) Who wrote the original texts?
What, if any, were their sources?
What condition were those sources in?
What language were the originals written in? We don’t know so it’s fair to speculate that they came from the Orient or Africa. If that’s the case then it seems an argument could be made in support of those who say JC’s teachings were retreads of pre-existing Asian philosophies and religions.

4) Do we in fact know whether there ever were original texts? Was the bible handed down through oral tradition, for example?

5) Why should we be so concerned about which documents/translations to consult if it's God's word? If it is God's word it shouldn’t matter whether we are reading an English version of the bible or the Greek and Hebrew texts because it’s God’s word. And because it’s God’s word any translation or version of the bible will do because as God’s word we can rest assured that it has survived all translations to the present day intact and unaltered from its first original state as it was first delivered to man.

6) If God did craft these texts then it seems clear (to me at least) that he had a purpose other than communicating his will to humans.
Why would God, in his omnipotemce, his infinite wisdom, impart his word, his living manifesto in such a way and such a form that ONLY people with multiple PhDs in linguistics, history, archeology, and relgious studies be able to understand? Why make a book that he KNOWS will be mistinterprated by the vast majority of those who read it, since they will not know aramaic, old greek and any other languages in which his purpose and will was rendered?

7) Why leave it up to language in the first place? God, as creator of language would have known how imperfect language is as a means of communication. Why did God not simply imbue us, in some metaphysical way, with knowledge of his nature and design.

We can see the conflict and confusion today within the Christian community.
For example, friction between the critics of the KJV and advocates of the KJV like Terry Watkins.

Best to all,

Noah

spin

Dealing with texts such as those in the bible, the notion of original texts is difficult use. Is the "original text" the first manuscript in the final form of whatever text in question? Is it the first manuscript to contain the material found in whatever text in question?

We are dealing with literary traditions as we find indications of it throughout the biblical tradition: the different versions of the one story, the word for word or near word for word passages repeated in the bible, such as sections of psalms, historical material in Isaiah, lists in Chronicles and Nehemiah, etc. There may of course be oral tradition somewhere behind all this, but I fear that it would be totally irrecoverable.

I'll leave the rest of your comments to others.


spin

Roger Pearse

Is it for Christians to answer these general questions about the transmission of texts? Surely they apply equally to every literary text from antiquity. I would ask whether or not we have the works of (e.g.) Cicero or not. If we do, then these issues are simply points of detail. If some feel we do not, I would suggest that this is obscurantism.

We live in an imperfect world. Even printed texts have a textual tradition: even The Lord of the Rings does. But to argue from the imperfection of the world to the non-existence of one particular item seems fallacious to me.

This (and what follow) seems to be a series of theological statements, although I am unclear on what authority they are made. Each involves setting up an expectation and then objecting that it is not been met. I wasn't clear what the purpose of such an exercise was, so pardon me if I don't comment on these.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

I wonder if this response is as ingenuous as it seems. It is not of course: it is seeking "equal opportunity" of textual treatment, which I guess is fair enough. "[T]hese general questions about the transmission of texts", according to the writer, "[s]urely [..] apply equally to every literary text from antiquity." I may reword the original poster's statements, but yes, they apply, literally. But, as I think the intention of the original post is relatively clear, there is nothing "surely" about the comparisons our poster makes here.

We know who wrote the majority of the literary texts from classical antiquity that have come down to us. We usually know the contexts, the sources, the purposes for their writing. We can locate their efforts in genre and literary tradition. We usually know the audiences and why they were written -- and therefore the biases of the writer with regard to the audience. None of this is known of the biblical literature. Conditions and priorities were different.

Yes, probably texts were reworked, but it was usual with much of the classical literature we can observe that the writer whose name is attached to the work was responsible for the preponderance of the work. There are cases where this is not true, though often sources are cited, such as with Pliny, Diodorus and Josephus. (And Josephus is most useful when we are dealing with the history of his times, as when we are dealing with Polybius or Thucydides, whose works were mostly histories of their times. Josephus is then not dependent on earlier sources.)

(What our writer might say, is that generally the nt biblical literature is better attested to than the classical literature, given that the literature was preserved by the christian tradition which became the state tradition after Constantine, which is generally true, though we do get, among the same epigraphic hoards from Egypt that have supplied the earliest nt fragments, little mentioned exemplars of some classical literature which puts that literature on par with the nt material regarding attestation.)

What all the classical non-fiction literature supplies that the nt literature does not, is a transparent earliest possible date and latest possible date for its production. That, along with our knowledge of the author and his time, helps us establish the writing for use in a historical context.

1) We have what the OP describes as "information about that document". There is not a scrap of anything similar for the biblical literature.

2) We know that the classical non-fiction texts are not very far "removed from the original texts" by their nature. This is not the case, or perhaps not clearly the case, with the biblical texts -- with the development of philology a few hundred years ago, christian scholars have repeatedly attempted to deal with their texts by finding disparate sources.

3) We usually know the who, where, what, when, and for whom of the classical non-fiction literature. This is not the case with the biblical literature. (And not having the when makes it difficult to construct an audience from the text itself.)

I am still inclined to see our writer as being disingenuous in his short shrift of the OP.


spin

Roger Pearse

These comments do not seem to me to deal with the point I made, tho. If the points made initially have meaning, they apply equally to all texts; if not, they have no meaning.

Your comments seemed a little odd to me, so I'm not sure I understood them. Are you arguing here that classical texts are *better* transmitted than New Testament texts? Or as well? If so, please explain. Just to clarify why I find this odd:

For instance, when I look at Macarius Magnes, I see a text with no manuscripts known, based on a 19th century printed edition, itself printed from a now lost 19th century copy of an unknown manuscript.

When I look at Velleius Paterculus, I find a now lost 8th century manuscript which was printed in 1520, and for which all modern editions rely on that printed text.

The majority of classical texts rely on a limited number of manuscripts of a relatively late date -- usually no earlier than the 9th century.

Moving on, most of your post consists of claims that we know more about the circumstances of composition for (most?) classical works. Such a general claim seems somewhat sweeping to me.

We do know more about the composition of certain classical texts, because they were composed by major figures such as Cicero who discuss their composition in other extant works; others are really very obscure, as might be expected (none come to mind -- inevitably! -- so pardon me if I don't offer examples). But the relevance of this subject to the transmission of texts seems a little unclear to me.

(I have omitted more material asserting the certainty of the authorship of classical works. I myself think we can generally accept the authorship of classical works as given in the manuscript tradition etc; and I think the same of NT and patristic works. But I notice that people rarely deny it, which means that the thesis is somewhat untested).

I would suggest specifics would be appropriate for such a claim. I think of Minucius Felix (dated between 160-250) or Commodian (dated from 2nd-6th century), although these are patristic writers, of course.

One point I make with some hesitation: were you aware that there have been people in the past who asserted the majority of the classical heritage was forged at a much later date? The very late manuscript attestation of most literary texts makes this relatively easy to do.

I think your argument resolves into a suggestion that, because people go around denying all sorts of things about NT texts which they don't about classical texts, this shows the superior preservation of the latter. This seems fallacious to me. Sorry, but it does.

It is a commonplace that NT texts are far better preserved than classical texts; the mss are earlier, the tradition is richer, and the ancillary witnesses far more numerous.

A look at Eusebius, Church History, suggests otherwise.

This seems a little confusing to me, so I'm not sure I follow the points made.

I don't understand why we should suppose that classical texts have some superior 'natural' transmission.

The latter point -- that scholars have sought out copies from as many member-families of the manuscript tradition as possible -- is true for all texts. The difference is that, for classical texts, its quite hard when all you have is one 15th century edition copied from a now lost 9th century exemplar (so Velleius Paterculus).

To return to the issue of the thread: either texts are transmitted from antiquity, or they are not. If they are, the NT is. If they are not, then modern civilisation is based on a mistake, namely the renaissance. I am surprised that this is considered contentious!

All the best,

Roger Pearse

pharoah

The "Bible is being held up to unfair standards compared to other antique documents argument" is a tired,dead horse.

1) Most other classical documents don't claim to come directly from God.
2) Most other classical documents don't claim to be inspired and inerrant.
3) Most other classical documents don't have present-day advocates claming that the incredible stories within really happened.
4) The Bible for better or worse has had and still has a profound, pervasive effect in this world, much more so than virtually any other document in history.

It's because of these facts that the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, etc. should be held to more rigorous standards than other documents.

Roger Pearse

Just musing, but don't the Iliad and Odyssey hold a similar status in antiquity?

However I can't comment on the theological stuff. The question raised was whether the text has been transmitted to us or not. That, surely, is a different question?

Whatever the truth of these points, again, do they affect the question of whether or not we hold a text in our hands?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

Certainly not. I thought I had indicated that the classical works weren't transmitted as well as the biblical sources, because there was less interest in the christian world to preserve them.

Texts don't just have life in themselves they belong to a context established through archaeology and epigraphy as well as other texts which adhere to that archaeology and epigraphy. I am not dealing solely with physical text transmission, for I've already accepted that the biblical literature had societal support for their maintenance, whereas the classical sources didn't. They were maintained either by the church or through Arab sources.

Here we differ greatly. Putting aside the church fathers who operated within a historical framework and were never under consideration in my earlier comments about biblical literature, we know nothing, for example, about gospel materials until Justin Martyr demonstrates a knowledge of them. That's a hundred years between the reputed time of writing of the earliest gospel and the manifestation of the existence of gospel material.

We know when Polybius was writing his work because he partook in the period he was writing about. We know who Polybius was and who his audience was and what his approach to history was. This helps us to locate the work of Polybius in its cultural context.

We have epigraphic evidence for history in the two copies of Augustus's Res Gestae found in such disparate locations and which weren't known when people were reading Tacitus or Suetonius, but as we have become more weary of literary sources and their biases we have such epigraphic reports to show that much of the material offered by the famous Roman historians are supported. Livy's relative late descriptions of the 2nd Carthaginian war gets superb archaeological support down to the Punic remains from the battle scenes. We can look at Caesar's Gallic Wars and find the archaeological evidence for the various campaigns described therein. We know a lot about Caesar, down to his medical condition from numerous disparate sources. The classical texts fit into a highly complex and exhaustive web of historical evidence. This allows us to place those texts into a relatively safe contextualisation, while at the same time being weary of those elements of such texts that were outside the directly researchable abilities of the writers, eg Herodotus can tell us a fair amount about the Persian wars when read in the context of that web of historical evidence but when he starts talking about earlier things the material becomes highly suspect.

The classical sources are collocatable in that web. This is the fundamental difference with almost all the biblical literature.

Yup.

I hope that makes you feel good. It has nothing to do with my thoughts.

While the first part of the above I readily accept, the ancillary witness comment is absurd.

Why not cite a source a few hundred years closer to the period?

I may have been unclear! And of course I am making a sweeping generalisation as you accused me of earlier, but I'll stick to the basic content, as generalisations are rarely meant to cover 100% of all cases -- they wouldn't simply be generalisations if they did.

I am working from our generally vastly superior knowledge about the work and its author. We know when these works were claimed to have been written and can compare them to that web of historical evidence. We know the generalities of what the authors should know.

The analysis is not so much about transmission as about nature of the texts with regard to that web of historical evidence.

As I see that my latter point was not clear, the argument was about christian scholarly approaches to dealing with the problems of the biblical texts, which led to seeking disparate sources for elements within the texts, notions which led to Wellhausen's Prolegomena or the various synoptic analyses. The texts themselves have not been perceived as in some way coherent in christian scholarly circles for centuries. This is the nature of the biblical texts. One doesn't feel the urge to do so with most classical non-fiction authors save people like Pliny the Elder and similar collectors and reprocessors of earlier works and these authors are usually upfront in what they are doing.

Transmission is only one aspect of the issue and you have happily avoided all other issues. We don't know when almost any of the biblical literature was written, therefore what value has your plaudits for biblical transmission? Unfortunately little. You come to a wall which you cannot get over. The gospel texts don't get attestation prior to Justin. The Hebrew biblical literature can't be placed earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. What good is your transmission argument alone? It doesn't help place the biblical works into that web of historical evidence. This is what separates the biblical texts from the more historical texts -- that and often authorial intention (we know that the authors have an understanding of historiography, as evinced in their works and is sometimes overtly described). We don't know clearly the text types of much of the biblical literature. How do you separate illustrative stories, fictive historical contexts (such as most overtly found in Daniel) and traditions from historical narrative in the biblical literature in order to know something about the author and his intentions?

How do we jump the gap from the earliest biblical remains to the time when the texts were written? Good transmission "after the horse has bolted" means little.


spin

(On the subject of transmission, isn't Thucydides just as well attested as any of the Hebrew bible texts, given that there are numerous 1st c. fragments from Egypt of Thucydides?)

Johnny Skeptic

The following is from Farrell Till's account of a debate that he had with Dr. Normal Geisler:

Geisler's opening speech consisted of an effort to establish the "reliability" of the New Testament manuscripts. He referred to over 5,366 copies of "existing" New Testament manuscripts, which scholars have studied and compared and found to be "ninety-nine percent free of significant variances." From this, Geisler somehow reached the conclusion of the "reliability" with which the manuscripts had been copied by ancient scribes proved that everything the manuscripts said had happened exactly as recorded. In my first rebuttal, I asked the audience to assume that those 5,000 manuscripts were 100% free of variation. Even if that were true, that would in no way prove that the events recorded in the manuscripts had actually happened; it would only prove that the manuscripts agreed in what they said.

I presented three reasons why rational people cannot believe the New Testament resurrection accounts: (1) resurrected savior-gods were common-place in the pagan religions that flourished before, during, and after the time Jesus of Nazareth allegedly lived, (2) the claim that a dead man was restored to life is an extraordinary claim that required extraordinary proof, and (3) the only proof that Geisler can offer in support of his resurrection claim is hearsay in nature. Since Geisler spoke entirely from previously prepared manuscripts, he made no attempts to respond to these points, except when they came up during the 30-minute period of responses to questions from the audience.

In developing point one, I referred to the widespread pagan belief in resurrected savior-gods like Osiris, Dionysus, Tammuz, and Krishna, all of whom had had thousands of religious adherents long before the time of Jesus. The only attempt that Geisler made to rebut this argument was made during the question-answer session when he incorrectly said that bodily resurrections had not been claimed for any of the pagan saviors, so they were not "parallel" to the resurrection of Jesus.

In his first speech, Geisler had referred to the apostle Paul's claim that Jesus had appeared to "500 brethren at once" after his resurrection (1 Cor. 15:6), so in making my second point, I asked Geisler what was extraordinary about someone saying, particularly at that time when belief in resurrections was commonplace, that others (even 500 others) had seen a resurrected man. I asked him if he would believe a modern-day resurrection claim even if 500 people should say that they had witnessed it. He ignored the question.

In making my third point, I emphasized that the weakness of the testimonial evidence for the resurrection lies in the fact that all of the testimony was either hearsay in nature or, as in the case of the apostle Paul, visionary. We pay no serious attention to people today who claim to have visions, so why should we believe someone who allegedly had a vision 2,000 years ago? As for the testimony of the other "reliable" witnesses, it was all hearsay. Scholars know that the apostle didn't write the Gospel of Matthew and that the apostle John didn't write the Gospel of John, so these writers were not the "eyewitnesses" that Christian apologists claim that they were. So all that we have is a case of unknown writers saying that certain women said that they had found an empty tomb and had then seen the resurrected Jesus. "But what did Mary Magdalene ever write herself?" I asked Geisler. "What did Salome ever write?" "Who was she anyway?" "What did Joanna write?" "And who was she?" These were questions that Geisler ignored as well as my demand that he tell us just who those "five hundred brethren" were that the apostle Paul cited as witnesses of the resurrection. Where did they live? When did they see Jesus? I challenged Geisler to tell us the name of just one of those five hundred. He didn't do it, of course.

I usually leave a debate thinking, "This was the weakest opponent I have had yet," but given Geisler's background and reputation, I have decided that the weakness is not in my opponents. It just had to be that there is no credible evidence at all to support the views of those whom I debate. If there were, then surely one of them would have cited some convincing reason to believe in biblical inerrancy, the resurrection of Jesus, the credibility of prophecy fulfillment, etc. The evidence just isn't there to support any of those claims, and that is why the opposition appears so weak. End of quotes.

If Jesus actually 1) was conceived by the Holy Spirt, 2) was born of a virgin, 3) rose from the dead, and 4) ascended into heaven, those occurrences would have been without prior precedent or subsequent duplication in all human history.

Which is more likely, that some people will make second hand, third hand or fourth hand claims that some other people said that they had seen the risen Jesus, or that Jesus actually rose from the dead? Rational minded people will choose the former. Historically, the vast majority of humans have always had a penchant for dreaming up all sorts of religions in order to satisfy their desire for a comfortable eternal life. If Christianity had not come along, most people would have continued to follow Judaism and pagan religions, both of which would have been very poor choices indeed.

spin

Well mused. You are aiming at the right literature with which to make your comparisons. I haven't got a clue when they were written. Perhaps around the age of Peisistratos? Many analysts don't see a single hand at work in these books, so authorship is fundamentally unknown. Historical value? Far too hard to judge and highly suspect. They cannot be related to the era they ostensibly deal with, so they cannot overall be placed in the web of historical evidence, even though there are some verifiable facts within these texts. These same qualities are evinced in the biblical literature.


spin