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I am proud to announce that I am actually ahead in my homework! Anyone who knew me in high school, or who was in a college general studies course with me, will understand how out of character this is. I have not been the world's best student, to say the least. I'd chalk it up to maturity (one would hope) and excitement for the subject. Case in point...I just finished an exercise in text criticism, which is the practice of comparing copies of scripture. By copies I'm not talking about NIV vs. NRSV...I mean comparing various renderings of scripture from before the printing press. Hand copied on papyrus or vellum and either rolled into a scroll or bound in a codex. Why compare them? Perhaps this will come as a great shock to the Biblical literalists (or, as they are more accurately called, inerrantists) out there, but... 1. We don't have even one original copy of any text from the Bible. Nothing. Not gospel or epistle and certainly not Torah. So copies of copies of copies, the earliest New Testament text being a fourth generation papyrus scrap of the Gospel of John, are all we have. 2. None of these copies, not even one pair, agree on everything. The good news is that, with the exception of a few oddball bits here and there, none of the mistakes undermine any Christian doctrine. Most are spelling errors, some are skipped or repeated phrases or words. The interesting ones are the ones that seem to have been changed on purpose...for instance, there are two versions of the Lord's Prayer. Luke has the full ending which we say in church, "for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours forever. Amen." In the oldest copies of Matthew the same prayer ends with "deliver us from evil." In some copies, however, we see Luke's ending or a variant of it. Why? Because the scribes and monks copying Matthew knew the prayer from church, just like we do today. (I'd imagine that most anyone raised Christian, even if they no longer practice, can recite the Lord's Prayer.) They came to that passage and either quit referencing the original because they knew the text, or noticed the shorter version and thought it must simply be missing something. They "helped" the reader by adding what they assumed was missing. There are loads of these little editing jobs. Most copies of the Bible currently published have in them what scholars (mostly) agree are the original texts. They arrive at these conclusions by comparing the age of the "witnesses" and their reliability, as well as asking questions such as "is it more likely that scribes would add the longer ending to this prayer or cut it out?" While I do not, of course, have ancient copies of scripture here in the apartment, I do have a book which lists what witnesses say what. P45, for instance, is a papyrus from the 3rd century. I'd take its word before that of the 5th century Codex Alexandrinus. Wow. What a nerd. That must be really boring to y'all. Sorry. Amy picked up dinner on her way back from work...must go and eat! |
