Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] How can we even imagine an original text of the Gospels written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson?
[00:00:13] When it comes to the Gospels, how do we define the original text? Do we define it as the original manuscript that was first penned by the author, or do we define it as the gospels in their most settled canonical form?
[00:00:29] Response as it turns out, this is a complicated and endlessly fascinating question that, so far as I have been able to work out over the past 20 years of thinking about it, has no clear and obvious answer by way of very simple background for readers, not completely on top of the textual situation we are confronting when it comes to the Gospels, or any of the other books of the New Testament, or of any ancient christian writings at all, or in fact, of any writings of any kind at all, that come down to us from antiquity?
[00:01:03] We do not have the originals, however we define that term. See below.
[00:01:10] What we have are copies made from copies which were themselves made from copies. Most of these copies are hundreds of years after the books were put in circulation, and all of the surviving copies contain mistakes of one kind or another.
[00:01:28] The task is to use the surviving copies, some of which are in all certainty more reliable than others, to determine the original text.
[00:01:40] But what is the original text?
[00:01:44] Here's the problem, or at least part of it, you might think. For years I thought that the answer is very simple. The original is the wording of the text that the author originally wrote. That is, some person named John sat down one day, or over the course of days and weeks, and wrote a gospel. We want to know what he originally wrote. That would be the original.
[00:02:12] Fair enough, but its not that easy.
[00:02:17] What, for example, if before he let anyone else look at it, John, whatever his real name was, went back over his manuscript and corrected a few writing mistakes he had made and edited it in places, correcting his spelling mistakes, improving his prose, changing the order of a few paragraphs, rewriting a passage or two or 20 to make them more clear or emphatic or whatever.
[00:02:45] In that case, which is the original, the first thing he wrote, or the edited version?
[00:02:53] And what if, like me and most authors I know, he edited it, say, three or four times before letting anyone else look at it, let alone before he put it in circulation, then what is the original?
[00:03:09] Is it the first thing he wrote or the one that he finally was satisfied with and let someone else read?
[00:03:17] If you say it's the first thing he wrote, there's a problem because we would have zero access to that when the book got put into circulation. So someone else copied it it was only the edited version, not the original version. No copies were made of the original version. So all the copies we have go back to the edited version.
[00:03:41] That means that the only version we could even hypothetically get back to would be the edited, not the original version.
[00:03:50] But why would we call the later version the original?
[00:03:55] But maybe we should just agree to call it the original and simply agree among ourselves that what we mean is that it was the one that John originally let someone look at.
[00:04:08] But what if after he got that persons comments, he then made some major and minor edits again based on their advice?
[00:04:16] That again is how most modern authors do it.
[00:04:21] Then we have the same problem.
[00:04:24] All our manuscripts dont go back to the work he created by himself, but a work he later edited based on the advice of others.
[00:04:33] Even more serious, what if some years later, after the book had been passed around among readers, he decided to produce a second edition?
[00:04:45] As you may know, a wide array of scholars say that originally the Gospel of John ended at the conclusion of chapter 20, but that in a later edition, some years later, the author added chapter 21.
[00:05:00] If we conclude that is right, which one is the original?
[00:05:05] Do we print translations of John in modern editions without chapter 21 because its not what he wrote in his first edition?
[00:05:14] Or do we include everything that appears to have come from his own hand, including the later edition?
[00:05:22] So far I have only been looking at possible originals after John originally put pen to papyrus.
[00:05:31] What about complications even earlier than that?
[00:05:35] What if scholars are right, for example, that the seven signs that Jesus does in the gospel, his seven miracles, starting with turning the water into wine and ending with the raising of Lazarus, came to the author in an earlier document written by someone else, or say, even by him earlier in his life, which listed the most astounding miracles of Jesus in order to convince his readers that Jesus really was the messiah? That signs source would probably have ended with what is now chapter 20, verses 30 to 31.
[00:06:14] If thats the case when we are trying to reconstruct the original text, do we want to reconstruct what John wrote when he incorporated the signs source into his gospel? Or do we want to reconstruct the story as originally found in the signs source?
[00:06:32] I suppose we want the former, but then its actually not the original form of the story.
[00:06:40] Or take another problem.
[00:06:42] Suppose, like some other authors, the author of John did not actually put pen to papyrus himself, but he dictated his account to some kind of secretary who transcribed what he said.
[00:06:57] That complicates things in all sorts of ways.
[00:07:00] Suppose, for example, that John spoke a sentence and the secretary wrote it down incorrectly.
[00:07:08] Is the error the original text?
[00:07:11] It would be the original thing written. But if the original is what he spoke, well, we have no access to that. How would we know? And what if he originally misspoke?
[00:07:26] Or suppose a few days later John went back through to correct the secretary's mistakes, and he corrected this place where a mistake was made, but changed it to read slightly differently from how he had dictated it? He wouldnt have it written down when he dictated it. It would have been orally constructed, and he probably didnt have memorized every single word he said.
[00:07:52] Then you have three forms of the the original thing. He said orally, the wrong transcription of it, and then the different correction of the transcription.
[00:08:04] So which is original?
[00:08:07] I suppose the last of the three.
[00:08:10] What if he then later edited that again before he showed it to someone, and so on?
[00:08:16] There are many more problems, but these are just the obvious ones.
[00:08:22] What it means is that scholars, even before trying to reconstruct a text, have to decide what exactly they are trying to reconstruct.
[00:08:33] Given the fact that we don't have access to the very first thing John put down on papyrus, but only to the form of the text from which all of our copies survive, say, a second edition that had been edited three times, many scholars today argue that what we should reconstruct is not some kind of hypothetical original text, but the initial text, the text from which all surviving copies ultimately derive.
[00:09:05] That certainly makes sense, but it also creates problems. For one thing, again, obviously, what if the initial text involves a copy made 20 years after the original that has been altered in numerous places by scribes who had copied it in the intervening years?
[00:09:25] Then the initial text might be very different indeed from the text that John originally released to the public after revising it and possibly putting it out in a second edition.
[00:09:36] Is that what we want?
[00:09:39] A text that later unknown scribes created?
[00:09:43] Probably not.
[00:09:45] But can we get to something else that is even earlier?
[00:09:48] Again, probably not. How could we get to the earlier text if we don't have any manuscripts that derive from it? It's a mess, but it's the mess that we have and have to contend with. And it's the same mess. Mutatis mutandis, every ancient text, not just John, but Genesis one, Enoch, Plato's Republic, Cicero's letters. And take your pick.
