Subject: Re: Responses
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 21 2002 - 17:48:37 EDT
Jim said:
<< In my opinion, all this time, I've
been arguing For the existence of some kind of a canon in _Christ's day_
(maybe
even before that, back to around 2nd century BCE, but certainly in Christ's
day). That was the importance of the quotation from Josephus. I thought
you
were taking issue with the idea of a canon in _Christ's day_ by itself. >>
I did not mean to assert that there was no canon in Christ's day, but only
that there seems not to have been something that I would call a canon in the
last pre-Christian centuries. I meant to be referring rather strictly to
the time that the Qumran community moved to Qumran, which was around the
first or second century B.C.E. It does seem to me that the evidence for
something I would call a canon in Christ's day -- by which I mean earlier
than 40s C.E. -- is unconvincing. There is no evidence for the lack of a
canon then, though, while I take the Qumran scrolls to be evidence for the
lack of a canon, by my definition, one or two hundred years earlier.
It might be that significant variation was eliminated in the mainstream
community before Christ's ministry began. It might be that Hebrew texts
maintained the same variation in the mainstream community in 30 C.E. as they
did in 200 B.C.E. There is not entirely convincing evidence either way, to
my estimation. The prevalence of the Septuagint, or of the various Greek
translations that were accepted into it, would have provided something more
like a canonizing standard for the Christians but I do not know that the
Septuagint would have had such prevalence during Christ's ministry, or if it
became so important only in Paul's. I am certainly no expert in the early
Christian church, and by talking about it I'm sliding a bit out of my
field(s), but it seems to me that we probably know very little of Christ's
ministry but through the lens of Paul's, since the earliest record of
Christianity is in Paul's writings, which all post-date Jesus' life. I
think of Paul's effect on our understanding of Jesus' teachings similarly as
I do Plato's effect on our understanding of Socrates'; other people wrote
about both Socrates and Jesus, but all were probably profoundly influenced
by Plato and Paul, respectively.
Josephus' testimony very late in the first century C.E. convinces me of
nothing but suggests to me a bit about the state of things in Christ's life.
I suppose that Josephus, presuming that he did NOT know about substantial
variation, WOULD have known about it if it had been eliminated early in his
life, which was roughly contemporary to the end of Jesus'. So if Josephus
had no substantial variations, while the Qumran community certainly did, I
would suspect that they disappeared from the mainstream Jewish community
sometime between 100 or 200 B.C.E. and 30 or 40 C.E. This does not make it
certain, but it does make it look much more likely to me that Jesus would
have had a standardized text; or at least that a favored text -- probably
resembling the Masoretic -- would have risen with variants becoming
unavailable or less available sometime before Jesus' death.
And:
<< What many see happening is that Sirach used the same verbal formula to
refer to
Jewish literature that Josephus did, so infer that he meant something
similar to
Josephus. It's interesting that Josephus would appropriate the same
language to
refer to a fixed canon -- he had to be familiar with Sirach, and by doing so
could have been testifying to a tradition that well predated him. >>
If Sirach does not convince me, then Josephus' appropriation of the same
language would certainly not. If Josephus had a Bible; if he had no
substantial variation; if, indeed, he believed that Moses authored the Law
as he himself held it, then he had probably never considered the possibility
of substantial variation. If the book of Sirach does not mention it
outright, Josephus would have no reason to think that a difference existed
between its talk of books and his own.
I do not see in Sirach what I do see in Josephus. For Josephus to
appropriate a verbal formula, as you put it, that he sees in Sirach suggests
to me not that Sirach means something similar to what Josephus means, but
only that Josephus believes that Sirach does. He does not seem to have had
information about Sirach much better than ours.
I do wonder, though, what Josephus thought about the Septuagint. He wrote
in Greek, and I presume that he could read Hebrew. It is generally believed
that the Jews had abandoned the Septuagint before Josephus' time, but surely
he knew about it? and it would have differed quite substantially in many
places from his Hebrew texts, presuming that his closely resembled the
Masoretic. It is very unusual that he sounds so like a person ignorant of
substantial textual variation. It seems like he SHOULD have known, even if
the Qumran variants were already on their way out when the community that
preserved them left Jerusalem, just on the basis of the Septuagint's Greek
and the Masoretic's Hebrew. I wonder if he DID know about the variation,
even if it was preserved beyond his time, but he just didn't think it was
important, somehow, and could permit the variants into his canon of "only
22" with no contradiction and so forth. It is all very puzzling.
And:
<< I've been imagining a Qumran community that existed in Christ's day, not
1-2 centuries beforehand. >>
The Qumran community was destroyed, probably by Roman soldiers, probably
shortly after Jesus' death. So it did have some existence contemporary to
Jesus, and there's even been some speculation (rather wild speculation, in
my opinion) that John the Baptist had some association to the sect. There
is no mention of Jesus or Christianity in the scrolls, though, and by Jesus'
day the people who lived there probably didn't get out much. The community
arrived in Qumran probably between the middle-second and early-first century
B.C.E. Their collection of books is probably indicative of books available
in Jerusalem only at this early time.
And:
<< [. . .] if parts of a community accept 65 books and other parts of a
community
accept 67, I think it's a bit, oh, overconscientious to say there's _no_
idea of
a canon in that community, that the two communities hold to two entirely
different canons. The statement goes far beyond the evidence. I would say
the
same of a community that accepts, for example, the same 66 books, but has
some
variants of some of the 66 books floating around.
I think you have a bit too strict a definition of a canon. By your
definition,
we don't have one even today. >>
I would not say, for instance, that two communities with canons differing by
a few books hold "entirely different" canons, although neither would I say
without qualification that they share a canon.
But I WOULD say that a community that has a collection of books filled with
SUBSTANTIAL variation and that seems not to favor particular variants as
more authoritative does not have a Biblical Canon. Perhaps the modification
of "variation" with "substantial" is key.
It does not seem to me that members of a modern Christian congregation are
in a similar situation as the relevant ancients simply because they use
different translations, or translations from different manuscripts, or
translations using different readings of the same manuscripts. I should add
that the New Testament does not have manuscripts that vary so widely as do
the Qumran scrolls of much of the Hebrew Bible with each other, or as does
the post-Torah Septuagint with the Masoretic text.
Every so often an acquaintance learns in conversation that I read Greek for
fun, and either knows or learns from the conversation that the New Testament
was written in Greek. The question that is then universally asked is if I
think the popular translations are accurate to the original. The most
irreverent interlocutors ask with a smirk; the most faithful ask with wide
eyes and sometimes a hint of anxiety. The usually long and difficult answer
that I give basically amounts to, yes, pretty much, and the biggest problems
are usually from different readings of the same Greek texts and
untranslatable Greek ambiguities. A few cases do exist of passages in the
New Testament being changed or added in later manuscripts, but they are
almost always very easily sorted out. One such case, and one that is very
upsetting to some people, is that the story of the adulteress in John where
Jesus gives his famous "May he without sin cast the first stone" is very
certainly a late addition.
But usually, the problem is where to put the periods in a Greek text the
earliest copies of which didn't have any, or how to translate some bit of
Greek that doesn't have an easy English equivalent. The Gospel of John is
the New Testament book that I have studied most intimately, and both of
these problems occur in its infamously difficult first chapter. The last
two words of what is usually designated as the third verse are "ho gegonen,"
which means "what came to be" or "which came to be." If a period is placed
after "ho gegonen," then verse three translates as, "All [things] through
him came to be, and apart from him came to be not even one which came to
be." And verse four begins, "In him life was. . ." But if a period is
placed before "ho gegonen," then verse three loses "which came to be" to end
with "not even one," and verse four begins "What came to be in him was life.
. ." Both would be ordinary Greek grammar and construction, and it seems to
be a minor distinction, but what is at stake in the placement of a sentence
break is whether the verb "was" is existential. Either life came to be in
him, or it simply WAS in him. To the casual reader, and perhaps also to the
author(s) of the book, this ambiguity is not so troublesome as it is to the
translator, who has to make a major decision or write a footnote. Ancient
witnesses to the text either disagree about where to break these sentences
or are uncial texts with no punctuation at all. All of the oldest
manuscripts are of the latter sort, and the originals were likely so. A
case of Greek with no easy English equivalent is in the word "logos." It is
usually translated as "word" and this is usually not problematic. But the
bizarre use in the first chapter of John, with the logos being in the
beginning with God, with its being God, with its being made flesh and
dwelling amongst men, makes translation as "word" probably horribly
unsatisfactory. The word "logos" designates an expression, but also the
thought and intent behind it. It has many derived meanings, and is used in
widely different ways. It is used to mean word, speech, conversation,
language, story, thought, reason, account, and even ratio. From it are
derived the English logic, and the -log(ue), -logy, and -logist suffixes.
There is no way to render it simply in English, and "word" limits it
greatly.
This is the sort of difficulty that riddles the New Testament. It is not
afflicted with two or three or five substantially different versions of the
same book. The differences between, say, the King James and the NIV
versions of the Gospel of John seem to me of a wholly different sort than
the differences between variations of Sefer Iyov (the Book of Job) whereby
one has fully one-fourth less length than the other. When the variations
had by a community are of the latter sort, and there seems not to be even a
favored or supposedly more reliable version, I do not see the possibility
for a Bible as Bibles exist today.
There is a story that circulates among translators of the Bible and readers
of the Bible in the original that, true or not, seems to express something
like what I mean. As it goes, a group of missionaries spoke at a church in
England, or America, and mentioned their efforts to translate the Bible into
the South African language of the people their ministry had been focused on.
A pious old woman later asked them why they would bother with such a
time-consuming and difficult endeavor. Slightly puzzled, they answered that
these South Africans should be able to read God's Holy Book in their own
tongue. Shaking her head, the old woman exclaimed that, if the King James
were good enough for St. Peter, then by God it's good enough for the South
Africans.
I take this as satire, of course, but I do think that the attitude of the
old woman is an exaggerated form of how many Jews and Christians alike think
of their Bibles today. I have actually met several Christians who consider
the NIV quite a blasphemous corruption of scripture, and take the King James
to be the only Bible God approves of. They are vaguely aware, of course,
when it is brought to their attention that the King James, too, is a
translation. But they don't seem to spend a great deal of time thinking
about this fact. Nor that, as I tell them, the differences between the King
James and NIV are usually less significant than those between both of them
and the Greek they follow. I do not take these individuals to represent the
majority (at least I hope that they don't), but varying degrees of the
conception of Bible as a divine and unshakable text with every word and
letter inspired and sacred is, I find, quite pervasive in the mainstream
Christian and Jewish communities today. It seems to me that there is
evidence for similar attitudes going back a Very Long Way.
But, as I believe my assertion was at the very beginning of this all, Jews
as late as the last few centuries before Jesus had a very different
conception of their sacred books. And, it seems to me, books generally were
conceived of in a very different way by the ancients.
And:
<< If so, of what importance is this since the two [differing canons, or
sets of variants] seem to
support the same belief system? >>
I have suspected almost all along that this was lurking back somewhere in
your comments, but I didn't want to come right out and speak to it in case I
was wrong. I was never talking about a religious belief system. I was
talking about books. I have little doubt that the religious belief system
of the Jews was quite firm long before the Christians showed up, but I know
that their religious books were not. I don't think that any important part
of any religious belief system is at stake in my suggestions and assertions
here. I'm just talking about the books. They're usually all that I'm very
concerned with.
To answer your question directly, I take this to be of no importance to the
belief systems, but only to understanding the history of books.
-robbie
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