Subject: Re: Responses
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 29 2002 - 00:03:14 EDT
Jim said:
<< I have copies of books like The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English,
but simply haven't had time to read them. >>
Is that really the title of one of them? If so, do you know what it rests
its claims of completeness on, and how many pages/volumes it fills?
I would suppose it to be a "complete" translation of the less fragmentary
so-called sectarian Essene texts (although the identification of the Qumran
community and keepers of the scrolls as Essenes, long-accepted almost
unanimously, is now becoming increasingly controversial) and maybe
inter-testamental books, with everything from the Hebrew Bible left out,
variant or not. Is that right?
And:
<< 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'. >>
It might seem odd, I suppose, for such attitudes to change in any given
period of a generation or two. But it doesn't seem less likely to me that
they would change in the twenty years following Jesus' death than that they
would change in the twenty years preceding it, or the twenty years preceding
his birth, or the twenty years preceding those, or some other arbitrarily
given twenty-year period.
A possible cause for the change that seems to me very reasonable is that
many or most manuscripts might have perished in the destruction of Jerusalem
circa 70 C.E. to which (perhaps coupled with other things) I presume you
allude by saying that Jewish society was severely disrupted. It seems
probable that a standardized and more clearly defined canon, for lack of a
better word, would have been formulated by the religious authority some time
shortly after this date. I have no way to know, and it is still quite
utterly mysterious, but this seems at least as probable as a similar event
happening for less understood reasons in the century before Jesus' ministry.
And:
<< 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? >>
In short, Acts is an anomaly. My understanding is that no other book in the
New Testament offers so much textual variation.
However, I am unsure of the details regarding the so-called Western text, or
Bezan text. I believe that I have never heard anyone say that it is
one-third longer, but, rather, one-tenth longer, and I am not sure of the
reliability even of this. I unfortunately do not have full Greek texts to
place side-by-side, but only a Greek text assembled by the United Bible
Societies with a critical apparatus providing variations from the passages
they have favored, manuscript and ancient witness data, et cetera. So it is
impossible, or massively infeasible, for me to confirm or produce such
information with what resources I have available to me now.
Having just spent a few minutes thumbing through the UBS text of Acts with
attention to the critical apparatus, it appears that the variants are, if
not more numerous, much more substantial where they occur there than is
typical for the rest of the New Testament. Variants with an extra clause,
or even several extra clauses, seem to be abundant in Acts relative to
elsewhere, where most variants involve one or two words. After only this
brief perusal, it looks to me like most of these variants are adding extra
details: there seems to be more numbers, and more specific information about
places and distances and lengths of time.
Also, I am not sure if there is a full text that can be pointed to as the
Western text. It is possible, but I am not sure of it. My understanding
has been that the majority of manuscripts and other witnesses of Acts are of
the so-called Neutral Text, the one in all of our New Testaments, but that
enough manuscript evidence exists to demonstrate the early existence of a
variant text, or a small series of them. It has been my understanding that
these manuscripts and ancient witnesses were relatively sparse. My brief
perusal a few minutes ago was consistent with this understanding.
It is true, though, that Acts -- as a result of the Western text, whether it
is a cohesive book or a theoretical construct based on fragments -- exhibits
variation more significantly than the rest of the New Testament.
And:
<< 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. >>
That is certainly true. It is important to note, though, that something as
simple as reversing two letters, replacing an omega with an omikron, or
misspelling a word with two lambdas instead of one, can make a profound
difference. In such a highly inflected language as Greek, in a language
with so complex a morphology, very simple scribal errors can turn a noun
into a verb or a change a verb's person or number or mood. A statement can
become a command, or a command a wish. Simple variations like these are
sometimes not minor variations. But neither are they evidence of deliberate
insertions or deletions of significant portions of text, or of the
coëxistence of widely varying editions.
Such deliberate changes and widely varying editions are surely a part of the
history of the Hebrew Bible, but it seems that they are part of the history
of the New Testament only marginally or not at all.
And:
<< 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. >>
Early quotations and translations are considered early witnesses, and get
ample consideration in textual criticism. More than half of most of the
pages of my Greek Bible is an initially puzzling code, in a smaller font
than the main text, citing manuscripts and other witnesses by arcane symbols
and obscure number and letter designations. Variations are listed, evidence
given, and relative degrees of certainty suggested. The Syriac and Vulgate
translations, as well as quotations by the church fathers, are all given
their fair treatment.
And some significant variations do exist, but most of them are easy to sort
out. I'm not sure that it's accurate to say that the problems with the New
Testament texts are less big than the problems with the Tanakh texts, but it
is accurate to say that the problems faced by textual criticism of each are
usually of a different sort.
-robbie
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