Yeah, the popular meaning and the technical meaning diverge a bit.
Good point. It was common that people looked to teachers to explain the text; it was a Roman thing, too – they considered a “living voice” to have more authority and even truth than what was written.
There was a professor in grad school who maintained that Mark took notes from what Peter related about Jesus, then had to flee Rome before he was finished, and that someone else organized and finished it. This would actually fit how authorship was viewed; an editor/redactor could add to a set of pieces by someone else and the work could still be credited to the original writer.
That’s something that professor used to support his position. He conjectured that it was finished by someone in Antioch.
As for the coin thing, it occurs to me that in order to try to trap Jesus the Jewish leaders could have put some effort into finding an objectionable coin.
Reminds me of a response to a student complaint that a citation by Paul didn’t match the Septuagint: “Do not assume that Paul’s Septuagint was the same as what we have”.
It’s telling me I have to buy it! ???
So I registered, and then it said: “You do not currently have access to this content.”
Which is weird because I read a dozen or so articles there a month.
So I reloaded and now it says both of those things.
In the light Jesus is predicting the great tribulation and temple destruction I find it hard to believe Matt, Mark, Luke were written after AD 70 without mentioning that Jesus was right and that all these things happened. It sounds like predicting the past.
It seems that the problem is that these books did not start out in their final form. They were probably copied, edited and revised as they were passed along by bodies of believers, and not being considered scripture at the time but rather more memory aids, that was appropriate. They only became scripture through that process of refinement and usage.
Except the argument is usually made that the first time things were written down, (lets say 70 AD ish but even as late as 90 ADish) it was still within the lifetimes of some living eye-witnesses to the events, and hence core facts of the written account could be “fact checked” against living memories. This is not to say that living memory is perfect (and I am not an “inerrantist” by the strict definition), but this certainly is not like a long game of “playing telephone” where oral tradition was passed along for decades from one early church congregation to another without any ability to “fact check” the key claims.
As the centuries rolled on, with manuscript evidence, we can see where scribal errors and additions crept in. But even textual critics like Bart Ehrman say that one can “largely reconstruct” what the original first century text would have looked like.
Yes, but that same process would occur not like a book that is edited and the final copy sent to the publisher, but rather as part of a process that involved decades of transmission and copying, and only long afterwards was accepted as scripture, or quoted by the early church fathers.
I am probably much less “mystical” about the writing of scripture and the process of canonization than many here. I see human influences all over the text and in no way think it was drafted as a finely-edited textbook. (nor do I think God intended to transmit a “perfect book” to us). To me “scripture” is what the early church organically considered to be the most reliable witness to Jesus, not entailing any super-sacred type of writing per se. So the key question for me is “to what extent does it transmit reliable enough testimony about the historical life and character of Jesus”? Then, my goal is to “follow Jesus as the inerrant word”, not stake my faith on a supposedly inerrant text.
You say above that it involved “decades of transmission”. Yes–but depending on when one pegs the writing, only 3-4 decades orally before it was written down and during the period where events could still be fact-checked by those reading the first text(s). Later written transmission certainly involved scribal changes and errors, but even skeptical textual critics say that such changes can be tracked, to a large degree… although not perfectly.
This reminds me that the Orthodox have no problem admitting that much of what John wrote is a construct designed to convey Jesus’ message without necessarily using Jesus’ actual words – in short, they recognize that the fourth Gospel is a theological treatise (thus he is always “St. John the Theologian”) and not really history, a form of bios biography meant not to convey perfectly accurate details of a person’s life but to present the meaning of that life.
I’m struggling to understand why you are maintaining this… there is no “final form” of these books, nor were they “passed along” in some sort of linear progression. There are numerous “final forms” that date from antiquity, and comparing them through the established tools and methods of textual criticism can give us an extremely high degree of certainty that there were not the kinds of widespread, substantial, undetectable revisions happening that you are suggesting.
All the divergent, rather early fragments of New Testament manuscripts, their raw number and geographic distribution, copies in different languages, and the copious quotes from the New Testament in other early Christian writings… they all confirm 1) that there simply wasn’t the kind of widespread revision taking place that you seem to suggest, and 2) any cases where someone did attempt this kind of revision is easily detectable due to discrepancies in our multiple early extant manuscripts.
unless I’m misunderstanding you, you seem to be envisioning something like a linear transmission of the text, one open to a revision simply getting incorporated into the next iteration without any trace… Something like like the old “telephone game”, where any change gets transmitted to the next iteration, in a linear progression, and no real way of knowing how close the “final form” of the communication was to the original. … as if only one copy was made of a New Testament autograph, held by the community, which was free to make significant revisions before they passed on a single copy to the next generation or body of believers, who were similarly free to make major revisions without detection…
But remember, the reality is much more like a branching family tree where each generation had say 10 children or so… so you need to compare your “revision” scenario to a major, substantial, genetic modification or mutation that occurred in only one of an ancestor’s ten children… if so, then if you examined some random selection of this person’s 10,000 great-great-grandchildren, you would find said mutation in only around 10% of them, and it would be beyond obvious that the genetic feature in question had not been part of the original ancestor’s genome. This is comparable to what we have with the sheer number of extant ancient manuscripts.
John’s originally penned gospel would have had perhaps dozens of copies made from that original within the lifetime of the autograph, these copies which would have been distributed across the Roman empire… the earliest fragment we have having been found in Egypt. Any significant, substantial “revisions” someone made to the text they had access to when they made the copy of the copy, even within that first generation, would be detectable to us as these revisions would appear only in certain manuscript families but not in others.
Again, this is how we can relatively easily detect when certain revisions were attempted… because the “revision” can be found in some extant manuscripts but not others. And the sheer amount of available data makes it extremely unlikely that any such revisions as you seem to be suggesting could have snuck by unnoticed without any textual evidence.
I’m no fan of Bart Ehrman, but his observation about the raw number of manuscripts is germane:
We have something like 5,700 manuscripts of the New Testament—from small fragments of tiny parts of a single book to complete copies of the entire New Testament – in the Greek language in which they were originally written, along with manuscripts in many other ancient languages (for example, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic). That is good news indeed—the more manuscripts you have, the more likely it is that you can figure out what the authors originally said.
OK, What is the earliest copy of a gospel that you can find to compare from these numerous final forms you mention? You will find that there are a few fragments dated in the second century. None from the first century, So, even if placed on parchment, there was a process of refinement that occurred over those years, something attested to by Luke in his introduction to his gospel. evidently he found the earlier attempts to be incomplete or lacking, so wrote his gospel to bring it together. His gospel then is a product of that process of refinement and editing, and of looking at past events through the lens of retrospection.
Their culture was not our culture. Most people could not read, and their culture was oral. The gospel was transmitted orally and by different voices, sometimes in conflict, as attested by Paul. The gospels were written, not as newspapers about current events, but as a means to order and preserve those stories whose witnesses were dying off.
Yes, there are a lot of manuscripts from the early church. That is a good thing and attests to their unity and the work of the Holy Spirit in maintaining it. but look at their dates and consider how they came to be.
I’m not sure if I’m being clear… the earliest extant copies of these gospels are these “final forms” I’m speaking of… there is no one recognized (extant) “final form” of Luke’s gospel. (Textual criticism, comparing the differences between these manuscripts according to that science, helps us confirm with high certainty what the original text was, the consensus of these methods is what we have in our English Bibles today, but it is an amalgam, or composite…, each discrepancy is judged independently as to which of these manuscripts was likely most accurate to the original… it doesn’t depend on any one single extant “final form”)
In Luke’s case, there is a mostly complete papyrus from ~175-225, and there are four copies I believe in codices that date to ~300-450 or so.
These 5 or so early “final forms” have such numerous (albeit rather insignificant) discrepancies between them that that it confirms they are from different manuscript families… i.e., none if them were dependent on another or had an immediate common source.
hence to my previous illustration… examining these manuscripts would be like examining the genomes of a half dozen great-great-great-grandchildren of a common ancestor organism to try to reconstruct the ancestor’s genome. the minor mutations or divergences between them confirm they came from different branches of the family entirely. but this process would also alert the researcher to any significant intentional genetic modification in an early descendent after the original ancestor, as said feature would be present only in some, but not all, of the divergent families.
And hence, any significant revision attempted by someone after Luke’s autograph had been written would be found in some, but not all, of these various manuscript families we have extant.
Unless i am misunderstanding, I fear you’re still thinking of this in a linear fashion… consider the difficulty involved:
Any such “refinement” made to a copy of Luke’s gospel in Rome in say c. 125 AD would not have been made to the copy of the gospel they had in Alexandria, or Jerusalem, or Ephesus, etc. hence the “descendents” of those various copies that we do have extant… only some of them would reflect any such so-called refinements, and they would be easily detectable (and thus discarded by textual critics).
Now if all you’re talking about is any such refinement that occurred before (or as) Luke penned his autograph of the gospel, that is a different topic altogether… No debate whatsoever that Luke himself edited, arranged, selected, or otherwise refined his sources in composing his gospel. No significant disagreement there.
but that question is completely unrelated to how early our earliest manuscripts are, how much time existed between the autograph and our earliest extant copies, or any such untraceable refinement in the decades or centuries after the autograph was written.
in short, i have no major dispute with the idea of various refinement of earlier sources before (or as) the autographs of the gospels were written.
but the idea that some such similar untraceable “refinement” could have continued across the decades after the autographs were written but before our earliest extant copies, is simply impossible. Textual criticism of the divergent manuscript families from the wide range of extant mss would immediately reveal any such attempt at refinement in the decades after the autograph was written as such refinements would only be present in some mss families.
Sounds reasonable. No real problem after we have written copies. The question is how did we get there, since they are fairly late. And of course, what point in the process did inspiration occur. Was it in the writing or in the earlier oral transmission, or in the collective memories of the witnesses that came together and shared their experiences?
and hence the point of this thread… (you state this as if it is undisputed fact?)… Plenty of scholars dispute the later dates… and I personally also dispute the methods of the scholarship behind those late dates. if the early/traditional date and composition of Acts at ~62 AD accepted, due to the abrupt end, etc., then we have Luke being written at least a bit earlier, well within the timeframe of having heard from eyewitnesses, and also pushing writing of Mark (and Luke!s other non-extant written sources) back into the 50s… were not talking about vast time between the writing and the events.
i don’t feel so strongly myself, as, if it is inspired by God to be authoritative and inerrant Scripture then it doesn’t matter to me how long after the events it was written… but i have noticed the tendency of critical scholars to associate late dates with less reliability… and as noted before, I just don’t see any good reasons beyond the antisupernatural basis for moving the dates so late when there are common sense straightforward reasons otherwise (abrupt end, “we” section of Acts, etc.)
All the other reasons for late dates offered strike me as hypothetical speculations which already depend on the assumption of a late date, an assumption that these critical scholars have to make a priori due to the inherent bias… while all the evidence for early dates must be rejected without consideration by these scholars due to the same bias.
Lewis once made the passing illustration regarding a different topic…
A historian who has based his work on the misreading of a document may afterwards (when his mistake has been exposed) exercise great ingenuity in showing that his account of a certain battle can still be reconciled with what the document records. But the point is that none of these ingenious explanations would ever have come into existence if he had read his documents correctly at the outset.
This is a good sense as to how i see so many of these arguments for the later dates… once they have read the account and assumed no predictions can occur, and assigned late dates to the gospels, no doubt they can “exercise great ingenuity” and show how the gospels are consistent with the later dates. (But would those late dates have even been proposed in the first place if not for the bias against miraculous predictions being the starting point?)
Another thing that gives me pause… consider that for some time some learned critical scholars assigned the date of the book of John well into the 160s or 170s or so, with all the similar sounding arguments of how well it fit with that timeframe of the church’s development, etc… all the similar erudite, well researched, scholarly opinion of the late second century date, until that fragment of the gospel was found dating back to ~125 or so showing by the circulation all the way to Egypt that it had been written significantly earlier.
In some circles, there is also a speculative assumption that the texts were composed or rewritten as an answer to a need later in the history of the church. For example, if the Roman emperor or some other serious opponent of correct faith said something, there was a need to have a writing that counteracted what the opponents said. At that point, there emerged a writing of an authoritative person with the hoped content. This kind of very critical ‘Sitz im Leben’-type interpretation is just wild imagination, dressed in the form of ‘serious’ theology. I do not know if such assumptions are common anymore among professional theologians but they exist.
The Ryland’s fragment can date to 200 CE just as easily as 125. Brent Nongri has written on this. Not to mention paleographic dating in general has a large plus or minus associated with it. You seem to accept the 125 dating uncritically. Why not be critical of haphazard paleographic dating methods that often end up circular? You seem to criticize critical scholarship just not when some of it tells you something you want to hear?
John could have been copied and sent to
Egypt anytime after it was written. How long it would have taken to get there or why and when that copy was made are anyone’s guess. We don’t have to posit a generation for dissemination and spread. That is speculative and unnecessary. Why or how not got there is unknown.
Not to mention you are appealing to centuries old scholarship like it has anything to do with modern Biblical scholarship. Why? Many critical scholars find source material older than 20 years to generally be dated now.
A couple of centuries ago, it became fashionable in biblical scholarship to assign very late dates to John. For example, the famed German scholar F. C. Baur (1792-1860) dated it to between A.D. 160 and A.D. 170 (The Church History of the First Three Centuries 1:163-164, 175).
Because some scholars 200 years ago were incorrect on John’s date, all critical scholars are suspect? The arguments are not at all similar. Maybe one. You are offering nothing of substance, only apologetical deflection. I might as well respond with: Some Christians absurdly think the Bible is inerrant. So let me just dismiss all Christian arguments out of hand. No one cares about how John was dated 200 years ago outside historical curiosity except apologists trying to poison the well.
Yes, many scholars do date the works earlier. Most do not. Luke-Acts has a strong school for an early date and an equally strong and growing school for a much later 2nd century date. The centrist position still sways the most (maybe out of habit?). But the text of yours I put in bold is the real issue to me. I’d say your supernatural bias (“my gospels are early and stem directly from the eyewitnesses chosen by Jesus”) is more pronounced than any anti-supernatural temple argument. I’d be more inclined to trust the judgments of critical scholars who don’t believe in magic when doing history than pew warmers who think their holy book is inerrant and infallible in every detail. Many Christians need or greatly want the gospels to be historically reliable and trustworthy because they tell us about Jesus. When our faith depends on a positive judgment, it’s kind of hard to take conservative scholarship seriously isn’t it? This is a text-book definition of bias. Apologetics is the opposite of truth-seeking. It’s just making facts fit beliefs. See, it’s not hard to poison the well. We can’t trust any Christian scholars or any non-Christian scholars. I guess no one is trustworthy. Or maybe we should just stick to the arguments and steel man them. Something you don’t do.
There are common sense reasons why Acts doesn’t narrate Rome killing its heroes. These were articulated in this thread multiple times. You might not want them to be true but they answer your argument satisfactorily. One has to look at all the evidence for dating a text, not put all their eggs into this one tenuous basket. Your arguments for an early date is 100% hypothetical, apologetical and based purely on silence. Arguing from what an exegete did not write in a text is highly speculative. You are arguing based one what is not actually written and we have no idea why it’s not there (and this assumes Acts doesn’t allude to Paul’s death—something we cannot prove that it doesn’t).
Speaking of common straightforward reasons, the Greek of 1-2 Peter, its theology and use of the Septuagint, and the good Greek and complex theology of the Gospel of John aren’t good straightforward reasons to suspect they were not written by “unlettered” (per the inerrant and infallible text of Acts which apparently stems from direct, apostolic eyewitness recollection) Galilean fishermen? No, instead we will claim they used secretaries who were apparently, more responsible for the content of the text itself than the apostolic figures we tack on.
Not to mention your whole argument is comptely wrong. Most Biblical scholars are probably Christian and don’t have an anti-supernatural bias. They still date the gospels late. You are making it out like there are a bunch of atheists somehow infiltrating scholarship. The standard dating of the Gospels is held to by an enormous number of pious Christian scholars who do not have anti-supernatural biases. They just try to do history objectively and realize the oh so common sensual notion that Jesus can be prescient and Mark can date after the temple’s destruction. But conservatives like Cartesian dualism, either ors, black
or whites and no shades of grey. Unless of course we are dealing with potential errors in the Bible.
Yes they would, as Kloppenborg, Goodacre and others have shown. Mark reads very well in a post-70 context. That is when the irony actually works. Not to mention there of probably tons of ex eventu prophecy historians reconstruct outside the Bible Christians would never bat an eye at. Jesus has nothing to do with this argument.
One, changes made to any text very early could dominate the manuscript record.
Two: We have quite a few examples of alterations to the texts before the manuscript record. Many smaller proposed interpolations and larger examples such as one of Paul’s letters being several.
Three, I think the Western text of Acts (which dates very early) would like to have a word with you as well.
Four, What does an autograph even mean? How do we know the biblical authors didn’t revise their own works or publish them in stages? How do we know what alterations were made to the copies in their first generation, centuries before any manuscript evidence?
Five, If Marcion could truncate a gospel (if he actually did this) so could anyone before him—or expand one. This could be so early it could dominate the textual record. I mean, in our own canon we can see how the text of Mark was treated. This is speculative but you are calling this impossible.
Mark was turned into Matthew and Luke within a generation. John may have taken all these works and spun them his own way. This is not a scribal copying issue but just shows how quickly someone could use a text as a model, alter it and become very popular. It’s possible that original text could be swallowed up and disappear from history. This could happen to any work and if the revision or majorly edited copy is more popular it could be the only one that survives. In an absence of evidence (150 years of very little data) it’s difficult to know. We don’t know the exact compositional history or the full first generation dissemination of most Christian works and whether or not they extend to a single, early archetype (but more on this below).
Six, what do you mean by textual families? Text types are seemingly outdated now. Video by Peter Gurry:
Article on now disregarded text types:
What is also interesting is how you use incorrect antiquated views by some scholars who dated John late to cast doubt on critical scholarship but you don’t extend the same criticism to textual scholars who have been operating under now mostly rejected notion of “text types” for a long time? These conservative textual scholars have told us the NT is reliable textually but look, they had this whole house of sand built on text types that new data has shown to be false. So why don’t you dump out their scholarship and hold them suspect like you do critical scholars who tell you things you don’t want to hear? This is silly.
I mean even the seminal work by Metzer, a giant in the field of textual criticism is throughly steeped in these text families. Should we then not trust textual scholars because some of them made errors and operated under fuzzy definitions that were exposed when new data and technology became available?
Here is another interesting snippet from that article:
Yes, some German scholars got some things wrong about John’s date. Textual scholars got some things wrong too. Being open to change and revision is the hallmark of science and truth seeking. Having all the answers going in, mocking and rejecting that which disagrees with you out of hand, forcing it all to fit your a priori view through harmonization and trying to poison wells is not.
That CS Lewis article is so dated as well. It preaches to an uncritical choir that doesn’t know any better.
The issue there is the history of the New Testament.
Have you studied the “story” of the KJV bible?
The fact (and i mean fact) that it was passed down from generation to generation via an unregulated and unrelated control mechanism…then hundreds of years later compared with other translations and found to have not changed even a bit from the other autograph…that proves the opposite of such a claim.
The comparison i am talking about of course was the discovery of Sinaiticus in St Catherin’s monastry in 1844.
The reality is that what we now know as a result of Sinaiticus, is that the original autograph has remained largely unchanged for the entirety of its existence.
To add to the above, the finding of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1956 was a truly incredible proof of the consistent protection of the original autographs by Gods people over the ages. These scrolls added the Old Testament autograph test into the equation and proved beyond any doubt that the bible has not been corrupted.
In addition to the above, given we know that the prophet Isaiah most likely lived about 800 years before Christ. We can conclude with a great deal of certainty that what we have has been faithfully and accurately copied for the better part of 3000 years! (it does not matter when Isaiah was actually written btw…its still a record of his life experiences 9-8th century B.C)
Finally, whilst Bart Erhman makes the claim that the bible is full of errors and that the original autographs must be considerably different to what we have today…a number of very well known scholars have completely demolished Bart Erhmans claims there…and they have done that comprehensively. The real evidence shows that Barts claims of errors are insignificant and amount to less than 1% of the bible and of that 1%, not a single claimed scribal error changes any bible doctrine, theology, or historicity…not a single one!
Even the Pericope Adulterae (John 7:51-8:11), whilst generally accepted to be not written as part of Johns gospel in its first draft, it is accepted that this event did happen and that John probably was the one who recorded it as a later addition, and therefore is canonical.
What i find interesting is that even though codex Sinaiticus was lost to the ages, when it was eventually found there are some surprising differences in some of the writings that show the knowledge of variations that sometimes are and sometimes were not included in those texts when compared with later bible translations such as the KJV (Pericope Adulterae, Johannine comma, long ending in Mark). What is says to me is that the early scribes who copied controlled translations such as Sinaiticus were often aware of variations we find in the KJV which was written many hundreds of years later. The question is, how could they have known and made recognition of the differences in early manuscripts such as Sinaiticus or papyri 66 etc, if one or more of those so-called “corrupt variations/errors” came hundreds of years later in the Textus Receptus and finally the KJV?
For example, we know that Vaticanus has left a very specific and intentional space after Mark 16:8…its plainly obvious its scribes knew of the longer ending for Mark which is found in the KJV and so it is nonsense that the KJV record of the longer ending in Mark is a copy error of the ages!
So what’s the point exactly of my above response…
The point is, any claim that we can discount parts of the bible as non literal simply because of perceived changes or scribal errors is not reconcilable with the history of the bible autograph…ie its not supported by the actual facts (eg papyri 66, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Dead Sea scrolls).
I will not go into the other argument often presented with your type of response…the masorectic text and the Torah. Im just focusing on the New Testament historicity because that is where the passages of scripture are found that I use to answer the dilemmas posted by TEists in relation to the validity of a literal reading of Genesis 1-11 (ie Matthew 24, Luke 17, and 2 Peter 2).
Interesting information. There is one caveat in the analyses, I do not know how well the manuscript cluster tool or the studies have taken this into account.
All differences in manuscript variants are not as informative. Particular type of copying errors happen more often than others and are expected to happen in all lineages. In clustering analyses, these common copying errors act as background noise that makes it less likely to identify the underlying patterns - the signal is masked by background noise. What these common copying errors may also do is that poorly copied manuscripts (lots of common errors) are clustered close to each others, instead of being identified within their correct lineages. To correct the effect of this type of common copying errors, the most common, practically trivial copying errors should be excluded from the analyses. Analyses in which the most common copying errors have been excluded can then be compared to the analyses utilizing all textual differences. This would reveal the clustering of the manuscripts (lineages) in a more informative and convincing way.
If this kind of refined analyses have not been done, the conclusions based on the clustering analyses are not convincing.
If the key results would remain the same in the refined analyses, it would be interesting to think what these results reveal about the history of the manuscript lineages. There are necessarily some lineages as a manuscript copy is based on an earlier manuscript. Could it be that copies of particular manuscripts (variants) were more widely distributed than previously assumed, so that for example in Alexandria, there were manuscripts coming from different parts of the empire? That would explain why manuscripts copied in one place (e.g. Alexandria) would not form an evident cluster.
If the above speculation about the wide geographic spread of variants would be true, clusters could reflect barriers affecting movements and persecution, for example political, geographic or language barriers or regional campaignes to eradicate Christian literature. A regional campaigne to eradicate Christian literature could be compared to a regional bottleneck in population size, leading to the survival of only one or few genetical lineages within that region. This is a hypothesis that could be tested.
You are aware, are you not, that there are 5 different versions of the KJV. And given that it was a printed book is the reason it was passed down with no changes, after the last change that is.
Given the DSS don’t match any of the previously known manuscripts shows our texts have been changed. The question is are the changes great enough to actually make a difference.
Given the only evidence of the event is the pericope itself there is no actual evidence it did happen.
And it is missing from Sinaiticus which I guess is included in your “surprising differences.”
The location also changed over time with it first appearing at the end of John and finally some scribe decided it fitted better in it’s current location. So no it doesn’t appear this was a revision by John.
“The biblical scrolls from Qumran, dated 250 BC to AD 68, take the dating of available biblical manuscripts back a thousand years or more. Remarkably, many of these ancient scrolls closely match the medieval Masoretic Text tradition, which modern Hebrew and English Bibles are based upon, confirming the biblical text has been faithfully preserved for all these centuries” What the Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal about the Bible’s Reliability
It seems that you have a near complete bible version that predates them. I just cant wait for you to produce it. With the exception of i think Ester and Nehemiah, the complete Hebrew bible is contained in DSS.
If they prove copy consistency. Then it seems youre in trouble with that claim.
