Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts
Matthew Ferguson has been blogging
brilliantly lately on how to study the New Testament from the
perspective of classical literature (just check out his blog;
you’ll find weeks of must-read articles lined up there, all fascinating
stuff). But even his older stuff is awesome. Way back in 2012 he
published Leveling a Mountain of Manuscripts with a Small Scoop of Context,
and it long reminded me of how non-experts can be manipulated by
Christian apologists, because laypeople don’t know basic things about
paleography that we experts take for granted (so much that we forget not
everyone is aware of them). This includes new things, developments in the field, that aren’t found in most books because those books were written a decade ago or more.
Christian apologists exploit this fact often. Just as when they keep citing “experts on Josephus” saying the Testimonium Flavianum
(or TF) must derive from some authentic core, even though the “experts”
they are citing are either long dead or expressed their only opinions
on the matter a decade ago or more and may have changed their minds
since—because more recent developments have radically altered the data;
and only experts aware of those developments can have informed opinions
worth counting. For example, a flurry of positive opinion arose about
ten or twenty years ago from excess enthusiasm over the purported
discovery of an earlier version of the text in Arabic translation that
supposedly “proved” the passage predated Eusebius and said something
different. But by 2008 that “discovery” had been debunked in the peer
reviewed literature by Josephus expert Alice Whealey: that Arabic translation was in fact of a Syriac translation of Eusebius, and the changes were thus made after
him, either by a telephone game of transmission error or by scribal
attempts to make the passage more believable. This means all those
published opinions before were based on a falsehood. Those opinions
therefore can no longer be cited in favor of the passage. Expert opinion
has to be re-polled. And obviously, only experts aware of this
development should be polled.
This has happened in New Testament (or
NT) studies, too. For example, many papyrus fragments, once dated overly
early, have been dated decades or even a century later than previously
claimed, after the poor logic and unchecked bias of earlier estimates
was exposed. This was well reported by Neil Godfrey, in New Date and More on Dating,
which articles are also very educational on what the peer reviewed
literature says about the problems dating NT manuscripts. (BTW,
Wikipedia will often keep you more up to date than many experts are,
with a wonderful catalog of entries on all New Testament papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries.) As another example, sixteen years ago David Trobisch
published evidence changing the way we understand extant NT
manuscripts; and it’s taken a decade for his results to filter into
expert knowledge. Interestingly, Trobisch has been tapped to curate
Hobby Lobby’s new Museum of the Bible
in Washington, D.C., despite him in no way being a fundamentalist but
an actual legit scholar and justifiably renowned expert on biblical
manuscripts. Anyway, his book in 2000 presents evidence that makes a
significant difference in how we interpret the surviving manuscripts of
the Bible.
Today this will be my lesson number one.
My lesson number two will highlight the similarly field-changing work
of paleographers who’ve established that the earliest NT manuscripts
were also the least professionally copied, producing a startling
fluidity of errors and alterations at a faster pace than was typical for
most other books in antiquity, which would more typically be
transmitted by polished professionals, often working for supervised
publishing houses, a development that would not reach Christian
publishing until the end of the third century. My lesson number three
will then draw on Ferguson’s article about counting manuscripts, which I
just referenced above, thus tying the end of my article to its
beginning.
1. Everything We Have Comes from the Same Edition
The first thing to know about NT
manuscripts is that, so far, every single one we have is a copy (of a
copy of a copy of a copy…) of the same single edition, organized and
edited by a single person or focus group, and published between 140 and
170 A.D., in part as a response to an earlier edition (produced by
Marcion around 140 A.D.), the first ever known, that has been completely
lost (see this excellent article
at the Westar Institute for more on that backstory). This has
tremendous significance. A significance I may have to explain for the
average reader. Now, this is not saying that the books of the NT were written by these people and at that time. Rather, what we are talking about is an organized edition.
Meaning, someone made a choice of which books to bundle together, and
how to alter or arrange them (and even how to name them), and then
started knocking out and disseminating copies of that. And that edition completely displaced all other editions and textual traditions before it.
In Trobisch’s book The First Edition of the New Testament, as Robert Price puts it in his review,
“Trobisch argues that the New Testament canon of 27 writings that we
use today originated not in the fourth century as the result of a
prolonged and anonymous process of debate and ossifying custom, but
rather as the work of a single editor and publisher in the late second
century.” That means the canon we know was chosen in the mid-second
century, and not by any broad-based committee, but by a single person or
local group, from a single sect. And not only did they choose what
books would go in it (and thus what books wouldn’t go in it), they also chose which manuscripts
would be canonized. That is, many manuscript traditions existed, with
all kinds of variant readings, all with their own alterations,
interpolations, errors, deletions, harmonizations, and everything else.
The publisher of the “canonical” edition chose which manuscripts would be treated as authoritative, and thus ossified every error and distortion they contained.
Now, most atheists think they want the
reverse to be the case, that the canon not being decided until a
committee got at it hundreds of years after the fact is the more
embarrassing theory, and gives greater authority to the books excluded.
Often they think this was done at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.,
since the myth that that council chose the canon is weirdly common for
some reason, but Nicea only decided the creed,
and indeed invented the one we now know by merging several others
through a committee process, producing an impossible construct whose
value was solely political and whose theological meaning was literally
vacuous. Nothing at all was discussed about the canon at Nicea. The
first time any clear assertion of a canon came from Christian leadership
was a letter by Athanasias
in 367 A.D., and all he did was endorse the canon already widely in use
(against attempts to usurp or alter it). But actually, that the canon
was decided a century and a half earlier is almost worse. Because it means fewer people, and less discussion, was involved in its selection and preservation.
There is a parallel case with the manuscripts of Josephus, particularly of the Jewish Antiquities. In a peer reviewed article I wrote for the Journal of Early Christian Studies (reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ),
I demonstrated a variety of things that alter how experts must review
the evidence for Christianity in Josephus, but I also clearly showed
that all extant manuscripts of the Antiquities are copies (of
copies of copies of copies…) of the same singular manuscript owned and
used by Eusebius at his own Christian library in Caesarea. This means we
cannot expect any versions of the text different from or predating that
single manuscript to be available to us in any manuscript there is
today.
This means all variants prior to that
(including the original form of the text as Josephus wrote it) are
permanently lost and invisible to us. Every error and distortion and
mistaken “correction” that got into the text in that one single Eusebian
manuscript, from its own copying from an earlier manuscript in that
same library (used by Origen), which said significantly different
things, and every error and distortion and mistaken “correction” that
got into the text in the long process of transmission down through
numerous reproductions before Origen even acquired his copy, will never
show in the surviving record. All manuscript evidence there would have
been proving those variant readings, has been 100% lost. Probably
forever.
That the entirety of all Josephan
scholarship is only trying to reconstruct the text as it was in the
single centuries-late manuscript held by Eusebius in the early 4th
century, and cannot ever reconstruct any version of the text prior (down
to and including the original text as known to Josephus in the late 1st
century), is an extremely significant thing to realize. Trobisch has
given us exactly the same shocking discovery for the NT. This includes
evidence like the way the Gospels are named. As Trobisch points out,
calling any book “The Gospel According to” was extremely unique and
bizarre in the history of ancient literature, so much so that there is
no possible way the four Gospels all came to have such a peculiar title
form, consistently throughout all known manuscripts, by accident.
Accordingly, this means whoever produced
this singular c. 150 A.D. edition (I’ll just call it the C150 edition),
also named the four Gospels. And chose to do so by the coy method of
declaring them anonymous while seeming to assign them authors,
as if to fool the commonly uneducated hearer (since “according to” in
Greek was not how authors were designated, but how authors designated their sources;
so whoever produced this edition was declaring the contents of the
Gospels to be “according to” a named but never actually identified
source, while slyly not telling us the name of who actually wrote them).
The evidence verifying Trobisch’s thesis
extends far beyond that, and includes aspects of how the materials are
arranged in the surviving manuscripts themselves, including specific
marking and abbreviation techniques, and order and contents. As Price
summarizes:
[Trobisch] has delineated a paradigm that makes good, inductive sense of many hitherto-puzzling bits of evidence. He notes that the New Testament books appear, with very few exceptions, in four groups of codices, and that within each the order of presentation is virtually always the same. There are the four gospels, almost always in the familiar order Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. There is the Acts plus the seven Catholic/General Epistles, again always in the same order. There is the Pauline canon including Hebrews. And then there is the Revelation. (Sometimes the Pauline Corpus precedes Acts/Catholic Epistles.) Such an arrangement is hardly inevitable or obvious. Had various New Testament writings simply circulated independently and then been compiled by different scribes at different times in different regions, we would never see near-uniformity like this. Why would Hebrews be included among the Paulines so often, when Paul’s name never appears in the text? Why would everyone have concluded that what we call Ephesians and Romans were written to those churches when some copies show no destination city? Would every scribe have thought the Corinthian and the Thessalonian Epistles belong in the order in which they always appear? Surely some would have labeled our “First” Thessalonians as Second Thessalonians, they are so much alike.
In a subsequent article
Trobisch even made a case that the editor of this edition of the NT,
the sole ancestor of all other versions known to us, in all other
manuscripts, may have been the Christian leader Polycarp himself. I’m
not as certain, but the case he makes for that conclusion is good enough
to warrant at least the suspicion.
This then is why we will likely never
find surviving descendants of any manuscript that contained the original
text of 1 Thessalonians 2, by which we could verify the obvious
interpolation there. Because the editor of the C150 edition chose to use
a manuscript that included the interpolation. And the resulting version
eclipsed all others in the surviving record. Thus, just as we will
never find a version of Josephus that lacks the Testimonium Flavianum,
because the Testimonium Flavianum was in the one Eusebian manuscript,
and yet all surviving manuscripts today are descendants of that same
manuscript (indeed we know the TF was not in the manuscript Origen was
using in the very same library a century before—yet the Eusebian manuscript was a copy of that one,
or at best a copy of a copy of it), so also we will never find a
version of 1 Thessalonians that lacks its anti-semitic interpolation,
because all surviving manuscripts of that letter derive from the single
manuscript chosen for the C150 edition. The earlier, original version
was thus lost forever.
The C150 edition was, of course, still
repeatedly meddled with afterward, as we see countless variants and
distortions across all surviving manuscripts. For instance, the 150 A.D.
edition ended Mark at verse 16:8; the five different revisions to that
unsatisfying ending (as I thoroughly document in my chapter on the
Markan endings in Hitler Homer) were innovated into subsequent copies of that edition.
They therefore do not derive from any earlier manuscript or tradition.
It may be remotely possible they did (because, perhaps, someone tried to
“fix” the C150 edition against previous textual traditions available to
them), but the evidence we have of the overwhelming potency of the C150
edition in eclipsing all others across the whole body of surviving
manuscripts, numbering in the thousands, does not make that likely
enough to ever count on. What changes had before then and by then been
made to the original books (all interpolations, deletions, word
substitutions, harmonizations, and beyond) were thus ossified in the
edition all our copies today are copies of.
I’m often asked, of course, if someone
did thus choose the four Gospels of the known canon to release them in a
single edition (with all the other books chosen for the same
collection), even indeed to win a propaganda war with competing versions
and editions, why did they choose four Gospels that were so
contradictory, in both content and constituency? And I have often
replied: Politics.
Once Marcion started trying to take over
hearts and minds with the idea of a “canon,” a fixed body of scripture
of his own choosing and design, his opposition needed to escalate the
arms race with their own weapon in kind: they needed their own canon,
and they needed it to eclipse his in popularity. The most strategically
effective way to do that was to select books for inclusion in it that
would win over the largest number of constituents (from all the diverse
scattered congregations across three continents), while still not
producing so many contradictions (either to each other or to the desired
doctrine being fought for) that it no longer became possible to wash
them over with clever exegesis and apologetics. Since every region or
congregation had likely chosen one or another Gospel as its
authoritative holy text, then to bring in the most regions and
congregations, the editor of C150 cobbled together a political alliance
among the largest possible number of those, using the four Gospels found
in our canon. Hence those four were chosen. Because when their
constituents were added up, they far outnumbered Marcion’s.
And thus by fierce natural selection,
C150 won the popularity contest, and all its competing species went
extinct. All Gospels more deviant than those were, of course, rejected.
Just like the Council of Nicea cobbled together a contradictory and
unintelligible creed in order to unite more factions than the opposition
could claim in turn (elegantly shown in the last chapters of Ehrman’s
book How Jesus Became God), so the editor of the C150 Bible cobbled together a contradictory and unintelligible canon
in order to unite more factions than the opposition could claim in
turn. Thus, the Bible we have: Chosen based on political expediency and
doctrinal bias; not by applying any historical investigation or textual
science to determine the most original or authentic books or versions.
2. For at Least Two Hundred Years, Christian Scribes Were Sloppy Amateurs
Long ago I debated J.P. Holding on the reliability of the text of the New Testament (video)(slides).
Among my arguments were the fact that it is a standard principle in the
science of textual criticism that the first decades to a century of a
text’s transmission witness the highest rates of distortion in the text
(due to it being easier to eclipse competing texts, and easier to get
away with it, when so few exist), and the fact that Christians were not
professionally transmitting their C150 edition of the Bible for at least
a century after it was first published.
The C150 edition’s publication was an
amateur affair. And remained so for a century and a half. And that
edition was published more or less a century after the books in
it were written. Yet there is no evidence any professional efforts to
preserve those texts spanned that period either. In fact, if the C150
edition wasn’t being professionally transmitted, despite having the
backing of the largest and wealthiest commonwealth of churches, its very
unlikely its predecessors and competitors were either. And yet this
amateurism resulted in even greater distortions of the text than would be typical for most other books (like the Antiquities
of Josephus, which would more commonly have been transmitted by
professional scribes and publishing houses and libraries even from the
very first autograph edition). This makes the NT in its first two
centuries more akin to the so-called vulgar texts of Homer, which, being
reproduced by amateurs, deviated considerably and rapidly from the
controlled authoritative editions of professional houses (a comparison
already made in John Van Seters, ed., The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the Editor in Biblical Critism in 2006; see also pp. 133-35 of vol. 1 of A History of Classical Scholarship by John Edwin Sandys).
This is, again, another new discovery in
the evidence that has changed our understanding of the New Testament.
Studies have been done with regard to internal evidence of scribal
quality and professionalism on the earliest manuscripts and their descendants. And they show increasing professionalism over time observably corresponded with a decreased professionalism
in the earlier centuries, resulting in much higher documented rates of
accidental error in transmission during that period, and a higher
variability of the text (such as freer spelling deviations and
harmonizations). This scholarship is surveyed Robert Stewart, ed., The Reliability of the New Testament
(esp. 115-16, discussing the work of Barbara Aland) and the chapter in
that same anthology by Sylvie Raquel (pp. 173-86), who specializes in
these very studies. And as we can see, the poor quality of scribes
attending to the task of copying NT manuscripts in its first two
centuries would only have increased, not decreased, the rate of error.
By the 4th century Bibles started being produced (not solely, but started) in professional
copy-houses, with the standards of quality control and error correction
known for most other ancient literature (which standards and practices
were developed and had already become the norm for most secular
literature in Greek during the 3rd century BC, which disseminated into
Latin literary production a century or two later: see Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature,
now in its 4th edition). Eusebius, in fact, may have been the first to
have begun professional Bible reproduction, in the early fourth century.
Thus receiving a commission from Constantine to a production run of
some fifty Bibles at state expense. Before that, it appears, only house amateurs were tasked with creating Bibles for local use or distribution.
The significance of this is that when we look at later centuries (the period of even professional
duplication), we can count up an observed rate of known distortion per
century. That observed rate will already be smaller than the actual rate
(because we only have a small sample of the manuscripts that existed in
any given century; thus the distortions we can add up in what we
observe, must be a great many times smaller than the actual rate of
their occurrence). Yet I found that, for the NT as a whole, the rate of
interpolations was at least twenty per century; of harmonizations
(sneaking verses from one Gospel into another to eliminate
contradictions or fabricate corroborations), also at least twenty per
century. I didn’t attempt a count of significant spelling errors (errors
that actually change the meaning of a passage), but many of those are
known as well; and observed spelling errors in general number in the thousands per century.
Of harmonizations, for example, many
early manuscripts (including our earliest whole Bibles, both Codex
Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus) have Matthew agree with John that Jesus
was struck by a soldier’s spear and out came blood and water (in Matthew
27:49). Of interpolations, for example, just a random selection from
the Gospels includes John 7:53-8:11 (the Pericope Adulterae,
“let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” etc.), John 5:3-4
(someone added a line about an angel stirring the pool of Bethesda),
Luke 22:43-44 (someone added a line about Jesus sweating blood), Luke
23:53 (someone added a line saying Jesus’s tomb had “a door that took
twenty men to open”), and so on. Of significant spelling errors, my
favorite is the accidental dropping of a single letter, that changed the
original “peace on earth for those whom God pleases” to “peace on earth
and goodwill toward men,” the latter being the mistake! (I discuss this
instance, and much else amusing about Biblical criticism, textual and
literary, in my Drunken Bible Study video.)
So if the observed rate of error and distortion over the five centuries after
the year 300 was 20 harmonizations, 20 interpolations, and possibly 20
significant spelling errors per century (and this isn’t even including
deletions and word substitutions, two other common causes of distortion
and error), and the text of the NT went a whole century before being
ossified into the single manuscript of the original C150, which single
manuscript all surviving manuscripts are copies (by descent), then there
are, we can expect, at least 20 interpolations, 20 fake harmonizations, and 20 significant spelling errors in the NT that will have no manuscripts telling us that. Which means, any given verse you are looking at, might be one of those. We have no way of knowing.And mind you, I said at least. Remember, that rate is an undercount of the actual (due to the paucity of surviving manuscripts), and is for professional reproduction, in the later (and thus most stable) centuries of textual transmission. Since textual critics know that for all books, the rate is higher in its first century of transmission than later centuries, and since we know that, even worse, Christians were using amateurs to reproduce their texts and were not substantially engaging professional reproduction controls (and we can observe today this was producing a higher rate of distortion), the NT error rate in its first century must have been substantially higher than the already-expected 20 interpolations, 20 harmonizations, and 20 substantive spelling errors.
It just gets worse when we try to check the manuscripts against quotations in the Church Fathers. Because…guess what? The patristic texts have also been subject to error and distortion, and in fact we have documented their manuscripts were particularly prone to being re-harmonized to later versions of the Biblical text! In other words, we can’t cite, say, Irenaeus as confirming an early reading of an NT book…because medieval scribes may have altered what Irenaeus wrote to “agree” with their text of the Bible! Yup. (See Hitler Homer, pp. 290-91 for scholarship on this embarrassing revelation.)
3. Counting Manuscripts Is as Useless as Counting Xeroxes
Finally, the third thing to know, is
that the number of manuscripts we have of the NT is largely useless. It
allows us to see through some of the distorting filters of the Middle
Ages. But it doesn’t help us with the crucial two to three first
centuries of the text’s transmission, because the text was so hugely
subject to distorting pressures (being perpetually at the center of a
propaganda war), transmitted unprofessionally, and all textual
traditions preceding the single manuscript of the C150 archetype are
lost. Their numerical count today is zero. And yet those are the manuscripts we most desperately need to see to establish what the original authors wrote.
Nevertheless…
Parts of the New Testament have been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian.
But…
Ever hear the argument that our earliest copy of the historian Tacitus’ Annals (c. 116 CE) dates to the 9th century, seven hundred years later, but we have early copies of the Gospels dating to only a couple centuries after their composition? How about that we only have 9 Greek manuscripts of the historian Josephus’ Jewish War, but we have over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament? Clearly we trust the historical information of Tacitus and Josephus, so we should trust the New Testament too, right? Wrong. Once more, apologists have blown up a big number, divorced it from context, and created a misleading argument that can be torn down by three simple points of clarity.
Ferguson focuses on the incorrect
conclusions often launched from these numbers (such as confusing textual
accuracy with historical accuracy). But even the numbers are a trick
pulled on the unaware. As Ferguson says (my emphasis):
When it comes to the “mountain” of 5,800 Greek NT manuscript copies, even conservative textual critic Dan Wallace acknowledges, “it should be pointed out that most of our manuscripts come from the second millennium AD, and most of our manuscripts do not include the whole New Testament.” Here is a summary of the the distribution of the Greek NT manuscripts by date:As can be seen, the vast majority of these texts date to after the 9th century [A.D.], which was a time when Christian monks were dominating the apparatus of textual transmission in Europe. It is thus not surprising that more copies of the New Testament were produced than other literary works during this period. If one excludes later medieval manuscripts, Wallace notes that only approximately 124 manuscripts “come within the first 300 years,” which is a considerably smaller number. [Credit to Bob Seidensticker for supplying the chart.]
And all of those manuscripts come from Egypt,
a single province and region of the Roman Empire. More importantly,
almost every single one of those manuscripts is not really a Bible or
even a book, but just a fragment, often just a tiny shred, in some cases
containing hardly even a single whole word. For example, the earliest
fragment, P52,
now dated to around 150 A.D. (and thus possibly from the first run of
the C150 edition), is a tiny rip of papyrus, barely the size of a credit
card, containing only 31 words (front and back)—and apart from “and,”
“the,” “from,” “so,” “that,” and “him,” only two of those words appears complete, the words “said” and “anyone.” Not exactly a bonanza of evidence. As you can see for yourself, not a single manuscript from before the time of Eusebius contains even a whole book, other than P46 (and it only has some of the Epistles, many still damaged or fragmentary) and P66 (most of the Gospel According to John), both dated to around 200 A.D., and P87
(just the paltry Epistle to Philemon), dating to about 250 A.D. Of
anything like near complete Bibles, only a handful predate the Middle
Ages.
In fact, let’s fully consider what that
“5,800 manuscripts” really means (and thus how it’s a scam to cite it as
if it meant anything):
- Nearly five thousand of those are actually copies of manuscripts we already have, and are therefore useless. Since we actually have the originals they copied from, so we don’t need them. This is akin to xeroxing an existing manuscript of Tacitus a million times and claiming we have “a million manuscripts of Tacitus, which is totes more than the Bible!” Although unlike xeroxing, we can use those otherwise superfluous hand-copied manuscripts to study the rate and nature of errors and alterations in transmission, akin to studying the distortions caused by the Xerox machine; but they don’t tell us anything useful at all about the one Eusebian manuscript we are able to try and reconstruct from its surviving descendants. So we shouldn’t even be counting them.
- When we look at the thousand or so remaining manuscripts, nearly all of them are from the Middle Ages, in fact most by far are eight or more centuries later than the original texts they purport to contain. All they show us is how the text was transformed by error and alteration in the Middle Ages, representing the stabilization of the text that medieval Christendom wanted, rather than any effort at determining their accuracy in respect to the originals. Some of those medieval manuscripts will by accident preserve early readings, which makes them at least useful as a check against some of the errors and meddlings of all the others, but again, only in respect to dermining what the text looked like in that one single late 2nd century manuscript created and edited for propaganda purposes. Though it’s theoretically possible some preserve corrections to that text in later copies against earlier copies, but that’s both unlikely and impossible to ever determine has happened.
- That leaves us with that paltry 124 manuscripts that are not Medieval and not copies of manuscripts we already have. So we’ve gone from nearly six thousand to barely more than a hundred
- And almost all of those are just tiny random scraps, not full manuscripts of even a single book. Some of these (the smallest at least) could derive from pre-C150 edition manuscripts (as does, for example, the aberrant Egerton Gospel, which may be an earlier version of John: OHJ, p. 492, n. 217), but there is no way to tell, and they contain too little information to be of much use even if they did.
As for the manuscripts in other
languages, as translations they are almost all late productions, and
almost all Medieval, and often highly deviant. Indeed especially the
earliest, tend to be the weirdest (as I show for the endings of Mark,
for example, in Hitler Homer).
And for all we can tell, they, too, are just translations of the
standard C150 edition, or derivations therefrom. They can put a check on
later Medieval excesses. But they aren’t much useful beyond that.
In final analysis, the number of
manuscripts we have that contain even a whole book of the NT and aren’t
Medieval and thus just as comparably late as almost any other book from
antiquity, is maybe closer to the same number as we have for Josephus.
The one advantage we have for them, is that they are earlier. But that
advantage is wiped out by the fact that unlike Josephus, the NT
manuscripts were under intense pressure to alter them, and were
unprofessionally transmitted for centuries in the throes of a continual
propaganda war. And hundreds of variant readings remain for which we
cannot be sure what was in even that one anti-Marcionite manuscript; and
scores more deviations from the originals must exist for which we will
have no manuscript evidence at all.
So again, all we can determine from
extant NT manuscripts (no matter how many we have) are the decisions of a
single person or focus group around 150 A.D., who chose, for each book
they selected to include, a single manuscript from all those in
circulation at the time, which they themselves may well have edited
further, and all based on accident (the manuscript that just happened to
be known to them or close at hand) and their own peculiar dogma and
politics (their current political needs and doctrinal presuppositions,
which all differed substantially from those of the original authors),
and not on paleographic science—even though that science was invented in
antiquity and well available to them, had they wished to apply it.
Conclusion
So when Christian apologists make hay
out of the big number of Bible manuscripts, they are pulling wool over
your eyes (and the eyes of their congregations, and possibly even
themselves). That number is meaningless. It has nothing to do with the
reliability of transmission or the reliability of the surviving texts.
Similarly, all the manuscripts we have of Josephus all derive from the
single manuscript used by Eusebius around 300 A.D. at the Library of
Caesarea, a library he curated. Thus, two hundred years of manuscript
variants for Josephus are lost to us. And no amount of citing how many
manuscripts we have can get us passed that choking singularity. All
those manuscripts of Josephus that we have, can only help us reconstruct
what was in the one single manuscript of Eusebius in 300 A.D.
(and often, not even that, as many readings remain obscure or
undecidable among the variants known, just as is the case with the NT).
Likewise, no count of NT manuscripts can
get us passed the choking singularity of the Anti-Marcionite Edition of
about 150 A.D., and all its transmission errors and political and
doctrinal choices, changes, and idiosyncrasies. All those manuscripts we
do have, can only help us reconstruct that single manuscript. A
manuscript dating one to two whole lifetimes after the books in it were
written. A manuscript assembled and edited by persons with a definite
propagandistic agenda, and no professional or scientific concern to
ascertain its textual accuracy. And, like for Josephus, in many cases we
don’t even have that. For there remain countless instances in
the NT where we do not know which variants known to us actually appeared
in that edition. And in some cases, it’s statistically possible, none of the variants extant today is what was originally in it. And yet what was in it, is just what was in it.
What was in the original versions of the books it assembled, we
literally cannot know. At most we can bank on the probability that
massive changes might have been unsuccessful; but countless small ones
would have; and we know for a fact they were—as in the case of the
Christian edition of the OT, the Christians kept insisting it had
passages in it that Jewish versions didn’t (see OHJ,
pp. 90-92), which of course they blamed (implausibly) on the Jews
changing their versions. Because everyone’s edition was, when their own,
“obviously” the unsullied original.
So those big numbers? Useless. Meaningless. Showy fantastical blather.
And so also goes into the bin the claim that the Christians carefully and meticulously and reverently preserved even that
edition. They doctored and meddled with it repeatedly. And did so more
blatantly and recklessly in its first hundred years of publication, as
in that period they didn’t even employ professionals to oversee the
accuracy of its reproduction. Such professional care only entered the
scene in the 4th century. And even then errors and alterations remained
common.
Like I said when someone at the Holding debate asked me why I don’t distrust secular manuscripts, like the Annals of Tacitus, for the same reasons I distrust the Bible: the Annals are also lousy with transmission errors and possible interpolations and deletions. “If the Annals
of Tacitus were instructions for building a rocket, I would not get on
that rocket.” I wouldn’t base my life on it. It would be foolish to. I
trust it to a certain probability, because as an ancient historian I
don’t need to be certain of anything I reconstruct about ancient
history, I can be fine with balances of probability; I’m comfortable with ambiguity.
But for a worldview instruction manual, on which you will gamble your
entire life, and govern your entire conduct, and use as an overriding
rule over all your opinions, the Bible would only be trusted in such a
capacity by a fool. Because it would be foolish to trust even Tacitus in
that capacity. And the Bible is far worse. The Annals
of Tacitus were not transmitted for a century and a half by
unprofessional amateurs before benefiting from professional publishing
controls. And the Annals of Tacitus were not edited and
transmitted for hundreds and hundreds of years by persons obsessed with
altering it to suit their ever-changing fanatical, political, and
doctrinal needs. And above all, the one edited variant of the Annals
of Tacitus that we get any chance of seeing was not chosen two
lifetimes after Tacitus by a single person or cabal obsessed with using
it to win a political propaganda war with the convenience of its
contents.
So here we are. Three things you should
know about the New Testament manuscripts…their number is useless, they
all come from the same late and flawed edition, and they are more
riddled with error and distortion than the most competently transmitted
of secular texts would have been. And that is the very worst kind of
book to base your life on. Even besides all the stupid and shitty things it says.
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