Subject: Re: Responses
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 22:57:09 EDT
Thanks again for the long, detailed reply, Robbie -- I appreciate this.
This is a field I haven't studied in ten years and even then I didn't get
so deeply into it. My Greek is about first semester's worth. I have
copies of books like The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, but simply
haven't had time to read them. I'm studying for Comprehensive Exams and
have a ton of books to read. Half of them by Heidegger. Ungh.
ANYWAY, most of what you're arguing sounds pretty reasonable. I think you
misunderstood me a bit RE: my question about the relationship of texts to
belief systems. Ultimately, a canon is something defined by a community.
You know better than I that the word means "rule" or something of the sort
-- the measure by which beliefs/lives/other texts are judged. So when we
discuss canonicity, we discuss the attitudes of a community toward its
texts. We're doing something like sociology and archaeology. Ultimately,
it's really very difficult to infer from the mere physical attributes of a
text what the community believed about the text. We need them to just tell
us :). They usually don't. At least not that directly. Your system of
inferences works well with the data. It may not be the only system that
works with the data, but I don't know enough to offer an alternative. My
statement was meant to imply that the community may not have thought much
of the variants if they aren't subdivided into smaller communities with
different beliefs based upon these variants. I'm not aware of very much
communal identification with specific variants of texts prior to the time
of Christ.
It would seem odd that attitudes/beliefs about Scripture from Christ's time
to Josephus' time -- perhaps 60-70 years -- would vary that greatly. But
it is possible and Jewish society was severely disrupted between the time
of Christ and Josephus. So I tend to lean toward thinking the attitudes in
Christ's time were similar to the attitudes in Josephus'.
A question: my understanding is that the western text of the Book of Acts
is about 1/3 longer than any other text of Acts. Is that an anomaly, or
very common among the books of the NT? I think I've read in Westcott and
Hort's Introduction to the NT in the Original Greek that the vast majority
of textual variants in the NT consist of things like reversing the closing
two letters of words, smoothing out bad Greek, etc. It's not that there
aren't some insertions (there's a whopper in 1 John too), but that these
simply don't account for the majority of variants.
But I've seen testimony to some of larger variants as well, and then we
have to consider that much of the NT is quoted in the church fathers, and
take into account the Syriac and Vulgate translations. So I've always
thought the problems with the NT texts were at least as big as the problems
with the OT texts -- what you said was pretty much news to me.
But again, I haven't studied this in some time ;).
I knew a guy that said the same thing about the King Jimmy version too --
"If it was good enough for Paul, it's good enough for me." I've spent a
great deal of time with rather conservative Christians, though, and that
attitude is pretty rare. Most don't really want to deal with textual
problems, have their favorite translations, but generally respect all
translations (paraphrases like The Living Bible tend to be a bit more
controversial, but not much more). Bible translations are like Democracy
to them.
Easier to believe in if you don't see how it's being made :).
The more traditional ones lean King James and the ones who want to
understand what's being read and what they're reading lean NIV. Those most
concerned with accuracy lean toward NASB (which has always seemed like a
Bible for the anal retentive to me). And, of course, those who prefer the
Amplified Bible like
options/choices/alternatives/expansions of the possible readings.
It's a temperment thing.
Jim
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