More on the Original Text
I’m not going to link to every post in Tim’s series, but he has just posted his first substantive one, and I’d like to note a couple of things and then quote part of one paragraph.
If you read his first post you will know that Tim is planning to make an argument for the reliability of the original text of the New Testament. Now depending on just what he means by “original” that could vary from difficult to impossible. In fact, he has taken on a difficult, but in my view not impossible task because he understands the nature of the task.
Responding to a claim that it is futile to try to reconstruct the first century text, he says:
. . . Most assertions, scientific, theological, or otherwise, are hypotheses, attempting to explain as much of the evidence as possible. One theme we will come back to again and again is that possibility is not the same as probability. That a hypothesis exists at all is not an argument in favor of its viability. That a hypothesis cannot be proven 100% true by reason or evidence does not mean that it can’t be maintained with a reasonable degree of certainty.
That is absolutely correct, and something that needs to be said repeatedly. People are constantly asking for absolute certainty in historical matters, and it cannot be provided. The only way we could be completely certain about the original text of the New Testament would be to actually have the autographs. Then we could compare what we have to them. As it is, we will always be dealing with probabilities.
But we must resist the temptation to assume that a probability is the equivalent of the absence of knowledge. We live with probabilities every day. Right now I’m using my computer even though I know there’s a 30% chance of thunderstorms. I’m generally protected, but in our worst storms I will shut the system down. I’m quite functional even though I don’t have absolute certainty.
With that, I look back at the earlier part of Tim’s post. My only problem here is not with the data, which he summarizes quite well, but with the context. I think it is very difficult for laypeople to understand the meaning of these manuscript numbers. They sound impressive, but what do they mean? That requires some context in terms of how many manuscripts we normally have for ancient documents (many less), and just what one can do with manuscripts.
Herewith a quibble. Manuscripts are weighed, not counted, and that can mentally skew these numbers. Those approximately 5,500 mss are not all of equal weight. At the same time they do have some weight, which it is easy to forget when one is busy weighing fragmentary papyri and key early manuscripts.
In any case, I’m enjoying reading Tim’s series, and look forward to continuing. I have also demonstrated my verbosity, having written at least as many words commenting on Tim’s post as he put into it. It is unlikely, however, that at half a century I will change that much!
