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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.

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

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  • #31
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    Despite all the storms and waves that have gone over it, there remains especially in England, a deep mass of water that has steadfastly refused to be shifted by anything much that has happened on the surface. This body of opinion is not fundamentalist, but it is conservative; and it really hasn't believed what the critics have been saying. The winds of fashion come and go, but the committed have their anchors and are content to ride out the storm. Of course in the process they are changed more than they think and certain things are silently modified. But there is a supple strength in this attitude such as is traditionally supposed to serve and to save the Chinese: bend before the gale and when it has passed over you can stand upright again.

    To be continued...

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    • #32
      Continued from the last post above↑

      THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

      It can best be illustrated in the area of the New Testament by the ordinary lay Christian's attitude to 'the Fourth Gospel'. The very title indeed is a bit of scholarly affectation. For no one talks in ordinary speech about the first or other Gospels. But critical susceptibilities have been respected to the extent of allowing the scholars this circumlocution, though it is certainly no more agreed among them (in fact even less) that Matthew wrote St Matthew than that John wrote St John. But apart from the question of authorship there is a stubborn conviction among the silent majority that has refused to let the critics 'take away' St John. All the time that the scholars have been telling them that St John's Gospel is, of course, factually quite unreliable and that its picture of Jesus is simply a mystical meditation of much religious but of no historical value, they have quietly bided their time. And they are beginning to look like being justified. This is not to commend their critical faculties, which have largely been dormant. But it is to draw attention to their horse sense.

      Comment


      • #33
        Can We Trust the New Testament?

        Continued from the last post above↑

        THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

        No one can be both a teacher in the university and a preacher in the Church without being aware of the strong conservative 'undertow' in the country at large. The 'reassuring' sermon is that which tells people that they can after all believe that Jesus said or did what he is supposed to have said or done, that the Christmas story is 'true', that the tomb was empty and that 'the critics' have been proved unfounded. For such people, whether clergy or laity, who from time to time break out in letters to The Times or The Church Times, scholarship is basically a threat to be weathered. I believe that in many of their conclusions (if not in the way they reach them) they are right, and I discover that the sermons that I preach on these questions often take people agreeably by surprise. In fact the upshot of this book will probably seem to many of my critics unexpectedly, perhaps suspiciously, conservative. Particularly on St John I find I have long had strange allies―I remember being sent an article by a Southern Baptist from the United States who was using me, I think in all innocence , as a stick with which to beat the liberals! On the dating of the New Testament (as will become evident) I derive a certain innocent merriment from outflanking my more conservative pupils when they serve up what the textbooks say. Yet for all this, I believe that the conservatism of the committed is a seriously reactionary force in the field, and I would never dream of abetting the obscurantism of those letters. It too can generate its opposite and contribute to the kind of polarisation that seldom in my experience produces more light than heat.

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        • #34
          Can We Trust the New Testament?

          Continued from the last post above↑

          THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

          For like the fundamentalism of the fearful, it takes cover behind a suspicion of scholarship―except, that is, where this is thought to come out the 'right' way, when its 'assured results' (usually stated with far too much confidence) are triumphantly cited to prove that after all 'the Bible is true'. Yet the only healthy attitude can be to trust to impartial scholarly investigation whichever way it comes out. For those who are genuinely committed to Christ as the truth must be prepared for the risk which God himself took when he committed himself to history, that is, to the contingency of events and to the fallibility of records. They more than others must believe that 'great is truth and it shall prevail' and never be tempted or driven back into equating orthodoxy with ignorance: that way lies betrayal and defeat.

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          • #35
            Can We Trust the New Testament?

            Continued from the last post above↑

            THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

            For positions that look safe in a storm may turn out to be dubious refuges. A hundred years ago the conservatism of the committed was quite sure where the defense of the faith lay. It lay with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and his allies in insisting that the opening chapters of Genesis were literally and historically true: to allow that they could be true as myths, while Darwin's views could also be true as science, was to sell out. Yet had these good men won the day against Thomas Huxley and his allies, it would be impossible now to be a Christian and a scientist. The cause of the faith would have suffered irreparable damage―whereas in fact the stories of the creation and the fall have now been liberated to become far more meaningful than when they were true simply of a single remote period of time. The truth of the Gospel stories involves indeed a more complex interrelationship of fact and interpretation―for Jesus, unlike Adam, was a historical individual. The task of disentangling the strands in them demands therefore greater critical discrimination, not less. The way in which we can 'trust' the New Testament is less simple than the way in which we can trust the Old Testament, let alone the Koran or the Bhagavad-Gita. For the 'mix' in the Christ-event is richer. It calls for the full assurance of conviction and criticism, not their mutual distancing in guarded distrust.

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            • #36
              Can We Trust the New Testament?

              Continued from the last post above↑

              THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

              The conservatism of the committed is probably more entrenched in the sort of people likely to read this book―and, if I am honest, deep down in myself―than any of the other attitudes. It therefore behoves us to be especially wary, and respectful, of it. The plea is often heard not to 'disturb' the faithful or make it 'all too complicated'. 'Why can't you leave us alone?'―or at any rate leave the Bible alone. In a simpler, pre-scientific age this might have been enough―as it doubtless is for millions of people still, in many parts of the globe. Yet we live, for good or ill, especially for those of us who read paperbacks and watch television, in a world where everything else is being questioned; and in an increasingly revolutionary society a pre-critical faith will come to be seen as a harmless if beautiful relic. It is sobering to reflect that it is mainly in those areas of Christendom where biblical criticism has made least impact, in eastern Orthodoxy and peasant Catholicism, that Marxism had made most. This is not a reason for doing biblical criticism; indeed the most militantly fundamentalist are often the most blindly anti-communist! But it could help to shake us out of our dogmatic slumbers―if the sight does not do so of so many thousands of young people merely passing us by. Moreover the resurgence of fundamentalist attitudes in our day, even in educated countries and in charismatic circles that supposedly prize the spirit above the letter, speaks judgements on the churches for failing to present an intelligent authority of the Bible as a viable alternative to non-biblical spiritualities. But the best and ultimately the only valid reason for taking the quest seriously is the love and trust of truth for its own sake. And that, with whichever predisposing attitude we may begin, is finally the sole test and judge of us all.

              Comment


              • #37
                Can We Trust the New Testament?

                Beginning of Chapter 2

                FACTS AND FALLACIES

                One of the most powerful factors in distrust is ignorance, and I find in talking to laymen that there are all kinds of misconceptions about the New Testament, and what scholars do, that lay them open to believing anything―or nothing. So it may be useful to start with an elementary collection of facts and fallacies to clear the ground on which to build.

                Comment


                • #38
                  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...

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    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...

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      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...

                      Comment


                      • #41
                        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...

                        Comment


                        • #42
                          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...

                          Comment


                          • #43
                            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...

                            Comment


                            • #44
                              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...

                              Comment


                              • #45
                                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...

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