Dubious Arguments that we CAN get to the "Original Text"

[00:00:01] Dubious arguments that we can get to the original text. [00:00:06] When I have public debates with scholars over whether we can know the original text of the New Testament or not, I stake out the claim that we cannot. And they stake out the claim that we probably can. [00:00:18] Part of my argument is always the one I started to outline in the previous post. [00:00:24] If we take something like the Gospel of Mark, our first complete manuscript of Mark is 300 years after Mark was first produced and put into circulation. [00:00:34] So how can we know if that manuscript is extremely close to the original? We don't have an original to compare it to in order to find out. And we don't have earlier manuscripts to compare it to in order to find out, except for one remarkable but highly fragmentary manuscript about a century and a half earlier, dating from around 200 CE, which does contain differences from the complete one. [00:01:01] So, given this fact, how does my opponent typically argue his case? [00:01:06] Normally, he cites two important data. [00:01:09] There is no disputing either data, and I am completely on board with them being important data. But I don't think they lead to the conclusion that my opponent draws. [00:01:20] The first datum is that we have far more manuscripts of the New Testament than of any other book in the ancient world. Far more manuscripts. [00:01:29] This is, of course, absolutely right. There is no one on the planet who knows anything about the matter that would say otherwise. [00:01:37] In itself, though, that is not, for me any reason to think that we therefore know what was in the New Testament. It's nice to have lots and lots of manuscripts from a thousand years after the New Testament was written. But that doesn't tell us that these manuscripts have a text that's the same as the original. [00:01:54] My opponent will sometimes say, in developing this particular argument, as if it were scoring a point, that if I think that we can't know the actual words of the New Testament, then I must think that we can't know the actual words of Homer or Euripides or Plato or Cicero or Seneca. [00:02:12] They usually mark that comment with an exclamation point or two, as if no one would want to go so far as to think that. [00:02:19] But in fact, that's exactly what I think. With these authors, it is even more difficult to know the exact words. [00:02:27] That's not a strange opinion. It's the opinion of the textual scholars who actually work on these other authors. The only people who think that this is a strange opinion are people who know nothing about these other fields of inquiry. [00:02:40] That, of course, would include the vast majority of all biblical scholars. [00:02:46] One big difference between the New Testament and these other ancient authors is that with the New Testament, scribes may have had a more personal reason for wanting to modify the texts that they were copying. [00:02:58] Presumably no one copying Euripides or Cicero had personal ideological reasons for wanting them to say something different from what they said. With the new Testament, though, if a verse seems to contradict another verse or contains a historical mistake, or if it appears to present a theological conundrum, scribes who saw the Bible as an authoritative text would have had every reason to change what the verse said, and they often did. [00:03:26] And so it is true that the New Testament is far, far better attested than any other book from antiquity. The reason for that, by the way, is not hard to figure out who was copying texts. Throughout most of the Middle Ages. Christian scribes, which books would they be more interested in copying, books of scripture or the writings of Plato? No contest. So, of course we have more books of the New Testament than any other books. [00:03:52] But the reality is that in one respect, the New Testament is like all other ancient books. Given our textual situation, it is very hard to know what the authors originally wrote. [00:04:03] The reason that matters in particular with the New Testament is that simply there are gazillions of people today, especially those with a high view of the inspiration of scripture, who really care what the original words were. Not that many people care that much about what the original words of Plato or Cicero were. The second response that I get from scholars wanting to show that we must have the original text is a little more interesting. It involves what scholars sometimes call the tenacity of the traditional. This is the view that since we have so many manuscripts and they contain so many variations, then surely with this abundance of evidence, the original reading can surely be found for every passage, every verse, every word in one manuscript or another. [00:04:49] In this view, textual variants, as abundant as they are, surely include among their number the original text. We just have to find it in each case. [00:04:59] One very interesting piece of evidence for this view involves a fact that is not widely known outside the ranks of the professional textual critics. [00:05:07] It's new papyri manuscripts. Relatively very old ones do show up all the time, several in the past few years. Whenever a new papyrus turns up, it almost never contains a textual variant that's completely new. The variants are almost always variants that we know about from our later manuscripts. This shows, the argument goes, that variants were not created later. Our later manuscripts preserved variants. They didn't create them. And this shows, it is argued, that all of the earlier variants are to be found even in the later manuscripts. This is a terrific argument, and it's very interesting. On the surface it seems pretty convincing, but in my view, it does not actually show that we have the original reading all that we can know that we do. I'll explain why in the next post.