Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Textual Criticism

  • Textual Criticism Summary from Parchment and Pen

    C. Michael Patton presents Textual Criticism in a Nutshell, though what he means more precisely is New Testament textual criticism in a nutshell.

    It’s quite a good introduction giving a feel for the types of variants and why they might occur, and also why we might prefer not to call them “errors” considering that some are intentional, and some are stylistic variants and so forth.

    I would note only one caveat–I think he is a bit optimistic on how much impact the few substantial variants would have. I recall one correspondent who noted that of course variants in the New Testament text made no difference on doctrinal issues, since we don’t truly base our doctrines on the Bible in any case. That’s also overstating the case, in my view.

    Certainly there is a great deal more in the church’s doctrinal statements than is in the texts themselves. I regard this as a good thing. I think the church was supposed to grow and that the doctrinal statements express the church in that process. At the same time, they did take care within their approach to the study of texts, to provide some basis in scripture.

    We would hardly have the debates we do about some variants if there were no doctrinal issues. Thus it is good to realize that while the support orthodoxy may be strengthened or weakened by particular variants, there are no smoking guns that say “that doctrine is wrong,” or “this other doctrine should have been there.” It’s more a matter of the weight of textual support for the elements of doctrine.

  • 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.

  • Appearance of the Form of the Glory

    In today’s Running Toward the Goal podcast, recorded on the road with apologies for the quality, I discuss Ezekiel 1:28. I thought that as additional reference I’d provide my discussion of these terms from my college paper originally written in 1979. This is unchanged from the original form.  (This extract is an appendix to the original paper.  The full paper is here.)

    The Uses of ;eyn, demuth and mar’eh in Ezekiel 1

    In the textual comments (see note p on verse 13) I made an emendation of the text in which I stated that a scribe, reading the chapter and seeing demuth used in verse 13 would tend to wish to correct it to mar’eh as more appropriate to the context of the verse. As the King James Version uniformly translates each of the three words above with English words which are essentially similar, it is necessary to demonstrate that this use is indeed correct. The KJV has translated them as color, likeness, and appearance respectively.

     

    ;eyn appears four times in the chapter, Holladay suggests simply “look” or “appearance”, but Eichrodt (OTL) suggests “sparkle”. Elsewhere, gleam is suggested. The latter seem most appropriate in the context here, In verses 4 and 27 the Chashmal gleams, In verse 7 the polished bronze. In verse 16 the wheels, probably of a translucent or transparent color gleam. So gleaming or sparkling here appears to be the best translation.

     

    demuth appears 9 times. We have the demuth of the four living creatures who have the demuth of a man. Their faces have the demuth of various creatures. The demuth of a vault is above the creatures’ heads. The sapphire stone resolves itself into the of a throne. Upon the demuth of a throne is the demuth of the appearance of a man. Finally the glory of God is said to have demuth. The only one of these which is neutral is verse 28, “the form of the glory of Yahweh”, although even here reference is being made to the form which was on the throne. Holladay suggests form as a translation for demuth. It appears to be the best translation in this chapter.

    Lastly we have mar’eh which appears 11 times. It is used as a general reference to the four creatures, immediately followed by the statement that they had the form of a man, four faces, four wings, etc. In verse l3 there is the mar’eh of lightning, which does not have “form” as such. In verse l4 we have the mar’eh of lightning again. The mar’eh of the wheels was as the sparkle of tarshish, etc. The mar’eh of the wheels was as if a wheel were within a wheel. Ezekiel sees the mar’eh of sapphire which resolves itself into the form of a throne. There is the form of the mar’eh of a man, and the mar’eh of fire, the mar’eh of a rainbow, and the mar’eh of a gleaming. In only one of these cases would “form” be an appropriate translation. That is verse 16, with regard to the wheels.

    In verse 13, however, the situation is reversed. The “coals of fire burning like lightning” could hardly be described as having “form”. The scribe, seeing Ezekiel’s normal use of the words could easily have added mar’eh in the margin to indicate that this would be a better word to employ here.

  • 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!

  • Defending the Originals

    Keep an eye on if i were a bell, i’d ring for more on this. He just attended a conference and has those intellectual juices flowing.

  • Bringing Textual Variant Statistics Under Control

    Dan Wallace has started a series (actually he did so last week), on textual variants in the New Testament. His first article The Number of Textual Variants: An Evangelical Miscalculation deals with the definition of a textual variant and then with an estimate of the total number of textual variants in the New Testament text. The second deals with the nature of these variants.

    Information about textual variants is abused constantly in discussions both within and about Christianity. Dr. Wallace is setting about providing a basis for correcting some of these abuses. The number of variants is cited raw as evidence that one cannot trust the Bible. The number of manuscripts is cited as evidence of the historical reliability of the New Testament. Yet both of these uses miss the mark. The first fails to take into account the nature of the variants, which Dr. Wallace begins to do in his second article. (I will link to the next part when it appears). The second, is based on the false premise that one can demonstrate the veracity of a document based on the number of times it is copied.

    At the same time, the number of manuscripts and the number of variants can be used to demonstrate the likelihood that we do, in fact, have something close to the original text of the New Testament. Wallace contends that meaningful, viable variants constitute less than 1% of the total variants, and he may be generous in that estimate. The vast majority of the New Testament text is not even disputed.

    Note, of course, that neither the number of variants, nor the number of manuscripts, actually impacts the historicity of the autograph. These statistics form the basis for our best measure of how accurate our current copies are, information that we need in studying the now absent autographs.

    I use the fact that there are some substantial variants in my book When People Speak for God in discussing inerrancy. Modern proponents of inerrancy assert inerrancy of the autographs, and believe that inerrancy is a necessary characteristic if one is to assert any authority for scripture. I challenge this on the basis that we do not have the autographs, yet many of us do, in fact, accept the authority of the scripture as we have it.

    This relates to Wallace’s third category, which he describes thus:

    The third category are those variants that can affect the meaning in a significant way but have a very poor pedigree. A classic example is 1 John 5.7 in the King James Bible (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”). This reading is not found in any manuscripts prior to the 12th century, and even then it is found as a marginal reading written by a scribe several centuries later than the original scribe wrote. . . .

    The paragraph continues with the sparse representation of this reading. Certainly no modern textual critic would be likely to argue that 1 John 5:7-8 as read in the KJV is an original reading. Yet many people have used Bibles that contain that disputed passage, and seen them as authoritative. In other words, inerrancy is not needed for authority, and in fact, very, very few people have had an inerrant Bible, even if inerrancy of the autographs is essential.

    I believe the Bible is adequately preserved for it’s intended purpose, and that we do not need to possess an inerrant Bible for that purpose.

    Having digressed into my side interest, the value of Dr. Wallace’s work is that he is so thorough in his basic scholarship that you can often evaluate opponents’ work by reading his summary of their view. Thus while I will disagree with some conclusions, the basic work is exceptional. He is doing a great service in going over this basic information. Many church members are quite confused on the subject of textual criticism, and what it means or does not mean, for the reliability of the Bibles they hold in their hands.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Summary and Conclusion

    This is the conclusion of my multi-part series responding to Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus. Here are links to the earlier portions of this series:

    In chapter 7, The Social Worlds of the Text, Ehrman discusses how the social situation in the early church shaped changes that were made to the text. In particular he discusses the status of women, and mentions several instances of textual change that relate to it. Amongst these are Junia/Junias in Romans 16:7, and the prohibition for women teaching in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36.

    Next he discusses the relationship of Christians and Jews. Some alterations in the text make the Jews look bad. By the 2nd century, Christians were a separate religion, and often engaged in polemic against Judaism.

    Finally he discusses paganism and apologetic alterations to the text. He provides numerous illustrations in each case.

    One of his major points in this section is to show how the scribes were human beings whose world shaped the way in which they transmitted the text, and thus to some extent the text itself. When you hold a Bible in your hands, you hold the complex product of numerous people, each of whom have had a small part in shaping the text you will read.

    Conclusion

    It is in the conclusion that a differ significantly from Ehrman’s view. In technical terms, he is certainly expert, and he displays that expertise throughout the book. As a popularizer, he is clearly one of the best. I have not seen a clearer explanation of the basics of New Testament textual criticism for the non-scholar.

    The fundamental difference in our conclusions results not from the content, but from our starting points. I begin with the view that inspiration is something that happens to people, and that people express that inspiration in various forms, including text. While a person experiences God, individually or in community, the expression of that experience is distinctly human.

    Ehrman seems to accept the standard evangelical view of Biblical inspiration that assumes that God’s breathing of scripture is essentially the impartation of data to be expressed in words.

    How radical are the changes?

    If you see inspiration as involving the impartation of data to be accurately expressed in words, and expect those words themselves to be divine, then the alteration of such words must come as a shock. This is the experience expressed by Bart Ehrman in his conclusion. He sees the changes as radical and important because they alter the words, and to him the words are the vehicle of inspiration, or in the end of the lack of it.

    For me these changes are not nearly so radical, because I assume that the writers chose their own words, and in most cases their own facts. Thus alterations are interesting, but neither shocking nor dismaying. If one studies a broad enough basis of the text, one can get to who Matthew, Luke, John, or Paul really were, and to me that is the key to inspiration. God spoke to the community through these people in a special way and I want to get to know them.

    One quotation will illustrate this point:

    In particular, as I said at the outset, I began seeing the New Testament as a very human book. The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it. Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted “born-again” Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. . . . (p. 211)

    I would like to point out one other thing, however, and that is that those who argue Biblical inerrancy, with or without verbal plenary inspiration, as it applies to the autographs do need to respond to the issue of the relevance of such inspiration. What is the importance of the inerrancy of a document we do not possess? If we can deal with 98% accuracy in the Bibles we actually have, why would the discovery that the autographs were also only 98% accurate suddenly be a devastating blow to the authority of the Bible?

    This is why it seems to me that the doctrine of inerrancy of the autographs is more a doctrine about God than about the accuracy or authority of God’s communication. What the doctrine says is that God is perfect. Certainly, I can agree with that. But that still seems irrelevant, because the issue is how well did human authors comprehend what God revealed to them?

    Dependence on Scholars

    On one last issue I think that Ehrman makes a particularly good point. I have heard many people express either the desire to be completely independent of Biblical scholarship or even the feeling that they are independent. Sometimes these are people who do not even read the source languages, much less work with the manuscripts to determine the text. When we consider context, the history and culture that stands behind the text, many more specialized fields come into play, and nobody is able to be proficient in all of those areas. All of us are dependent at some point on the scholarship of others.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus VII

    . . . in which, of course, I respond to chapter 6. I will post a directory to the whole series of responses, with the final entry, but in the meantime you will get the series by choosing category “Textual Criticism” in the right sidebar. There are other entries in that category, but all the most recent ones are in this series.

    In chapter 6, Theologically Motivated Alterations of the Text, Ehrman looks at some specific points of theology and the way in which scribes altered, or tried to alter the text in opposition to those viewpoints. In our surviving texts, he notes, we don’t have many non-orthodox alterations, because it was the orthodox who won the day, and their texts were the ones that were preserved.

    He discusses three theological points which engendered theologically motivated changes: Adoptionist christology (Adoptionism in Wikipedia), docetic christology (Docetism in Wikipedia), and separationist christology. Adoptionism holds that Jesus was not born the son of God but was adopted, docetic christology holds that Jesus merely appeared to be human and to suffer as a human, but in fact, it was all just an illusion, while separationism suggested that Jesus was completely separated from God when he died, i.e. his divinity did not suffer death with his humanity.

    In each case, these anti-orthodox positions resulted in changes. These alterations to the text did not change the theology in a major way, but in the likely view of the scribes who made the changes they prevented people from interpreting a passage in an unorthodox way.

    I would simply make two notes on this chapter. First, it’s easy to make too much of such changes. The defense, as I frequently like to say, is never to base theology on a single text, but rather on an overall message an author is trying to present. Second, the abundance of Greek manuscripts lets us get behind this type of changes.

    I do agree with Ehrman that these types of alterations should be of concern if one holds a verbal plenary view of inspiration. If the individual words are so critical, as opposed to the overall message, then how could God allow the inspired words to be replaced wholesale? It’s easy to say that the abundance of manuscripts means that we can get at the original texts with a high degree of accuracy, but what about all those believers who used the various flawed manuscripts? What about the English speaking church before the ERV? (Note that the ERV used the Westcott and Hort text, and thus corrected numerous inaccuracies in the KJV.)

    I am absolutely comfortable saying that one can access God’s message via scripture, but when that message is reduced to the word by word level, i.e. if every word is important, then the state of the manuscripts is problematic.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus VI

    . . . in which, quite logically, I discuss chapter 5. 🙂

    In Chapter 5, originals that matter, Ehrman first introduces the basics of textual criticism and tells us how textual decisions are made. This good overview, as he notes, will not prepare you to make textual decisions for yourself, but it will let you know how scholars function as they decide which variant to use in an eclectic text, and similarly which variant to translate in a Bible version.

    Ehrman then discusses three textual variants with theological significance and in each case he disagrees the the general consensus on the appropriate text. These texts are:

    • Mark 1:41
    • Luke 22:43-44
    • Hebrews 2:8-9

    I have surveyed modern versions on these with some interesting results. I’m going to survey just a few translations, and then give my own opinion on each one. Ehrman deals with the theological and interpretive issues quite well in his discussion on each of these. My interest in this section is whether the non-scholar has ready access to this information. Please note that where I list translations supporting each option, I am not being exhaustive. Each list is a subset of the subset of translations I am using for this quick comparison. In each case a subscript f indicates that the translation in question indicates the alternate choice in a footnote.

    Mark 1:41

    The issue here is whether Jesus “had compassion” on the leper or “was angry/indignant.” The evidence for this variant is presented in the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, 4th Edition (UBSIV), which is a common starting point for Bible translations, though note that most English versions make their own specific textual decisions and do not follow a particular Greek edition. UBSIV places “compassion” in the text and gives it a “B” rating.

    The following translations support “compassion”: CEVf, ESV, KJV, NLTf, NRSVf, NETf, NKJV.

    The following support “angry”: TNIVf, REBf

    The best note here is in the NET. A strong case can be made for “angry” but the dominant reading in English translations is “compassion.”

    Luke 22:43-44

    Here the issue is the presence or absence of verses 43 and 44. Ehrman argues that the original text probably did not include those verses.

    Versions including 43-44: ESVf, NKJV, KJV, CEVf, NLTf, REBf, TNIVf

    Versions marking 43-44 in some way: NRSVf, NETf

    Versions excluding 43-44: None

    Again, the NET is to be congratulated on an excellent footnote. I would suggest that those who do not know Biblical languages but want to go deep into the text should access that version. It is available in an excellent online edition at NEXT Bible.

    Hebrews 2:8-9

    In this case the question is whether in verse nine it should say that Jesus tasted death “by the grace of God” or “apart from God.”

    Versions supporting “by the grace of God”: REBf, TNIV, NKJV, KJV, ESV, NRSVf, CEV, NLT, NET.

    No version supports “without God.” UBSIV rates “by the grace of God” as an A reading.

    In this last case, the NET does not include a footnote.

    Conclusions

    I would conclude two things from this. First, in most cases, one can access significant textual differences through various English versions. While the NET has the best notes for the first two examples, it has none for the last, which is only noted by the NRSV and the REB. This is a good argument for using multiple versions and reading the footnotes.

    In addition, if people paid more attention to the resources available to them things that Ehrman points out in his book would be much less shocking to them.

    Discussed in study notes (Learning Bible, Oxford Annotated, Oxford Study)

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus V

    In chapter 4 of Misquoting Jesus, The Quest for Origins: Methods and Discoveries (pp. 101-125), Ehrman moves to important but slightly less engaging material. This chapter is important in laying out the basic history of textual criticism, and how Biblical scholars began the move from the corrupt Textus Receptus to a better critical text.

    Many of the debates these scholars engaged in over the centuries are similar to debates that still continue today. Even though it is well established that there are numerous textual variants, people still try to create ad hoc arguments for why the text behind the KJV is the best text, or why one can somehow ignore all these variants.

    The key element of this chapter is the discussion of Westcott and Hort’s textual methodology and where it differs from modern practices. Westcott and Hort are unduly blamed for many elements of modern textual criticism. It is appropriate to grant them a substantial place in the history of textual criticism, and to give them credit where credit is due. They pulled together principles from the work of others, brought them to completion, and produced an excellent critical text.

    Their substantial work is often used in ad hominem attacks on the modern text, as though by proving Westcott and Hort to be unorthodox in some way, one could prove that modern eclectic texts such as UBSIV or NA27 are also of no value. First, of course, such an ad hominem attack is clearly unjustified especially when all the building blocks are available for study. Only someone without the ability to deal with the substantial evidence available would resort to an ad hominem attack under the circumstances.

    Second, while Westcott and Hort were pioneers in the science and art of textual criticism, their methods have been considerably refined and improved, so that saying a modern eclectic text is essentially like that of Westcott and Hort is inaccurate. Ehrman outlines the differences at the end of this chapter (123-125).