Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Do we know if our Copies of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament are accurate? By Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth when talking about how we got the Bible, there's obviously a lot more involved than understanding how and when the canon came to be collected and more or less fixed. Knowing which books are in the canon is not the same thing as knowing what words were originally in the books.
[00:00:26] For that we have to move to the related question of the textual tradition of the books, of how they were copied for many centuries before the invention of the printing press.
[00:00:36] I've talked a good deal about that with respect to the New Testament on the blog, but far less about the Hebrew Bible.
[00:00:42] Since I've just finished with some posts on the canon, now I can turn to the question of the what do we know about how it was copied? Can we trust that we have what the authors wrote?
[00:00:53] What are the complexities involved?
[00:00:56] This will take two posts I will be drawing for my discussion in my textbook, the A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press the earliest writings of the Hebrew Bible were probably produced during the 8th century BCE.
[00:01:13] This is the date of the oldest prophets, such as Amos and Isaiah of Jerusalem. When an ancient author produced a book, he obviously wrote it out by hand, and if anyone wanted a copy, he had to copy it by hand or pay someone else to do it for him.
[00:01:29] One page, one sentence, one word, one letter at a time.
[00:01:34] The term manuscript literally means handwritten copy.
[00:01:39] The books of the Hebrew Bible were passed down in manuscript form year after year, century after century. It was not until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century CE that things change.
[00:01:51] Then it was possible to mass produce copies of books, and more important, it was possible to make sure that every single copy of a book was exactly like every other copy, with no sentences, words, or even letters different from one copy to the next.
[00:02:07] This was not the case with manuscripts. Scribes who copied a text could change the text whenever they felt the need. Maybe they thought the copy they were copying had made a mistake in it and they wanted to correct it.
[00:02:18] Maybe it didn't say exactly what they wanted it to say and so they changed it.
[00:02:22] Moreover, scribes could simply make a mistake when they were not adequately trained to do the job of copying, or when they were inattentive or sleepy.
[00:02:32] So what can we say about the text of the Hebrew Bible?
[00:02:35] Some apologists claim that we have exactly what the authors originally wrote and claim to be able to prove it. Is that right?
[00:02:44] The first printed copy of The Hebrew Bible. That is from a printing press appeared in 1488.
[00:02:51] Before then, for over two millennia, the Bible had been produced and reproduced by hand in manuscript form.
[00:02:58] The printers of the 15th century and later, of course, had to decide what to print, and for that they had to use manuscripts that were available to them. If what they used were manuscripts with lots of mistakes in them, then necessarily the printed version of the Bible, or now in many multiple copies, would reproduce the mistakes made by the scribes who had centuries earlier copied the text by hand.
[00:03:23] Today there are millions of printed copies of the Bible in Hebrew and in modern translations, all produced by modern means.
[00:03:31] But what manuscripts are these printings based on?
[00:03:34] The oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that we have, which is the basis for modern printings, is called the Codex Leningrad Densis because it was located in Leningrad, Russia. It dates to about the year 1000 CE.
[00:03:49] We do not have any complete manuscripts of the Bible before this.
[00:03:53] That means that the oldest complete manuscript is 1700 years after the earliest books of the Bible had been written and 900 years after the canon was closed.
[00:04:04] A somewhat earlier Hebrew manuscript is called Codex Aleppo. It is not complete. About a quarter of it was lost in a fire in 1948.
[00:04:14] Why don't we have earlier relatively complete manuscripts?
[00:04:18] Shouldn't we have thousands?
[00:04:21] It appears that in the Middle Ages, when Jewish scribes copied the Hebrew Bible, they destroyed the manuscripts they used to make their copies once their own copies were complete.
[00:04:31] So the older copies they copied do not survive.
[00:04:35] Why keep an old, worn out copy if you have a nice new one?
[00:04:39] Our understanding of the text of the Hebrew Bible changed radically with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as we will see.
[00:04:45] But not even among the scrolls did we find complete manuscripts of the entire Bible.
[00:04:51] And so the key question should we be concerned that the Jewish scriptures, Old Testaments we read today are based on a manuscript that was copied from earlier manuscripts, Copied from earlier manuscripts for many, many centuries. That the first surviving complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible was made fully 17 centuries after some of the books of Scripture were written.
[00:05:14] The older view of scholars was, and for some apologists still is, that there is no reason to be concerned. Because Jewish scribes from time immemorial followed very strict rules when copying their texts to make sure that they never changed a verse or even a word or even a letter. Jewish scribes were known to be highly scrupulous so that the text known in the year 1000 CE, it was believed, was the same as the text known in the year 1 CE.
[00:05:44] Scholars today are not as sanguine about the matter for a variety of reasons.
[00:05:49] It is true that in the Middle Ages, Jewish scribes adopted a set of rules to ensure that they would not change the text.
[00:05:56] But when did those rules come to be put in place?
[00:05:59] They certainly were not in place in the years after Isaiah of Jerusalem produced his book, or even in the centuries immediately after that.
[00:06:07] So what if the texts of the Hebrew Bible were changed either a little bit or a lot in the centuries before these rules came to be put in place?
[00:06:18] To deal with this question, we need to consider a bit of background.
[00:06:23] I'll pick up there in the next post.
