A Major Argument that We Can Be Sure We Have the Original Text

[00:00:01] A major argument that we can be sure we have the original text. [00:00:06] There is one particularly interesting argument sometimes used by those who believe we can know with good certainty what the original text of the New Testament book said. [00:00:15] This is the argument called the tenacity of the tradition. The argument is prefaced on the very interesting phenomenon that whenever papyri manuscripts are discovered, say, from the third or the fourth christian century, they almost never contain new variant readings that we didn't already know about from later manuscripts of, say, the 7th to the 15th centuries. Instead, the readings of these early manuscripts reappear in later manuscripts. [00:00:43] The conclusion that is sometimes drawn, then, is that the tradition is tenacious. That is to say, later manuscripts did not invent their variant readings, but in almost every instance replicated variant readings that they got from earlier manuscripts. And one corollary that is sometimes drawn, then, is that variant readings do not disappear, but continue to be replicated in later witnesses. If that's the case, then the original readings almost certainly still survive somewhere in the manuscript tradition. The task of textual criticism, then, is simply to figure out which of our surviving variant readings is the original. [00:01:25] This certainly sounds like a convincing argument, and it's no wonder that so many people find it compelling. I myself, however, do not, and I would like to explain why. [00:01:35] The first thing to stress is that if someone wants to cite evidence for a point of view, it is always important to examine the evidence to see what it is evidence of. [00:01:46] In my judgment, the evidence used to show the tenacity of the tradition, in fact, does not demonstrate the tenacity of the tradition. The evidence instead shows us something about the proclivities of scribes from the Middle Ages. [00:02:00] That is to say, the fact that manuscripts from the 7th to the 15th century, say, do not introduce new variants as a rule, into the tradition, does not show that new variants were never introduced into the traditional. They obviously were introduced into the tradition at some point. That is a point prior to the 7th of the 15th century. Otherwise, you would have to argue that all the variant readings were found in the originals, since they could not, under this theory, have been introduced later. But that, of course, is nonsense. [00:02:32] The fact that manuscripts from the Middle Ages have variant readings that can be found in papyri from, say, the third to the fourth centuries, simply shows that medieval scribes were not interested, for the most part, in changing the texts themselves. [00:02:47] They were interested in preserving textual variants that were already in the textual tradition. [00:02:53] But that tells us nothing, precisely nothing, about what scribes in, say, the first and second centuries were doing or what their interests or proclivities were. It simply tells us how scribes in the 7th to the 15th centuries operated. [00:03:11] Just to make sure I'm stating this clearly. Just because a scribe living in the year 1150 chose not to alter the text he was copying, unless he knew a textual variant from other manuscripts that he was familiar with, does not mean that a scribe in the year 150 felt and acted the same way. In fact, evidence from this later scribe in his later period has zero relevance for what was happening in another time and place hundreds of years earlier, before later scribal practices were established. Let me zero evidence. [00:03:49] Here are some realities that need to be borne in mind. [00:03:53] Unlike the later medieval scribes, the earliest scribes, say the first hundred years of copying of the texts were not professional scribes who were trained to copy literary texts. This is not a disputed point among experts. [00:04:08] Unlike these later scribes, the earliest ones were often extremely careless and often did not object to changing the text on their own volition. [00:04:18] There are far more differences among our earlier manuscripts than among our later ones. The papyri that we have from the second and the third century differ far more from the later manuscripts of the 7th to the 15th centuries than these later manuscripts differ from one another. In fact, and this is even more significant, these earlier manuscripts differ far, far more from each other than the later manuscripts differ from each other. [00:04:46] It's absolutely true that the vast majority of our textual changes were produced in the first 200 years of the copying of the text. But there is simply no way, literally no way, to know how many of the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, or whatever changes that were made to the text in those early years have survived in the manuscripts that we now have. [00:05:11] Just take the example I've used before, the Gospel of Mark. Let's say mark was produced in Rome in the year 70. [00:05:19] Let's say that once it was put into circulation, it was copied to ten times. [00:05:23] It would not have been copied by professionals, but simply by whoever was literate and able to make a copy. [00:05:30] These copies would have had differences among them. [00:05:34] Suppose each of these copies was copied ten times. Now you have 110 copies. Each set of ten copies of the original ten would have copied the mistakes of their predecessor and made mistakes of their own, different mistakes for each manuscript. Suppose each of those was copied ten times. Okay, well, do the math. We now have over a thousand copies. [00:05:57] Those thousand copies were copied, and those copies of the thousand were copied. And here is the key point. We don't have any of those thousand copies or 110 or the ten or the original? The original is lost. And the hypothetical first ten. And the hypothetical first hundred and the hypothetical next 1100. How could we possibly know that our first complete copy that now survives from 300 years later and the copies made for the centuries after that contain all of the mistakes introduced into the original ten copies? [00:06:33] We can't know. We wish we could, but we can't.