Going Back to the Original
Sinaiticus, a 4th century manuscript of the New Testament and parts of the LXX Old Testament, will go on display, starting this July with some portions, and available completely by next year (MSNBC.com story).
The story got me thinking about what it means to go back to “the original.” KJV-Only advocates will tell you how hard it is to go back to the originals, since we have not one single autograph of any Biblical book, and then suggest the ridiculous conclusion that we should therefore use the KJV as our standard. This would be analogous to going to a bowl of fruit, and determining that because all the fruit has some spoilage, we might as well take one of the most spoiled pieces.
Once in a discussion on the <a href=””>Compuserve Religion Forum</a>, someone asked me if I had ever read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I wasn’t precisely sure what he meant, so I responded that I had read some portions, which is quite true, though I have mostly read them in transcription. The closest that I’ve gotten to an actual scroll or scroll fragment is a photograph. What he expected, however, was that I had actually handled the original scroll, done the transcription myself, and then worked from that transcription. To that I had to say, “No, even with the photographs the only thing I’ve done is to check a letter or two against the photograph, and even there I would leave the final word to the folks who are really experts in that area.” That was a great disappointment to him.
In my experience, “going back to the original” can mean looking up a text in your preferred translation, going to the original language in an appropriate critical edition, examining manuscripts, or having in one’s possession the autograph of a work. For those involved in source and form criticism, it can mean going back to the sources from which the document we have was compiled.
It is important to remember that we cannot completely eliminate our dependence on someone else’s work. Whether you use an English translation or examine the individual characters on an ancient manuscript, you do not achieve your result independently of others.
Nonetheless, going as far back as possible, and checking as carefully as possible is a positive thing, even though we know we will not achieve it perfectly.