Announcement

Collapse

Biblical Languages 301 Guidelines

This is where we come to delve into the biblical text. Theology is not our foremost thought, but we realize it is something that will be dealt with in nearly every conversation. Feel free to use the original languages to make your point (meaning Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic). This is an exegetical discussion area, so please limit topics to purely biblical ones.

This is not the section for debates between theists and atheists. While a theistic viewpoint is not required for discussion in this area, discussion does presuppose a respect for the integrity of the Biblical text (or the willingness to accept such a presupposition for discussion purposes) and a respect for the integrity of the faith of others and a lack of an agenda to undermine the faith of others.

Forum Rules: Here
See more
See less

Can We Trust the New Testament? by J. A. T. Robinson

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MODERN TRANSLATIONS

    At this point we reach the last link in the chain connecting us with the original words of Jesus. For not only was he first translated into Greek, but most of us depend on a translation of the Greek. Can we trust these translations?

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    Finally, there is a glaring instance of words which certainly never formed part of the true text of the New Testament. In 1 John 5.8 we read 'there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water and the blood, and these three agree'. Someone later embroidered this to, 'There are three who bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water and the blood, and these are one in Christ Jesus; and there are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Son and the Spirit.' The words in italic occur in no ancient Greek manuscript and were correctly omitted by Erasmus from his pioneering modern edition of the Greek Testament in 1516. But when attacked for taking things out of Holy Writ he rashly wagered to restore them if anyone could produce a Greek manuscript with them in. A late one was found that did contain them, where they were translated back from Latin. So he agreed, and thence they got into the text used by the AV! But lest anyone should carry away the idea that the text of the New Testament is settled by bets, one should say that this is a totally isolated example. And in the end everything comes out in the wash: you will not find a trace of the interpolated words even in the margin of the RSV or NEB. But it does raise the question in the AV.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    Here are two instances where there is not such a clear case.
    1. Luke 23.34. 'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they do'. Again this 'hard saying' is almost certainly not invented by the Church. If anything is, it is surely the ipsissima vox of Jesus. Yet it is missing from important manuscripts. It could well have been cut out by those in the Church who did not feel so charitable toward the Jews!

    2. Another doubtful passage is the so-called 'longer text' of the institution of the Eucharist in Luke 22.19b-20, with its addition of the words 'Do this in remembrance of me' and a further cup. Here it is probably a question of Luke or some subsequent scribe combining the liturgical traditions of different Christian centers, one of them being found also in Matthew and Mark, the other being like that cited by Paul in 1 Cor. 11.24f. Whether the second was added to or cut from the original text of Luke is a matter of very delicate judgement. On the New Testament panel of the NEB we decided after long discussion to omit it from the text (though I recall voting for it). The first edition of the RSV similarly put it in the margin, but the second restored it to the text! Yet ultimately it is not so important whether it was part of the text of Luke. For it was certainly part of the oral tradition of Jesus's words in the early Church.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    I have given these detailed illustrations partly to show again how little difference such variations make. There are however other places where it is a more important matter of judgement whether what is in the later manuscript tradition (incorporated in the AV) originally formed part of the true text or not. Here, first, are three examples of verses that all scholars would agree are missing from the best and earliest manuscripts.
    1. Matt. 6.13b, the doxology to the Lord's prayer: 'For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen.' This was clearly read back into the text of Scripture from its early use in liturgy, from which we are familiar with it―though it is interesting that it only got into the English Prayer Book as late as its final revision in 1662.
    2. Mark 16.9-20. These verses, describing Jesus' resurrection appearances, were evidently added subsequently (certainly not by Mark) from other early Christian records, because it was thought (I suspect rightly) that the point at which the best texts of the Gospel break off (16.8) was too abrupt to be intended as the original ending. The NEB margin registers other attempts to meet the felt need.
    3. John 7.53―8.11, This story, the woman taken in adultery, is certainly no part of the Gospel of John (from whose style it differs markedly). It is a piece of floating tradition (in some manuscripts it turns up after Luke 21.38). But that does not mean it is inauthentic. If fact it was probably felt to be too difficult (because too permissive) a story to be included in one of the finished Gospels―but too like Jesus to be thrown away.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    There are of course places where scholars come up with guesses about what the author might have written, and they may be right. But, as it seems to me, only about two conjectures in the whole text of the New Testament are at all compelling, both, as it happens, in St John. The first is in John 3.25, where the NEB reads, without any marginal note, 'Some of John's disciples had fallen into a dispute with Jews. The RSV, again without recording an alternative, prefers the reading 'with a Jew'. Bentley, the great eighteenth-century classical scholar and notorious Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, suggested that the original, now lost, read with Jesus'. This gives excellent sense―though no one can say that the meaning is much affected either way. Again in John 19:29 the NEB says of Jesus on the cross, 'They soaked a sponge with wine, fixed it on a javelin, and held it up to his lips'. The RSV, like all the other English versions, has 'put it on hyssop'. Now hyssop, the little herb marjoram, is totally useless for fixing a sponge to! What the NEB has done is to follow a reading which differs by only one syllable (HYSSO instead of HYSSOPO). It happens to occur in one, eleventh-century, Greek manuscript, though it is almost certainly there a clever conjectural correction. Yet I believe the NEB is right in supposing it is what the author of the Gospel meant to write. Whether he actually did write it we shall never know. We tend to assume that the autograph started perfect, but nothing of any length that I have ever written was without a slip of the pen! In fact I am inclined to think that on occasion St Paul would have been the first to correct what his best manuscripts make him say. For example, in Romans 5.1, I suspect he intended to write, 'We have peace with God', but Tertius who took it down (see Romans 12.22) may well have been responsible for the minute change, mishearing a long 'O' for a short, that now causes him to say, according to our best witnesses, 'Let us have peace with God'.

    To be continued...
    Last edited by John Reece; 03-24-2015, 07:59 AM.

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    The other thing that needs to be said is that almost certainly the original reading is in the vast majority of cases to be found somewhere in the existing manuscript tradition. In other words it has not been lost, so that we are left to guess or conjecture what it might have been. This is quite a different situation from that in many classical texts, where in the plays of Aeschylus, for instance, one of the main tests of the originality and judgement of editors is their ability to conjecture what the author might have written, since at so many points our existing manuscripts are quite evidently corrupt. There is a real difference here between the New Testament and the Old, where a glance again at the NEB margin will reveal notes like 'Probable meaning; Hebrew obscure'. There is nothing of this in the New Testament.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    This does not, of course, mean that we know precisely what the New Testament writers penned. The very wealth of evidence makes the sifting and sorting out of it a most complex task. But two things can be said. When everything has been taken into account, the number of variants that make any difference (let alone any important difference) to the meaning is extremely small. The English reader may test this for himself by looking at the marginal readings at the foot of the page in the NEB. (They were unfortunately omitted in the popular, in contrast to the library, edition of the New Testament when that was first published separately, but now they are there in the standard edition of the whole Bible.) There are two kinds of marginal readings, which represent possible, though not in the opinion of the majority probable, alternatives. One is introduced by a simple 'Or' and that indicates a different way of translating the same Greek text. The other is introduced by a phrase like 'Some witnesses read (or add or omit)' This indicates an alternative manuscript reading, and is alone relevant for assessing the difference which textual uncertainty introduces. Going through these latter will show how relatively rarely the meaning is affected. Thus in the book of Revelation (which no scholar, incidentally, would ever call 'Revelations': where does this popular image come from?) these can be counted on the fingers of two hands, and none seriously alters the sense.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    To return to the textual transmission of the New Testament, the wealth of manuscripts, and above all the narrow interval of time between the writing and the earliest extant copies, make it by far the best attested text of any ancient writing in the world. In the case of Greek and Latin classical literature it is not at all uncommon for there to be two or three manuscripts only and a gap of anything up to a thousand years. In the case of the New Testament there are, as I said, literally hundreds of witnesses, and in no case is the interval more than three hundred years and in many parts now a good deal less. In fact, one papyrus fragment of St John's Gospel stands so close to the time of writing as actually to have ruled out some of the later (and in any case wilder) dates proposed for its completion. Besides this there is the indirect evidence of quotations in the Early Christian Fathers and of versions in other languages (like Syriac, Coptic, and Latin) which were taken from earlier texts now lost to us. So the statement by that professor of modern history that 'no Gospel text can be traced back even indirectly beyond the fourth century AD' is palpably wrong.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    Perhaps it is worth just interjecting a word here on the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, which have been the most exciting and most publicized find in recent years. None of the caves, of course, contained a single text of the New Testament, for the monastery of Qumran was a Jewish not a Christian community. (Press reports a few years back of minute Greek fragments of New Testament books have proved to be unsubstantiated, and in any case these would have been later deposits.) There were many scrolls and fragments of major importance for establishing the text of the Old Testament, narrowing the gap between the original writing and our earliest manuscripts by several centuries. But their effect on the whole has been to reinforce how reliable rather than unreliable the later tradition was. With regard to the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls have thrown some most valuable new light on the background of contemporary Judaism out of which Christianity emerged. But the idea that they have upset all our previous ideas or forced us to revise our entire picture of Jesus is utterly wide of the mark. As regards the text and translation of the New Testament, I can remember one word of the Acts of the Apostles, used to describe the company of the believers, which as translators of the NEB we considered might be more of a technical term than had previously been thought. But even this did not in the end alter the translation or even merit a marginal variant. So the revolution can hardly be said to have been shattering!

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    So much work has been done on this over so long a time that a considerable body of established results has been built up―though this does not mean that here, as elsewhere, the judgements of experts do not differ. Printed editions of the Greek text are readily available with the main variants at the foot of the page for easy comparison. I mention this because I find that the popular image of the New Testament scholar, or even the Bible translator, is of a man poring over ancient manuscripts (and of having his work constantly upset by the discovery of new ones). But there is no need of this except for the paleographic expert, with his (now) expensive machinery. (It is said that a modern university became convinced that theology was after all a science when its first professor in the subject―who happened to be a textual critic―began ordering a whole load of photographic equipment, and then put in for a building to house it! But the rest of us can rely on this manuscript work to be done for us. And though important new manuscripts do turn up from time to time, constantly refining the process and closing the gap, it is highly unlikely that in the New Testament any will come up with even one entirely new reading which must obviously be accepted as original.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    First one must say that the analogy is misleading. Transmission, even by word of mouth, was a much more exact and controlled process than it is for us, with teachers trained and instructed by their masters to memorize their words and pass them on with an astonishing degree of accuracy. Then the scribe, who was a professional, was much more like the modern copy-typest or proof-reader than the amateur playing a game. We can recognize―and so discount―the kinds of errors that frequently recur. One, to which a modern secretary is equally liable, is that the eye drops from a word or clause which ends in one way to another in a following line which ends in the same way―so that in this last sentence, for instance, everything between the two words 'way' gets left out. In fact, that happened in the final typing of a draft of the NEB, and a whole verse got accidentally omitted! However, it was picked up in the process, and this illustrates the important fact that the transmission of copy is not the work of one man. There were schools of scribes, as later there were in the monasteries, and the greatest care was taken in checking, often by counting the lines and letters. Our biggest safeguard however is the many-stranded cord of transmission. In the case of some ancient authors everything literally hangs on the thread of a single manuscript. In the case of the New Testament there are hundreds and indeed thousands of threads―and of course correspondingly numerous variations. Naturally some threads are much older and more valuable than others―and most of the variations frankly insignificant. A copy cannot have more authority than that from which it is taken―though it may often be useful if it was produced by comparing and collating manuscripts of different family origin. The science or art of textual criticism is concerned with tracing family trees, explaining how the variants are likely to have arisen and trying to work back as near to source as possible (the original autographs having of course perished).

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    MANUSCRIPTS AND MISTAKES

    Meanwhile, there is the second and far longer gap, not between what Jesus said and what he is recorded as saying, but between that record and the state in which it has reached us. The Gospels, like all ancient books, were of course written by hand, originally on scrolls but soon afterwards in codex or book form, and then laboriously copied by a succession of scribes, in the earliest times on papyrus, the predecessor of our paper (most of which inevitably has perished), and then on vellum or parchment, made from animal skins. How do we know that in the process the record has not changed beyond recognition, as in a game of consequences, by the compounding of mistakes?

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

    The first gap in the chain is therefore not nearly as great as might at first appear. It is doubtful if much of the record is seriously affected or distorted merely by the language barrier―especially since so many were bilingual. This does not of course mean that in Greek dress the teaching of Jesus has not become subtly adapted to the conditions of a different milieu. His words or actions, for instance, may have become modified to fulfill or bear out the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint or LXX―so named because of the legend that it was translated, independently, by seventy scholars). Certain prophecies only 'work' if they are read in the Septuagint version―e.g., most famously, Isa. 7:14, quoted in Matt. 1.23, where the Hebrew means merely that 'a young woman' will conceive, not 'a virgin'. Sometimes, too, we can detect minor changes in expression, especially in the Gospel of Luke, which arise from its being addressed to the gentile culture of the Graeco-Roman world. Thus in Luke 5.19, in contrast with Mark 2.4, the roof has tiles, which makes the process of penetrating it a good deal more formidable! But all this is part of the much larger and more important question, to which we must return, of how Jesus's teaching was reapplied in very different circumstances to the mission and message of the early Church.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

    Jesus certainly would have given his teaching in Aramaic, and so, except where the occasional word has been translated into Greek like abba (the child's word he used for addressing God as 'Dad'), we do not have any of his actual speech―and of course he didn't write anything himself. This then is the first missing link in the chain of transmission. How do we know that the Greek translations have not got him wrong? The answer is, of course, that we cannot be certain. Indeed there are places where differences in Gospel sayings look like translation variants. For instance, 'Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect' (Matt. 5.48) and 'Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful' (Luke 6:36) have plausibly been argued to be alternative translations of a single Aramaic word meaning 'whole' or 'generous'. Others too have suggested that behind the baffling phrase, for which no satisfactory parallel has yet been found, 'Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!' (John 1.29), may lie a mistranslation (or a double meaning) of the Aramaic for 'the servant of God'. Yet the mere fact that these reconstructions can be guessed at shows how near beneath the surface of Greek the Aramaic still lies―especially in those parts of the teachings of Jesus (like the sermon on the mount) which are in poetic form, with its Semitic parallelism, rhythm and rhyme. Though we cannot recover the ipsissima verba, the actual words of Jesus, some (like the German scholar Jeremias mentioned earlier) are convinced that at many points we hear the ipsissima vox, the distinctive voice of the Master.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:


  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

    THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

    The New Testament consists of twenty-seven separate 'books'―and is therefore better thought of as a library-shelf than a book. All of them were originally written in Greek. I mention this because some people think that the Epistle to the Hebrews must be written in Hebrew, and even the Epistle to the Romans in Latin. But 'Hebrews' only means Jewish Christians, and throughout the eastern half of the Roman empire and indeed in Rome itself the international language, the lingua franca in which most exchange was conducted was Greek. This was a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great some three centuries earlier, and in the heart of Palestine, which was once part of his empire, it is becoming clear that Greek was commonly used as a second language even by quite ordinary people. There was no mention of an interpreter in the Gospels, and Pilate, for instance, would almost certainly have conducted his conversations with the Jews and with Jesus in Greek. This is relevant when we come to ask whether so-called 'Galilean peasants', like Peter and John and James the Lord's brother, could themselves have written the books that stand against their names. The evidence is accumulating to suggest that they could. Whether they did, of course, is another matter and raises much wider issues. But it is significant that all the early Christian writings, including those that evidently have a Palestinian background, are in Greek. And this is the more significant when practically all the writings from the Dead Sea caves produced by the Qumran community at the same time or a little earlier are in Hebrew. Neither language was that of the people, which was Aramaic, a member of the same family of languages as Hebrew. It was not, as is commonly supposed, a late dialect of Hebrew. If you look at the footnote to Gen. 31.47 in the NEB you will see even Jacob is represented as speaking Hebrew, Laban Aramaic. But in the times between the Testament (as part of the book of Daniel shows, which was written then) and in the New Testament period Aramaic was the speech of Palestine. Hebrew would still have been used for 'high' purposes, for the liturgy and Scripture reading, but there were paraphrases of the Old Testament in the vernacular for synagogue use.

    To be continued...

    Leave a comment:

widgetinstance 221 (Related Threads) skipped due to lack of content & hide_module_if_empty option.
Working...
X