mountainman

I have been trying to understand the current range of opinion
concerning a number of issues surrounding the above three
major codexes of the christian literature.

1) DATING: Dates for these seem to vary by hundreds of years.
Some opinions are early enough for codexes B and Aleph to have
been one of the 50 Constantine Bibles (ordered circa 330 CE),
or even earlier (Codex B given circa 300 CE), while other opinions
provide varying dates in the fifth century. This is a substantial
range of opinion for each of these codexes.

2) INTERNAL TEXTUAL STATE: It appears that there exists a
very heavy scholarly opinion that the text of these codexes
suffers from "copyists errors" that are not insignificant. This
seems to support the notion that - particularly codex A - the
source material being copied was not a single MS, but several
MS of varying value and diverse origin. Obviously each codex
must tell its own story ...

I have done a days background reading, but the ground
appears very extensive, and I seek advice. My questions:

1) are there any formally recognised benchmarked dates for any
or all of these --- the purported oldest actual written text?

2) are there any formally recognised dominant theories for
the place, or the role that each of these codexes have played
in the transmission of the "canonical text" from our common
antiquity to the present day?

Thanks for any summary opinions, or article references.

Finally, I am presuming that none of the above codexes
have been carbon dated, and the results published.



Pete Brown

Steven Avery

Hi Pete,

Those are good questions. As to the scribal condition of Aleph and B may I presume that you read the Dean John Burgon critique of the abysmal scribal condition of these manuscripts ? (Including the large number of correctors. I also would like to know more about overwriting of the original on Aleph.. James White once shared about how they use a spectrographic analysis to reconstruct the original however I have not studied the matter to see how accurate was his statement and how widely applied).

Also I suppose you ran into the 'fool and knave' note on Vaticanus.

From one point of view (eg. the Jews and the Torah and the Masoretic Text) corrupt manuscripts, poor scribalism, is ipso facto a warrant to consider a manuscript of no real import. Even trash to be buried. The various Byzantine Text and Received Text viewpoints of the NT text would say that this concern is 100% applicable to those two manuscripts.

I have never seen anyone attempt to defend those two manuscripts from the accusation that they are loaded with obvious scribal blunders. And I have asked on various forums.

This was the first issue that led me to reject the modern version texts that are essentially based on those two manuscripts, beneath the facade of eclecticism.

I do hope you get good answers to your dating questions. You can also ask on the Yahoogroups textcrit forum or the TC-Alternative forum.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Bede

Mountainman,

Have you tried posting on the Jesus Mysteries yahoo group. It is a group especially for mythicists and contains some bright (if misguided IMHO) people. You might get a better hearing there than here. Most Christians are banned from posting there (including me).

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusMysteries/

Sorry if this has been suggested before.

Best wishes

Bede

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi there, Pete,

Palaeographic dating of manuscripts is notoriously iffy (in spite of what some authors may say or imply). In general, A, B and Aleph can be dated fairly securely as belonging to 4th-5th centuries, or ca. 400 CE. More precision is hardly possible.

All manuscripts have "copyists errors". Are these 3 manuscripts more prone to them than usual? It's difficult to say.

But what is perfectly clear is that there is a huge number of variations between these 3 manuscripts. For example, there are about 3000 significant differences between the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in the gospels alone.

Yes, this is possible.

The physical date of the parchment isn't really so important. Sometimes a later manuscript has a better text.

Obviously it depends on who you talk to. The overwhelming majority of the academe of course prefers the Egyptian text, so they love these 3 manuscripts. But there are many arguments to the contrary. See my webpage,

http://www.trends.net/~yuku/bbl/cvers.htm

As I say, the physical date of the parchment itself isn't really that important. The date of the manuscript, and the date of the text that it contains are two different things.

All the best,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

What makes you think that there are textual experts among the mythicists, Bede? I'd be extremely surprised if there were any...

There are very few textual scholars in general. This is where they hang out,

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/textualcriticism

(Myself, I'm not allowed there! )

And this is the alternative,

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TC-Alternate-list

Cheers,

Yuri.

Gamera

I've never run across anything indicating they have, but that's hardly important. Radio carbon dating has many limitations, and in fact is usually deemed to provide dates that are not as accurate as paleography.

First the dating relates not to the text but to the paper or parchment (i.e., the death to the animal), and that may predate the text in question by many years. And if a palimpsest is involved, all bets are off.

Second, the bigger the sample the more accurate the date, and unfortunately these mss are too precious to provide large samples.

Third, carbon dating is susceptible to later contamination, especially mss that have been poured over for centuries in all kinds of conditions, including centuries where flame was used as a lighting source.

Fourth, carbon dating is expensive. Comparisons of carbon dating and paleographical dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that carbon dating and paleographic dating mostly lead to the same general result, so carbon dating is disfavored. G. Bonani, M. Broshi, I. Carmi, S. Ivy, J. Strugnell, W. Wolfli, "Radiocarbon Dating Of Dead Sea Scrolls", ‘Atiqot, 1991, op. cit., p. 31.

Finally there are problems related to 14C to 12C ratio calibrations, since the ratios vary over time.

So, to give an example, the Gospel of Judas was carbon dated leading to a date determination from 220 to 340 CE, quite a range. Pal. dating put it at around 300, as I recall. So even the carbon dating doesn't support your Contantine made it all up thesis (at least not the older end of the spectrum; and why would Constantine prepare an apocryphal gnostic text at any rate?!)

This article goes into some of the limitations of carbon dating of Koranic mss.

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Qur...Mss/radio.html

The bottom line is carbon dating is not the pancea you seem to think it is.

mountainman

Thanks to all for the series of helpful replies to this question.
I'll be following up the leads provided, and other suggestions.

Can anyone suggest other important codexes or manuscripts
related to the historical preservation of christianity, particularly
out of the Byzantine Empire?

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Steven Avery

The Byzantine manuscripts are generally of far higher scribal quality that the manuscripts you referenced above (or Bezae). And there are various families within the Byzantine line (even cross-families they are far more homogeneous than Aleph, B, A). Probably you are most interested in manuscripts from the 6th to the 10th century. And since we are talking about much larger numbers of manuscripts that are generally in agreement with each other there is far less emphasis on individual manuscripts.

In general, any writings by Professor Maurice Robinson will be helpful .. he defends the view that you can demonstrate the accuracy of the Byzantine line over the few alexandrian manuscripts even if you totally disregard the masses of later evidences from after the 11th century to the Reformation, a period when the Greek-manuscript church was almost 100% using the Byzantine line.

For discussions of the individual and families of Byzantine manuscripts, as well as conceptual and paradigmic discussions of what is what, my specific recommendation is the TC-Alternate forum that I mentioned above.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TC-Alternate-list/.

The folks on WhichVersion can be very helpful as well. Especially on discussions of the individual verses and sections and also the distinctions between the Byzantine Text and the Received Text.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic