12/02/2020 – New Testament Part 3 Transmission

What is the New Testament and how was it transmitted? Part 3 of a 4-part series. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. Many people say they believe in the Bible but don’t know the history behind who wrote it or how it was formed. We’re going to look at answering three questions in this four-part series. First, what are these documents and who composed them? Second, how were they transmitted? And third, why these documents – how were they selected? The first two parts of this series on the development of the New Testament focused on the composition of the documents, specifically the letters and the gospels. This part will focus on the transmission of the text and in the next episode we’ll talk about how these texts were selected for inclusion into the New Testament canon.

Let’s get started. There were Gospels written under the names of virtually all of the men and women associated with Jesus; Apocalypses ascribed to Peter, Paul, and James; Acts of Andrew, Peter, Paul, Thomas, John, and Pilate; and letters purporting to come from a host of people mentioned in the New Testament. Most of these have vanished, but a few of them survive, mostly in fragments or in brief quotations by other writers. How were these texts transmitted?

Nothing in the Gospels or Acts indicates that Jesus’ followers could read, let alone write. In fact, there is an account in Acts 4:13 in which Peter and John are said to be “unlettered” – the ancient word for illiterate. The vast majority of people telling stories about Jesus were not writing them down or even reading them. For one thing, the vast majority of people in that time and place simply couldn’t read, let alone write. The books that were of principal importance in early Christianity were for the most part read out loud by those who were able to read, so that the illiterate could hear, understand, and even study them.

We don’t have the original of any early Christian text, either within or without the New Testament. The earliest surviving complete books of the New Testament date to around the 3rd century. For instance, the first reasonably complete copy we have of Galatians dates to about 200 CE, 150 years after Paul wrote the letter. The earliest surviving copies of the complete New Testament with all of its books date to around the late 4th century – in some cases 250-300 years after they were first written. Prior to that, only manuscript fragments exist along with quotations from other authors.

In the ancient world, books were not easily distributed nor produced en masse. There were no printing presses, photocopy machines, or electronic transfers of information like email or the internet. They had to be reproduced by hand which was not only slow, but prone to copying mistakes. This means that in the ancient world, when there was more than one copy of a book, there was no guarantee that the multiple copies would all be the same. The copies were not all alike, for the scribes who copied texts inevitably made alterations in those texts either unintentionally, or, more often that you would believe, intentionally.

But it was not until after the invention of the printing press in the 1400’s that the vast differences among Christian manuscripts came to be recognized because printers had to decide which form of the text to set up in type. One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. Look at this. What does this say? God is nowhere, or…God is now here? See the problem?

The differences that exist among surviving manuscripts are called variants by scholars. Some background. Outside the Christian communities, in the Roman world at large, texts were typically copied either by professional scribes or by literate slaves who were assigned to do such work within a household. In this case, the people reproducing the texts were not the people who wanted the texts. The copyists were by and large reproducing the texts for others. But in early Christianity the opposite was the case for Christian scribes. In short, the people copying the early Christian texts were not, for the most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living; they were simply the literate people in the Christian congregation who could make copies.

This became so bad that the early Christian leader Origen wrote in the 3rd century, “The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”

This issue even goes back to the New Testament itself. Look at Revelation 22:18-19:
“I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” – RSV

This was not a threat to the reader but a threat to future copyists who would be copying the text! Professional scribes used to copy Christian documents didn’t start until around the early 300’s so anything copied earlier than that…well…(sigh).

Now sometimes intentional changes were with good motives – such as correcting a geographical reference or a scriptural quotation. Other intentional changes were theologically motivated alterations. This happened whenever the scribes copying the texts were concerned to ensure that the texts said what they wanted them to say because of theological disputes raging in the scribes’ own day.

The big question is, how to get back to the original text? The problem is intensified by the fact that once a mistake was made, it could become firmly embedded in the textual tradition, more firmly embedded, in fact, than the original. Any change, whether accidental or intentional, becomes permanent – the next scribe who copies, copies the mistake and adds further mistakes. In some cases, reconstructing the original text is nearly impossible. It’s a bit hard to know what the Bible means if we don’t even know what the words are!

There’s a difference between a copy and a translation. Say there’s an original Greek text. Then someone produces a copy from the original. Centuries later, someone has to choose which copy to base a translation on. Look at the example of the Authorized Version, otherwise known as the King James Version, because it was commissioned by King James I in England in 1604. Some English-speaking Christians swear by the King James Version since it was the most popular English translation for centuries. But the King James Version is filled with places in which the translator rendered a Greek text derived ultimately from Erasmus’ edition from the early 1500’s which was based on a single twelfth-century manuscript that is one of the worst of the manuscripts that we now have available to us. It’s no wonder that modern translations often differ from the King James, and no wonder that some Bible-believing Christians prefer to pretend there’s never been a problem, since God inspired the King James Bible instead of the original Greek! The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early 1600’s who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text. Yikes! But even those who acknowledge its inaccuracies still use it for its Shakespearean-like poetic value.

A few more ideas. The broader term scholars use to examine the Bible is called Tradition-criticism. This is broken down into three sub-categories called source-criticism, redaction-criticism, and form-criticism. Source-criticism is investigating what genetic relationships, if any, exist between texts. Redaction-criticism is investigating the author’s development of sources including any omissions, additions, or changes. Form-criticism is trying to figure out in what forms were the oral units transmitted such as parable, dialogue, or debate.

To determine the best or most probable reading when there are differences in early manuscripts, scholars look at the oldest and best manuscripts as well as preferring more difficult readings as scribes often tried to smooth out the text and make it easier to read for future readers.

As an example of form criticism, before the Gospels were themselves produced, oral traditions about Jesus circulated, and as the stories about Jesus were told and retold, they changed their form and some stories came to be made up closer to the ones we have today. Later biblical authors read what earlier authors wrote and often used and changed content. Scholars can look how the author of Luke changed what was written in the gospel of Mark. Luke has changed the account, and if we wish to understand what Luke wanted to emphasize, we need to take his changes seriously. People don’t take his changes seriously when they pretend that Luke is saying the same thing as Mark.

The two most well-known instances of early Christian writers adding to the original text occur in the gospels of John and Mark. The woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 is most certainly a later addition to the text because it is not found in the oldest and best manuscripts and its writing style in the original Greek is very different from the rest of the gospel. The ending of the gospel of Mark has a similar problem. Mark 16:9-20 were not part of the original text but added by a later scribe. The writing style is different, this passage is not in the earliest and best manuscripts, and verse 9 is an odd transition introducing Mary Magdalene considering the fact she had already been introduced at the beginning of the chapter. It’s interesting to note that Mark was the earliest gospel written yet it did not have a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus. Textual criticism matters.

So to wrap this up, changes by scribes were based on changes in interpretation, but we do this all the time as well by interpreting texts differently. They changed scripture the way we all change scripture, every time we read it. For they were trying to understand what the authors wrote while also trying to see how the words of the authors’ texts might have significance for them, and how those words might help them make sense of their own situations and their own lives, just like us.

In the next and final episode of this series we’ll talk about how these texts were selected for inclusion into the New Testament. I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.