Roger Pearse

Much of this is true, although somewhat misleading. Texts also get corrected in transmission, and most errors do not ripple down into copies because they are typos and the like, silently corrected, obvious to any reader. Good copyists are well aware of all these factors, and they take measures to resist them, including comparison with other manuscripts of the text. Even bad copyists just reproduce what is before them.

Appealing to the number of witnesses as showing mathematically that there must be ever more witnesses turns the process on its head; the more witnesses there are, the more likely it is that the original text is in there somewhere.

The same applies to every ancient literary text.

So the conclusion that we are invited to draw from the sort of arguments made above is that we don't have copies of ancient literary texts, for any practical purpose. But the idea that the classics did not reach us is obscurantism, of course; they did, and they sparked the renaissance. Likewise the far better preserved NT has certainly reached us.

I was interested to see the letter by Bart Ehrman, but it seemed to me to encourage this obscurantism as well, which is very annoying to see in someone paid to study the subject.

Usually underlying this somewhere is a theological issue -- "the bible cannot be inspired if copies get copyist errors, typos, whatever" -- getting mixed up with the issue of whether the text has reached us at all. The former issue has nothing to do with it.

Whether the contents of that text are true is a separate question; we have Suetonius Lives of the Caesars more or less as he wrote it, but whether his collection of gossip is accurate is another question.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Chili

If Jesus called the written Word the yeast of the pharisee why should we worry about it if we can/must receive the true meaning of this Word from Jesus in nature first. If this is true it must follow that we can read about it in the bible and correct it there according to the prior revealed knowledge that we have of the story that in the bible is just a word story or parable. Jesus tells us about this in John 1 and confirms this in Jn.5:39-40.

-Jay-

Roger, with all due respect, your charges of obscurantism seem to be nothing more than a dodge to try to get around the fact that we don't have the originals so we can't be very specific in how close to the originals we claim the copies are. Eh.

Anyway, I've extended an invitation to Dr. Ehrman to comment on the issue himself. Perhaps he will accept, if his schedule permits.

regards,

NinJay

Roger Pearse

We need to decide whether we have the opportunity to read the works of Cicero or not. If the answer is 'yes', then the same applies to all works transmitted the same way. And what rational person would answer 'no'?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

ChristMyth

Thanks for moving my thread to the proper place, Ninjay.

So, if I'm understanding correctly, we cannot say that the argument is a complete failure simply because if we assume that the ms were tampered with to begin with, then we must assume that every other ms from antiquity has had the same treatment throughout time. This calls into question the authorship of all ms that we take for granted, such as the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.

If we, however, assume that at least some of the texts were copied with a certain degree of accuracy over time, then we also must assume that the NT writings could be in this category and have reached us with very little or no tampering with whatsoever.

Christmyth

Roger Pearse

This is correct. It's obvious that problems occurred in making books prior to the era of print; but if we draw conclusions from this, it 'proves' way, way too much, and pitches us straight into a morass of subjective judgements where we accept some texts even tho transmitted in a manner that we would regard as inadequate in other cases.

After all, Cicero's letters were mostly dictated; sometimes dictated to more than one slave at a time, and sent by separate couriers (in case of accidents). It is unlikely that these copies were identical, if of any length. In theory this would mean that even *Cicero* didn't possess a copy of his own letter!?! Does a change from 'et' to 'ac' mean that the letter is not transmitted? If this is the consequence of such a minuteness, then all this seems very close to madness to me.

I don't quite see how people get themselves into this, to be honest. We live in an imperfect world. Nothing is copied accurately. Is any book today free from misprints? Do we worry about it? It's part of life; and to draw conclusions about whether a text has reached us (for all useful purposes) from these details is to make a category mistake. It's one thing if the last 5 books of a work are missing altogether -- yep, that has not reached us. But if those 5 books turn up, in an Ethiopic translation of an Arabic version of a Coptic translation of a Greek original, written down by an idiot with dyslexia; well, that is still survival, and is infinitely different to non-survival or non-transmission.

Nor does any of this mean that what the text *says* is true. (Said already, I know, but worth reiterating endlessly, because of the confusion).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

-Jay-

Your position, if I understand it correctly, is that the statement:

"The Bible (the NT, specifically) has not come down to us with <some specific degree of> reliability"

Implies that:

"No ancient text has come down to us with <some specific degree of> reliability".

Which in turn implies that:

"Ancient texts would therefore be useless."

Now, it's not an unreasonable conclusion to draw that any ancient text that we have only copies of (in other words, we lack the original documents) may have copyist errors (or mistranslations, or erroneous fixes, or whatnot). This is such an obvious statement that it isn't even interesting.

Some of these errors may be significant when compared to the notional original. This statement isn't particularly interesting, either.

The problem is that the value of those ancient texts isn't really contingent upon the original versions of them. If we don't have them, we don't have them. Period. The value of those texts is in whatever we happen to have now. We take what we have and move forward with it, and if we happen to find an earlier version of something, we incorporate that into our body of knowledge.

Now, you appear to be claiming that this is a fatal problem, and you appear to be claiming this because you want to be able to make some specific claim about the Bible - that it's been transmitted with <some quantifiable degree of> fidelity. You need to be able to claim that because you want to hold the Bible up as authoritative. This is special pleading, plain and simple. (As an aside, nobody is claiming that the current Bible is completely different from the original texts - Ehrman himself admits quite freely that most of the differences in the mss are minor and inconsequential. The Bible apparently does have a fairly high overall degree of transmissional fidelity, and in terms of the broad themes, that's not a problem at all.)

Oddly, though, for most ancient texts, the issue is largely irrelevant. When I read The Iliad, I'm not overly concerned with whether I've got the Fagels translation or the Fitzgerald - they both do the job. I'm not basing social policy on whether or not Athena really tricked Hector, or whether the account of that event was transmitted faithfully.

The Bible is different, though. Sexist policies are instituted using forged epistles as justification. Vacuous non-curricula are foisted upon schoolchildren based upon poorly translated versions of the Bible. I could go on. The point is that social policy, at many levels, is based on the Bible, and if that's going to be the case (and it shouldn't be, but that's another topic), we have to be honest with ourselves about the differences in the source material, and not try to minimize them or sweep them under the rug. It's irresponsible to assume that it's highly accurate, which is what you're trying to do.

regards,

NinJay

-Jay-

Not unexpectedly, Dr. Ehrman has declined to join the discussion, citing a very full plate.

regards,

NinJay

ChristMyth

I agree that the Bible itself should be held to a higher standard than other ancient texts when we consider that many people claim that it is The Word of God and should be the mark that we base our moral standards and lives by. From this point of view, the Bible should not be placed in the same category as, say, The Illiad which doesn't impact society in such a way.

Personally, however, I believe this sidesteps the argument at hand. There have been plenty of people who have based the unreliability of the biblical texts simply on the fact that we only have copies of copies. If we judge other ancient texts by that same basis, what texts from antiquity could we trust?

Christmyth

Roger Pearse

Agreed; purely because the NT is the best preserved of ancient literary texts. The same argument would work with the major Greek Fathers, and for the same reason; they're the next best preserved.

Ah, agreed, but some steps have been omitted which might mislead some people reading.

The argument to which I am responding is that the NT is useless as a source, because of the question of transmission. To whatever degree the NT is 'useless', the same would therefore apply to a greater degree to everything else.

I don't have a clear idea of in what ways the transmission issue is to render the NT useless, so leave it as vague as I found it.

Agreed, in the same sense as modern books get misprints.

This is speculation, tho. It might be true, but I feel that we have to take a self-denying ordinance and refuse to use this argument, without evidence of specifics.

The reason is that it leads very quickly to "I am going to ignore this passage which is inconvenient for my theory about Roman bowel movements as an 'obvious' interpolation, while retaining this one which is convenient."

This happened in the 19th century, and human nature being what it is, seems to happen as soon as people start to accept unevidenced statements about damage in transmission as reasons to ignore texts.

Um, but surely it is? Think about a history, a recipe for curing foot-rot, a list of Roman legions and their commanders. If we propose to use these, damage is a problem. (I wonder if I understand your point here, tho).

We certainly use what we have; on the basis that it is the original, as best we can tell.

If so, well, it is your own, for I haven't raised the issue.

My view on the transmission of texts applies to all ancient literary texts, whatever their contents. It is a pragmatic one, designed to exclude the most serious problem with using ancient texts -- modern bias; and especially *my* bias.

Firstly, this is correct, as I understand it.

Secondly, tho, this is not the message that people are getting from Ehrman and repeating all over the place -- what I see is "texts cannot be copied from antiquity".

Indeed so.

But step back a moment. Is this not to say that any text which becomes politically important 2000 years later must suddenly, retrospectively, develop a different kind of transmission? Because as it stands, all texts are transmitted the same way. We cannot very well demand different standards for texts which we happen to consider important; that is much the same as saying (for practical purposes) that any text of importance is useless, to the degree that it is important. Furthermore...

In this forum, I think all of us have sufficient educational advantages (even me) to know all ancient literary texts are transmitted more or less in the same manner. Some may feel that all of them should be rejected, if inconvenient, but it is perhaps fortunate for us all that Petrarch and Boccaccio and Poggio and Scaliger and all the body of the humanists of the renaissance did not agree, corrupt and late as nearly all their texts were, and corrupted still further by lazy and avaricious Italian scribes.

But then this is what I mean when I talk about the obscurantism inherent in such a position; we're rejecting something of inestimable value, something we really do have -- the classical heritage --, for short-term convenience.

I would ask you to consider: is there really no other manner of registering one's hostility to Christianity, other than by tearing up the heritage of mankind? Is there no other reason to suppose that the bible is wrong in what it asserts, other than these technical excuses which disrupt all our knowledge of antiquity?

Atheism does not require this position, surely? Indeed would classically educated atheist ever dream of adopting it? Why shoot oneself in the foot like this?

It is, above all, unnecessary. If we possessed the author's autographs of the entire NT, do we not agree that it would not affect one iota the question as to whether Christianity is true?

IMHO, of course. I really would rather keep religious arguments out of the study of the transmission of texts.

All the best,

Roger Pearse