Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Are scribes of texts actually authors? By Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth in my overview of the responses to my book, the orthodox Corruption of Scripture in the afterword I wrote for the second edition, I began to address some major questions in the book. I argued that scribes of the New Testament intentionally changed the text in places in order to make it more orthodox in its theory theology, or to circumvent its use by heretics who had other views. That raises a question. Are scribes who change the text to make it say something different, actually authors instead of mere copyists?
[00:00:41] Heres how I discuss the issue at the beginning of my afterword.
[00:00:45] I see no need here to restate the original thesis of the orthodox corruption of scripture. There is one issue connected with it, however, that has not been clear to some of its readers. That does need to be addressed in the book. I never claimed, and certainly never meant to claim, that the majority of all textual variants in the tradition were intentional, a term I will be discussing below, nor that the majority of intentional variations were theologically motivated. My concern was to focus on one kind of intentional variation, readings plausibly generated in the course of theological controversies of the second and third christian centuries.
[00:01:23] Moreover, I chose to concentrate within that larger subgroup on one particular phenomenon, variants that appear to have been created in the context of the christological controversies of the day. I did not intend for my study to be the final word on theological modifications of the text, let alone intentional changes more broadly. On the contrary, my hope was that other scholars would follow suit and look into other comparable kinds of changes that has happened to some extent in the intervening years, although not to the degree that I had hoped. There is still significant work to be done, dissertations begging to be written on related aspects of the problem.
[00:02:04] My overarching concern, however, was that variant readings should not be discarded as trivial and useless as we forge backwards to the original text.
[00:02:13] The variants themselves can be of supreme importance for certain kinds of questions, not questions about what an author wrote, but about what scribes may have wanted his words to say.
[00:02:25] These are primary data for a period of christian history for which we otherwise have only sparse and scattered sources.
[00:02:32] The data can be of use not only to textual critics but also to social historians, historians of doctrine, and anyone else broadly interested in the history of the early church.
[00:02:43] Before discussing the developments in the field made since orthodox corruption, I would like to stress two theoretical points that I wanted to make in the work. Both of these points struck me as rather significant and fruitful. Neither one, to my knowledge, has been taken up by subsequent scholars. Both of them have to do with how we conceptualize the matter of intentional changes of the text.
[00:03:07] Scribes as readers in a thoughtful critique of orthodox corruption, the german textual scholar Ulrich Schmidt indicates that in my work, I consciously or unwittingly introduce a new concept of scribes, namely, the concept of the scribe as author.
[00:03:28] In fact, there was nothing unwitting about it. I do indeed present scribes as authors. Like other authors, they put pen to page and sometimes write their own words, not those of the text they are copying. My view, however, is even more extreme than that. In my view, scribes are authors of the text in the way that all of us are authors of the text, not only the texts that we write, but also the texts we read. When I wrote orthodox corruption, my understanding of how readers interpret texts was thoroughly informed by radical reader response critics such as literary theorist Stanley Fish.
[00:04:07] The basic view should be non controversial at this stage of our intellectual history, texts are not self interpreting. To be interpreted, texts need to be read, and to be read means to be read by individual humans who do not simply extract the meaning out of texts, but also bring a significant amount of intellectual baggage to the texts before taking anything out of them. What we bring to the text will differ for each of us, and whatever this is will affect what we take from the text.
[00:04:39] Thus, the meaning of a text, by the very nature of things, is not inherent in the text. Meaning resides in a confluence of factors, the blots on the page, the learned and socially constructed interpretive strategies of the reader, and all the other baggage, mental, emotional, contextual, etcetera, that readers bring to the task.
[00:05:01] This decidedly does not mean that texts can mean whatever we want them to mean. We are thoroughly social creatures. The ways we have been socialized affects our reading habits. Our interpretive options are therefore bounded by an entire set of hermeneutical and contextual assumptions inherited from our environment, our education, our life. But they are not bound absolutely. As I argued in orthodox corruption, whenever we thoughtfully read a text, we interpret it. The way we interpret it is by explaining it to ourselves. We do that by putting the text in other words.
[00:05:39] Scribes did that as well, since they too were human. They put the text in other words. But sometimes scribes did something more than simply put the text in other words in their own minds. On occasion, they put it in other words on the page. That is to say, they rewrote the text, not mentally, but physically, actually altering the words on the page so that in the very tangible sense, they really were other words.
[00:06:09] What scribes did in copying texts, then, is very much like what all of us do whenever we read texts. Obviously, though, there is a big difference. When we explain a text in other words, we do it in our own minds or possibly with our voices. When scribes put a text in other words, they sometimes did it physically, so that the copies they produced recorded the scribes own readings of the text in such a way that the words they inherited in the text were changed. As a result, subsequent readers, in a real and significant way, read a different text.
[00:06:48] Scribes, then were not merely copyists, and they were not, on occasion, merely authors. They were readers in a completely radical sense.
