Chris Weimer

Sshh...you'll ruin the fun if you give it away.

Riverwind

Oh...sorry.

Er..eh, hem...

Yeah, what's up with that deliberate manuscript defacement? Wasn't that some sort of crime back then?

Chris Weimer

If you can't find evidence for your theories, just claim that some Christian group or another deliberately destroyed your evidence. That seems to be an acceptable position to hold around here.

JoeWallack

JW:
It doesn't matter what this Manuscript originally had as you have already demonstrated with Statistics that Statistics are irrelevant here.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Nazaroo

You boys are a laugh and a half.

For a change here, Mr. Gibson is the one who has actually asked some reasonable questions.

As a matter of fact, the manuscript shows the typical pattern of damage for most of the leaves: that is, the first and last, the outer edges, the least-well protected pages, these suffer the most damage. And typically, the damage is around the edges of just about every page, not in the center.

P75 in fact is not even a complete manuscript. it consists of some passages from Luke and some passages from John. Many pages are completely missing. Notably those at one end or the other, but also a few pages from the inside, as though they had fallen out.


The rest of you, well...

The only thing that can be called 'random' about wear and tear is the bookworms. They actually have random tunnelling patterns which aren't predictable (except as to range or extent) other than a certain 'fractal' sizing and change of direction.

Other types of wear and tear, such as that caused by handling and usage conforms to simple and straightforward laws of physics and laws of probability.

For instance, the front and back, the outside pages, the exposed edges of an ancient papyrus book will suffer the most damage, due to exposure to air (oxidizing agents like oxygen, causing a slow deterioration from the outside in).

Next comes factors like 'wear and tear', that is actual usage. In this respect our manuscript (P75) is no different than any others. The frontal edges (the vertical edge of a page which faces outward toward the reader) suffer the most damage, being buffeted and subjected to human touch by far the most.

As a matter of fact, the pattern of damage for the page under examination above is quite easy to interpret generally:

(1) At the upper-right, a crack in the papyrus has caused the loss of a column of letters along the crack-line. These can nonetheless be restored with near-certainty.

(2) At the lower-left, the outer corner of the page (its the verso or left-hand page we are looking at) has been broken off, due to it being the the most common point by which a page is grabbed and turned.

(3) On the right near the lower middle, there is another crack, caused by flexing, and an imbalance or imperfection in the binding and sewing, resulting in another fault-line of lost letters, this time on an angle upward to the left across the page.

It is actually in our interest, to identify as much as possible of the damage that can be accounted for by accidental or expected causes. This leaves us with a much smaller residue of damage to account for in other ways.

So you see, a lot can be ascertained from a basic knowledge of manuscript forensics, and some accurately collated data, even without a photograph of the page in hand. The collation itself acts like a 'fingerprint', describing unique features of wear and tear, however in this case, all the wear and tear has rational explanations and physical causes. Nothing is random here; its all Newtonian mechanics.

We don't need to resort to any 'conspiracy theories' thanks.

In fact, the suggestion betrays a kind of sequential 'one-track' thinking made famous by Kahn in the Star Trek movie.

You people are still stuck in the mid-20th century, where rhetoric reigned instead of science. You still seem to think its about 'sides'.

But its not about 'sides' at all. Its about neutral scientific investigation, which properly takes into account ALL the evidence, not rhetorical debating techniques, which only call attention to evidence that supports a predetermined position.

Maybe with you, but not with me. I am only interested in the complete evidence, not some BS like Metzger's childish presentations, which only reveal 'evidence' supporting his own position.

The fact is, the evidence (as it always is) is complicated. Its ambiguous, and its often misleading. Its already 'misleading', because in spite of scare-talk about conspiracy theories, the simple truth is, there was a fight over these verses. That means that parties were actively engaged in both deleting the passage and in restoring it, as the manuscript evidence clearly indicates.

Whatever the Gospel of John was originally like, the fact is that men at once proceeded to tamper with it for religious/political reasons. With the Pericope de Adultera we are not talking about 'accidental' omissions or insertions from the 'margin'.

We are talking about grown men who knew perfectly well what they were doing when engaging in the act of editing the text. There is no need to call up spectres of 'conspiracy' when the people who did this did it openly enough to get called on it repeatedly by the opposing sides.

Its not classifiable as a 'conspiracy' (at least not a successful one) when Pacian, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and even Didymus make note of the passage and its colored history.

Just about every major Early Father has a comment. Why suggest that I or anyone else is appealing to 'conspiracy theories', as though we were talking about the Kennedy Assassinations or Martin Luther King.

It seems rather obvious that ecclesiastical leaders took sides, and engaged in a 'text-war'. This is hardly a conspiracy.

What this text-war teaches us is that men controlled and manipulated the streams of textual transmission, not blind 'accidental' forces. If we can learn anything at all from a study of the textual history, its that men did what they wanted to do.

Whether 'God approved of or providentially protected the text behind the scenes' is a completely separate issue, which cannot be investigated scientifically, and is off-topic.

Real science isn't about debating. Real scientists are all on the same side: the side of the truth and the most reasonable or plausible interpretation of the evidence. Real scientists don't choose the evidence, but deal with it as they find it. But for real scientists, all reconstructions and conclusions are provisionary, and can be overturned by new evidence. Real scientists aren't afraid to entertain different assumptions or premises, and consider new conclusions.

Its not about 'proving' that the passage is or is not authentic. Its about finding out whether it is or is not authentic, by considering all the evidence available and applying all the tools and possibilities to the problem.

Scientists have no problem entertaining even the most implausible possibilities, because its their job. And if you aren't flexible with your thinking and your conclusions, you aren't a scientist.

The scientific method is skeptical, but the scientific attitude is open-minded.

Get out of the 60s, and get into some science.

This was your reply in response to some interesting and important facts about the manuscript history.

That is, a look at the manuscripts show that there was indeed deliberate attacks upon both the text, and actual physical attacks upon many manuscripts. There are far too many 'lacuna' and defacements involving this important passage to pretend that everything is just an 'accident'.

But just because we as scientists quite reasonably attribute intent and motivation to acts which are completely out of step with predictions from 'random' models, this doesn't make us 'conspiracy nuts'. All we are doing is what judges and jurys do every day of the week all over the world.

Various evidences are presented and arguments made, but ultimately a judge or jury has to decide if preplanning or intent was formed, and not that the events were a series of accidents and coincidences. Why should our investigation of the conscious activities of scribes, editors, and ecclesiastical leaders be any different.

Ultimately, we have to look at the preponderance of the evidence, and decide if this or that piece of damage was a random accident, a coincidence, or a deliberate choice by a conscious being. This hardly makes anyone a conspiracy theorist. You might as well call every judge and jury in the history of law a conspiracy theorist.

You are engaging in obscurantism, not scientific investigation. A scientist would examine all the evidences, and consider all the arguments. Only propagandists sweep evidence under the rug, over-simplify it, or throw a smoke screen over it.

jgibson000

How kind of you to say so. But I note not only that my question about what your evidence is that a dot in a MS indicates omission of a passage was also "reasonable", but that you've conspicuously left unanswered one of my questions you have deemed reasonable, namely, how you know that the damage to the MS in question was deliberate, especially since, as you yourself have noted, this damage is not the only damage the MS has suffered and that it is consistent with the damage that appears elsewhere in the MS that has a "non-deliberate" cause.

JG

JoeWallack

JW:
So what we see in extant Texts means Nothing and what we don't see in extant Texts means Something. This new Textual Criticism learning amazes me Sir Nazaroo. Tell me again how sheep parchments may be employed to prevent earthquakes.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Nazaroo

Let me try to explain it in the very simplest of terms for the non-scientist and 'layperson':


The extant (known) manuscripts tells us little about the authenticity of textual variants. They simply tell us some of the textual variants that existed, and which were popular.

The extant manuscripts tell us much about the subsequent history of the text, and the interests and beliefs of those who copied and edited the text later.

Thats the new 'Textual Criticism learning' that amazes you so greatly.

Instead of apologetic and selective uses of the evidence of the extant manuscripts, we engage in scientific assessments of the same evidence, and use it for what it can actually tell us about the history of transmission, instead of the 'authenticity' of variants.

Its shocking, I know. But you'll get over it.

Nazaroo

We have quite reasonably and successfully accounted for the 'normal' and expected damage to the manuscript, around the exposed edges and in regions of heavy contact and use, like the bottom left corner.
To this we can add the 'theta' in line 17 as another example of edge-wear.


The 'Normal' Condition for an Internal Page in the Book

Next we can accept small random examples of damage, such as the lost 'omicron' (short 'o') in line 06 and the faded 'zeta' in line 14 and the 'tau' in line 38, as well as the 'eta' in line 42.

This group of minor imperfections and faded letters is a combination of surface deterioration and perhaps copying variations.

But what it does provide us is a base in conjunction with the undamaged background surface area, to give an overall expected state of preservation for the areas of the page which have not suffered special wear, and which have been protected by being pressed inside the outer pages of the book. This is the 'best case' state of the page.

The 'epsilon' in line 32 and 'omicron' in line 33 might also fall into this category. We can take those faded/damaged letters and get a rough estimate of the damaged/undamaged area ratio.

Taking the left half of the page from line 30 to 34 as a sample, we have 14 letters by 5 lines = 70 characters versus 3 damaged, i.e. less than 3% of the textual surface. Similar estimates come from the lower right section from line 37 to 44.

These are large sections of the surface area of the page, and are therefore good samples of 'best' condition of the page.


The Remaining Sections

Now we need to account for why there is a huge 'hole' in the upper center of the manuscript. thankfully there is a very typical and common cause for such deteriorations, and its mechanisms are well known.

Its called erasure. In an erasing procedure, a scribe essentially uses an abrasive (like sand, or a rubbing stick), with or without a liquid (water or vinegar or some vegetable-based cleaner) to remove a word, or a line or two, to start again.

But what is important for forensics, is that the physical treatment of the surface flexes and weakens the fibres a significant amount, as well as embedding fragments of papyrus and grit into the surface.

The result is that although the manuscript appears to be 'normal', and often shows no signs of erasure, the area of the surface that has been weakened and pulverized loses particles more quickly, and the fibres holding it together break more frequently. Eventually, writing over this area begins to fade and fall apart at a much quicker rate than the rest of the page.

Not only can areas of a page which have suffered erasure or similar treatment become easier to detect with time, due to uneven aging and deterioration, but also other accompanying side-effects are well known and easy to spot also.

For instance, in our manuscript, there is obviously a large area that has apparently suffered erasure and re-writing (between line 09 and line 13).

But re-enforcing and confirming this diagnosis is the naturally accompanying wear-mark below this area, between line 18 and 22, where the heel of the hand rested heavily during the erasure, and where the copyist's hand rested again for the second copying session. This area, although undergoing less contact and abuse than the erased area, still suffers some damage, by absorption of moisture, natural oils and dead skin from the hand of the workman.

The result after a thousand years, is that each of the two remaining areas of the manuscript undergo accelerated deterioration through Ph imbalance (acidic substances in the papyrus, like sweat and bacteria) and oxidation, in spite of this page being protected by being sandwiched in the center and covered over from the elements.

Nazaroo

To sum up, ALL FOUR of the 'earliest MSS' which somehow survived the pogrom of the manuscript purgings that occurred all the way up to the 8th century show marks indicating knowledge of the passage, and/or tampering.

P66:


P75:


Codex Vaticanus (B):


Codex Sinaiticus (Aleph):





Thus when textual critics like Metzger say the 'oldest and best MSS' omit the verses, the part of the story they leave out makes their case a naive attempt to mislead the reader.

The 'textual' evidence against the authenticity of the verses is nothing of the kind. It tells us more about early scribes and ecclesiastical editors than it can ever tell us about the authenticity of John 8:1-11.

We can measure the textual case against the verses scientifically with a special device: