Establishing the text¶
Textual issues with the Bible¶
There are some people nowadays who are quite cynical about the Bible, dismissing it as having been copied and translated over and over so that we can't know what it is we're really reading. Despite having my own scepticism about many things biblical, I don't share that view. The Bible is very well-preserved, certainly compared to many other ancient works of literature.
On the other hand, it is not the case that there is a single, perfect, known text. There is certainly nothing like an original. To understand more about the textual issues with the Bible we need to look into the historical process which led to us having the Bible we have today.
How did the Bible get here?¶
Look at the printed pages of the book you are holding, or the words on your screen. How did they get there? We must follow these words, this text, back in time.
Suppose instead that you purchased a modern novel, say last year's Booker prize winner. It arrives in a package on your doorstep. If you ask how it was produced, you can imagine that some text was sent to the printers to put onto paper, which had in turn come from a publishing company. It was the endpoint of an editorial process based on the submitted text of an author. And that author had typed away in some lonely shed, or whatever authors do, until they had finished it.
Let's go backwards from a Bible in the same way. The final stages are very similar, the publishing company produces a text which is printed and delivered. If we ask where they obtain this text, however, we find a much more extended chain of transmission.
The work of translation¶
In the case of a Bible, the publishers do not get their text from a present-day author but rather from a translator. Occasionally this might be an individual, but more often it will be from a translation committee.
Some few individuals have translated the whole Bible, but given the magnitude of the task and the linguistic skills required it is common to find that a group of translators have worked together, checking and confirming each other's work. The King James version (KJV) was translated by a committee, as were most contemporary English translations.
Now comes the complication. Going backwards one more stage, the translators have to work from something: what is it that they translate? They have to decide on a source text. The source is the text in the original languages, Hebrew for the Old Testament (with small sections in a related language called Aramaic), and Greek for the New Testament.
However, there does not exist any single such perfect text. What we have instead are particular manuscripts from before the age of printing, written by hand on paper or parchment. These ancient manuscripts, known in the trade as witnesses, have a tendency to differ from each other to a greater or lesser extent.
Can we rely on it?¶
Was it all made up in the fourth century to please a Roman emperor? No. There is plenty of evidence for the biblical text from papyrus fragments and its use by Church fathers. But it is possible that Constantine was behind efforts to standardise and publish copies of the Bible for use in churches.
These MSS are the oldest complete Christian Bibles. But there are parallel strands of textual tradition, especially in the case of the OT where Jewish scholars standardised the text for the Torah, often also known as the Pentateuch. There is also a Samaritan Pentateuch, which differs again, but provides further historical examples of the text. Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain portions of the Pentateuch and other biblical books too. The text types of these vary.
Finally, there is the old Greek translation of the Pentateuch called the Septuagint. The Septuagint (LXX) is important, dated possibly around 250 BCE, and launched a translation project which adopted a fairly formal, or 'literal' translation style. Usually the same term was translated the same way each time, and some of the Hebrew syntax was followed. This close equivalence means that it can be used to shed light on alternative readings of the underlying Hebrew text.
Now with each of these, the two Hebrew and one Greek version of the Pentateuch, what is one to do? Not to mention the early translations into Aramaic and Syriac. They had their own history of transmission, and are available to us today.
The wealth of evidence¶
My cup overfloweth? These problems have only one cause: the large number of independent witnesses to the Bible. The papyrus copying effort appears to have been substantial, with presumably only a small fraction surviving to today. Other works of ancient literature are less fortunate, sometimes having only one major witness to provide their text. But at least there is no debate about what to print.
With the Bible's wealth of manuscripts, methods were developed in the twentieth century to deal with the flood of newly available intact documents uncovered through archaeology or by chance.
There were and are a few versions of the Bible. The earliest complete Bibles, which survive from the fourth century CE, included books that you don't find in there today, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, or the Didache. Find out about textus receptus and Majority Text. (int LINK)
Where has our Bible come from?¶
Internet Age¶
Let's look at the journey the Bible has taken with us, from preserved scrolls to the situation today, where you can display dozens of versions in a moment on a device that fits in your hand.
We will be taking a deep dive into history. Much of this information was not available before the twentieth century. More work is being done every year as archaeologists and historians make more discoveries.
It was not until papyrus and other evidence was dug up and studied that a clearer picture emerged of religious developments in the critical centuries from Alexander to Constantine, roughly 300 years each side of 0.
At the same time almost all of the history written about biblical times, until very recently, has been based on the Bible as if it is an accurate report of past events. We want to scrutinise the Bible's reliability as a source. Before we can possibly do this, we need to know what is the object of that study.
There must be one or more source texts for the translator to work on. If these are incomplete, then a translation with lacunae (gaps) results. This is very often the case for ancient works, some of which are found only in fragments. Typical examples are the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi finds.
With the biblical writings, we have the opposite problem - so many surviving copies, from fragmentary to nearly complete, that they cannot all be fully catalogued. And although they have many differences, almost all of these are in small ways such as variant spellings, showing that the copying process has some degree of reliability.
A multi-lingual environment¶
The items (usually called books) each may come in different variants, in a multiplying number of languages. Because the ancient world was a multi-lingual environment, and translation happened quickly.
By the third century BCE there was a Greek version of the Torah and probably many of the other Hebrew writings. By the second century there may be additions (in Daniel, and in 1 Maccabees, now regarded as deutero-canonical) written first or only in Greek. As spoken Hebrew declined in the Greco-Roman period, the Bible's stories began to appear in Aramaic, Syriac and Coptic.
The translation process has continued until today into modern languages. Of course it has been thoroughly translated into many languages for you. Its face-value meaning is fairly well agreed in all but a few particular cases.
Is it, as some people say caustically, "a copy of a translation of a translation of a copy", or something like that? No, because these further translations are not in a chain. Scholars have worked to reconstruct, on the basis of the manuscript evidence, what the earliest or archetype of a text is.
This does not guarantee that it is the original, known as the autograph, but it is as good as the historical evidence allows us. But there is nothing unusual about that. The same is true for every document that has come to us from the ancient world, all the dramas and philosophy and historical works, and all other religious literature. See more on Copying and Translations
In addition to the well-known canonical books, there are various others that can be read, some of which have only come to light fairly recently through archaeological discoveries. Compilations of these writings became standardised and led to the Bibles in use today. Religious groups set standards, known as canons for what is and isn't included in the sacred book. This defines what we now call the canonical Bible. Int LINKs to canon.
We'll come back to religious belief. Is that an issue? Yes,
We will come back to both interpretation and translation. Prior to both it is necessary to clarify the source text which will be translated.
Modern study of the texts¶
As examples of literature the texts pose significant challenges. Many or most of the books do not read seamlessly or continuously, rather it is apparent that sections have been spliced together or fragments inserted into the narrative. In places there are signs of various kinds of censorship or re-writing.
From the nineteenth century onwards, many new ways of analysing the Bible have arisen. One aspect which attracted particular attention was the detection of smaller units within the biblical books
Most of the books are anonymous, even though they might have names traditionally attached to them (for example, the four gospels by 'Mark', 'Matthew', 'Luke' and 'John'). We know next to nothing about most of the authors, only what we know from internal evidence, and in a few NT cases some untrustworthy traditions.
Can we know the original text?¶
The available manuscripts have been studied in minute detail, and although they differ in thousands of tiny details (mostly spelling alterations) there are relatively few major discrepancies. Further discoveries of hitherto-unknown manuscripts actually show that the copying process has been fairly accurate. We can be confident that we have an identifiable final form in which the biblical text was preserved.
However, this final form very likely resulted from a process of editing. Those who cast doubt on copying and translation would do better to focus their attention on editing and censorship, because above all this is what makes it hard to know what was originally written. A given book may have been written in one century, substantially added to in the next, then heavily edited again two centuries later, before being faithfully copied in its final form. The earlier versions are all lost. We can be reasonably confident about the text we now have, but must acknowledge far greater ignorance about the versions or component parts that preceded it.
While there can be a degree of certainty that significant editing has taken place, it can be a lot harder to be sure exactly what the nature of it was, and which parts are older or newer than others. I'll call attention to various academic theories about these issues as we go along, not for the sake of it, but because it can help to make sense of the books and understand the process of their development.
The main source texts in use today¶
For the Old Testament, the work of developing textual criticism to a high standard and establishing a single agreed-upon text was undertaken by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes. They worked in late antiquity and the early medieval period to preserve and standardise their biblical text, beginning with the Torah. They added vowel points to enable the Tanakh to continue to be read even as Hebrew fell out of use as an everyday language (the modern secular language is a revival that has taken place in the last couple of centuries).
This Masoretic text is accepted by most modern translators. In the Jewish tradition, it is the only widely accepted text. In the wider scholarly tradition, it can be supplemented by the quite rare finds of Hebrew biblical books from earlier periods, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls (1st century CE).
For the NT, there is slightly more divergence. The KJV translators consulted early manuscripts, but for the Greek NT were reliant mostly on the published work of Erasmus. Later, by the 19th century, further manuscripts had come to light and a new comprehensive edition was undertaken by Westcott and Hort, whose work is the basis of the Revised Version (RV or ERV). Into the 20th century, there have been further efforts to produce a standard, notably the work of the Nestle-Aland committee and the UBS text.
Nevertheless there are a few competing standards as we enter the 21st century. New discoveries of papyrus fragments, and re-assessments of the existing witnesses, continue to motivate new attempts to settle the NT text. This may sound chaotic, but in practice the differences between these versions are very minor and of interest only to scholars. They make very little, if any, difference to doctrine, and none of major importance to the story we read in the books of the NT.
Manuscript evidence¶
We have more manuscript evidence for the Bible than any other near eastern document, mostly of course because of the copying efforts by Christians and Jews to keep their scriptures alive.
The control which churches have had over the text does open the door to sectarian bias, so that has to be factored in. On the other hand, if both sides of a religious argument have access to the text, it can make it more difficult for either to alter it definitively. Unexpected finds such as the Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated that copies in use in the first century CE were very close to our received Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.
Turning to the New Testament, the only complete copies come from the 4th century CE, but substantial fragments are known of many books from as early as the 2nd century CE. The fragments sometimes offer alternative readings compared to the later manuscripts. There are scholarly disagreements over a few passages or over which manuscript tradition to follow, however this is against the background of a mostly agreed original text.
Critical editions¶
Modern critical editions are usually the basis for any translation effort. For the Old Testament, this would generally be the Jewish Bible (Tanakh), which is overwhelmingly in Hebrew but contains some sections in Aramaic as well. The early Greek translation known as the Septuagint is also an important witness, because it quite soon became its own living textual tradition and in some cases may be closer to a lost original than the Hebrew version.
For the New Testament the standard text is Nestle-Aland, as used in the United Bible Society series now at UBS5. All the earliest texts for the New Testament are in koine Greek, a language spoken by many people in the eastern Roman empire, whether through formal education or through being engaged in commerce or civic administration. Some suspect that at least some written material, such as sayings, may have been written in Aramaic, but there is no direct evidence for this.
Thus, what we read today is a translation across (for the most part) one language barrier, whether Hebrew or Greek. The underlying text is, as far as can be determined, close to that which existed towards the end of the 2nd century CE. Thus we can read these documents with as much confidence as any other from the ancient world. Its state of preservation is actually very respectable overall.
They really did write this stuff, and sincerely in terms of their own fundamental conviction that they were conveying a message from a spiritual source. In fact, looking at it this way allows comparison with whatever messages we hear today from people with a supposed spiritual message who are able to gather a following.
STILL TO COME¶
Reformation and after¶
Hunt for Greek manuscripts. Re-awakening of Greek scholarship in Europe.
Greek scholarship had flourished in the Byzantine and wider Mediterranean world.
Textus Receptus¶
Which TR? Erasmus’ edition of 1516? Or 1519 (basis for Luther’s German version), or 1522 in which he included the forged Comma Johanneum? Or his definitive 1527 edition, corrected in the light of the Complutensian Polyglot? Or maybe one of the Stephanus editions of 1546, 1549, 1550 or 1551? Stephanus 1550 was the basis for the first English Geneva Bible (1557). Beza published several variants of his version, employing further textual witnesses but nevertheless sticking largely to Stephanus 1551. The 1611 KJV translators made use of Beza 1588 and 1598. The Elzevir brothers published their 1624 version based on Beza 1565, and then introduced the very term textus receptus in describing their 1633 second edition.
"What Greek manuscripts lie behind the text of the Complutensian New Testament has never been satisfactorily ascertained. ... Since Erasmus could not find a manuscript that contained the entire Greek Testament, he utilized several for various parts of the New Testament. For most of the text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts from a monastic library at Basle, one of the Gospels and one of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century."
Metzger & Ehrman pp.140 - 143