TEXT

NOTES ON THE TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE

I. The Old Testament Text

For further reading:

J. A. Soggin, 18-26, 29-34; LaSor, Hubbard & Bush, chap. 4; E. Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1957).

1. Original Autographs:

The original books were composed by different authors between ca. XII B.C. and IV B.C. (some scholars would put the date of final editing/composition of some books much later, around II B.C.; and some of the Apocrypha found in the LXX are dated between I B.C. and A.D. I; most OT books are very difficult to date). The originals were composed in Hebrew (some Aramaic in Daniel), in a consonantal text (no vowels), probably using the Phoenician alphabet. Later the familiar `square script' was used, borrowed from the Syrians.

All copying was done by hand (Gutenburg press = A.D. 1450). The originals were copied, and copies were made of those copies, and so on down to our day.

2. The Masoretic Text (MT) and the work of the Masoretes.

The Masoretes (Heb. massôret = `tradition') standardized the consonantal text and added vowel points about A.D. 500 or just after. They also fixed the use of certain consonants for long vowel sounds (the matres lectiones). Their work ensured a standardized pronunciation of the received text of the OT.

They also added marginal comments on the text, for instance counting the letters, words, verses in a book to ensure accuracy of transmission in copying. Finally, the Masoretes practiced textual criticism, preserving what they thought was the best reading when a variant existed.

2 main schools of Massoretes: (a) eastern school, in Babylon; (b) western school, in Palestine and later et. at Tiberias. The Tiberian system became most authoritative & widely accepted. It is one used in printed Hebrew OT today.

Modern scholars often refer to the Hebrew OT simply as the "Masoretic text," or the MT for short.

The oldest texts we had until 1947 were: Leningrad Codex, AD 1008; Aleppo Codex, AD 930; Codex Cairensis, AD 895 (prophets only); codex in Institute for Asiatic Peoples, Leningrad, AD 847 (prophets only).

3. Samaritan Pentateuch (SP)

about 1,900 textual variants where SP agrees with the LXX against MT

Exod. 20.17, a commandment added to build sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim. (Dt. 27.5-7 may have orig. read `Gerizim', but MT edited it to `Ebal'--both =mountains above Nablus--the older reading confirmed by Old Lat., Sym. & SP).

4. The Septuagint (LXX)

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), probably begun at Alexandria in the mid-third century B.C. Abbreviation: LXX (Roman numeral for 70).

Name: Latin septuaginta ("seventy"), from the tradition of the number of translators who produced a translation of the Pentateuch for the great library at Alexandria, a project initiated and funded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (cf. Letter of Aristeas).

Date: The Pentateuch was translated first (ca. 250 B.C.), later the prophets, and then writings. The latest books translated were some of the Apocrypha such as the Wisdom of Solomon, additions to Daniel, 4 Maccabees; these were composed between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D.

Contents: The Septuagint contains all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures, plus the "Apocrypha" (also called "deuterocanonical books" by Roman Catholics).

5. The Vulgate (V or Vg)

Pre-Vulgate: `Old Latin' (Vetus Latina). Vulgate = translation by Jerome in late IV AD, finished 390-405. He used Hebrew texts, often correcting readings of LXX. The Council of Trent (1546) made it the official text of the Roman Catholic Church, though in fact it had been the only official, only tolerated text for a long time before that.

Jerome sometimes used various Septuagint readings as well as the Hebrew text. Rufinus (d. AD 410) delared the Vulgate heretical; Augustine (d. AD 430) questioned the need for the new translation, and was critical of his friend's work. The Vulgate was sanctioned by pope Gregory the Great (d. AD 604), but still the text was carelessly interpolated with readings based on the Old Latin and LXX.

6. `Dead Sea Scrolls' from Qumran.

Then in 1947 a new discovery changed attitudes even among many of the most skeptical scholars. A shepherd boy looking for a lost sheep stumbled upon some jars hidden in a cave at Qumran on the Dead Sea. The jars turned out to contain the hidden treasures of a jewish community that had lived there from the third century B.C. up until the second century A.D. Their "treasures" were mostly writings: rules for the community, songs, and--most important of all--manuscripts of the Bible. One of the oldest texts found there was a scroll containing the book of Isaiah, and written sometime in the l00's B.C.! That is over l,000 years older than the oldest manuscript we had before the discovery of these manuscripts, which scholars dubbed "the Dead Sea Scrolls." All together every book of the Old Testament, except for the book of Esther, was found either whole or in part there at Qumran.

Not only were these texts older than all our other manuscripts, but they were important evidence in another way. For when the scroll of Isaiah was examined and compared with the codex from l,000 years later, it was found that the two texts were almost identical! There were some spelling differences, some changes in names, and a few minor variations, but essentially the same text had been preserved for more than a millenium. Evidence such as this greatly increases our confidence in the text of the Old Testament, for it shows with what care the Hebrew scribes passed it on and with what reverence they handled the text.

SOGGIN on the Masoretic Text:

"Literary criticism today tends to be much more prudent about the traditional Hebrew text than it was some decades ago. It is not that scholars fail to recognize errors of various kinds ... nor that it is impossible that in certain cases a prallel text or translation may have preserved a more accurate textual tradition; it is the fundamental attitude to the Massoretic text that has changed. The starting-point for the scholar today will always be only the Hebrew text, which is accorded a remarkable authority on almost all sides. As we have seen, this does not exclude some blemishes of notable proportions. But it has been recognized that these rarely prejudice the sense of passages which are historically or theologically important."

II. The New Testament Text

The number of copies we have of New Testament books is so great, and the age of many manuscripts and fragments we have is such that the evidence for the text of the New Testament is better than for any other book ever written in the ancient world--including the works of Homer.

There are three types of N.T. (New Testament) manuscripts: miniscules, uncials, and papyri.

Miniscules are the most recent type of manuscript: they began to be made in the 800's A.D., and used a flowing yet abbreviated type of writing which is like our handwriting (as opposed to printing). These are the type of manuscripts which were used to put together the so-called "textus receptus," or the text from which the Authorized Version (= King James Version) was translated. Erasmus was the Christian scholar who edited the first Greek N.T. to be printed, and it was his version of the Greek N.T. (basically) which was used by the translators of the Authorized version. It was a tremendous undertaking in its day. The earliest Greek text that Erasmus used, however, was what is now catalogued as codex 1--written around the year 1,000 A.D. There was a codex available from the fifth century A.D. (codex A), but it was not generally consulted until many years later.

Uncials (pronounced "unk-shials"). In later years, scholars began to discover older Greek texts, and in greater numbers, than they ever had before. In the nineteenth century especially our knowledge of the manuscripts began to expand, and many new uncials were discovered. An uncial manuscript was written in larger letters than the miniscules, all in capitals, with no spaces between the words and no punctuation. They were often written on vellum. Three of the most famous uncials are Sinaiticus, Vaticanus (both written in the fourth century A.D.), and Alexandrinus. These had been preserved through time only because they had lain in dry climates, hidden in boxes or covered in the sand. The first two of these were written within three hundred years of our Lord's death, and only some two hundred fifty years after the death of the last apostle, St. John.

Papyri. We have one last category of N.T. manuscripts: the papyri. The papyri are so called because they were written on papyrus, and have been preserved for archaeologists in the dry sands of Egypt. Three of the earliest are P66, P46, and P52 (these are their code-numbers assigned to them by scholars for easy reference). P66 has 104 pages, and originally contained all of the gospel of John; now only John 1:1-6:11 and 6:35-14:15 remain. It was written about 200 A.D., within a hundred years of the death of its author. P46 is a very early manuscript that originally had ten of Paul's letters (Romans, Hebrews, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 & 2 Thessalonians, all in that order), and it also dates from about the year 200. P52 is the oldest copy of any book of the N.T. that we possess. It is a manuscript of the gospel of John, written on pages only 2 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches wide, and only John 18:31-33, 37-38 survive. It was found in Egypt, over a thousand miles away from where this gospel was originally written, and it is dated to about the year 125 A.D. In other words, somehow a copy of John's gospel was made and brought to Egypt (or copied there) within a quarter century of St. John's death. Perhaps this was one of the very first copies ever made of that blessed gospel. P52 is also very good evidence for the traditional dating of the gospel of John at around the year 90 A.D. (Prior to this discovery many liberal scholars had doubted that St. John actually wrote this gospel, and thought that it had been written by someone else in the early church as late as l75-195 A.D. We can see that the discovery of P52 makes this impossible. Furthermore, the original gospel must have been written some years before P52 was copied in Egypt).

J. Harold Greenlee, Professor of Greek at Oral Roberts University, has noted: "In the N.T. and in other ancient literature as well, there is no question concerning the reading of most of the words . . . it is well to remember that the main body of the text and its general sense are left untouched and that textual criticism engages in turning a magnifying glass upon some of the details (Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, p. 17). Even if we were to use the worst manuscripts that we had, we could not lose any important message, any important teaching of the N.T. or any Christian doctrine based upon it.

Early Translations

As Christianity spread from Palestine, first into nearby Asia Minor, and then to Rome and the outer parts of the Roman Empire, the need was felt to communicate the gospel message in the language of the people who were being reached. Many people in the large cities of Italy and Asia Minor understood the original Greek. But soon the gospel was translated into Latin for the sake of those ancients who knew only Latin as the language of home and business. And as missionaries reached South into the African continent and North to the "barbarians," translations appeared in Coptic, Syriac, Gothic and Armenian (to name only some). One early example of how the copies of scripture were treasured is the "Codex Argentius" ("silver codex"), a Gothic manuscript from the fifth or sixth century A.D., written in silver letters on vellum dyed a rich royal purple. It is thought to have been made for Didrik of Bern, king of the Ostrogoths. The surviving portion of the codex contains most of the four gospels.

The first nine centuries of Christianity were a kind of golden age for translating. Christian missionaries reached much of the known world--even travelling into China and India a thousand years before the modern missions movement--and translations flourished. During this time Christianity also flourished in England, from where it spread also to Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Europe. From these early centers of piety we have preserved a few traces of translations into the vernacular English. No complete Bibles, not even a complete New Testament, survives from before the fourteenth century. But we know of portions of the O.T. (especially Exodus), some gospels, and some "inter-linear" translations (written between the lines of a Latin Vulgate) in Old and Middle English. Try your hand at reading this version of the Lord's Prayer from the West Saxon Gospels (about A.D. 1000):

Faeder ure thu the eart on heofonum,

si thin nama gehelgod,

tobecume thin rice,

geworthe thin willa on eorthan swa swa on heofonum;

urne gedaeg-hwamlican hlaf syle us to daeg,

and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfath urum gyltendum;

and ne gelaed thu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele, sothlice.

Unfortunately, the church's openness toward translations did not last. For one thing, although many translations were made, only one came to be the standard for the church in the West, namely, the Latin Vulgate. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the knowledge of Greek (not to mention Hebrew) became generally lost to most of Europe. Latin remained the language of law, of education, and of the church. And with the decline of literacy in the so-called Dark Ages the church became very protective (perhaps over-protective) of its scripture. The fateful decision came in the eleventh century, when the pope Gregory VII stopped the reading of the gospels and saying of mass in the native Slavonic language, in the area now known as Bulgaria and parts of Russia. He commanded the lessons to be read only from the Latin Vulgate, though allowing the priest to give the people a paraphrase in their own tongue. From that time on, the attitude of the Catholic Church in the West continued to harden toward translations and popular use of the Bible. Part of the reason for the hardening was due to the use of scripture by untrained lay people who distorted the message of Christianity. But we must also say the church was uncomfortable with criticisms which were levelled at the priesthood when lay people read the message of Jesus in their own tongue. The Bible became, as the centuries went on, an obscure and mysterious book, read only by those priests and wealthy or aristocratic people who were literate. Its words, even when spoken in the hearing of ordinary people, were in a language no longer understood.

The Reformation and the "Textus Receptus"

Revival of Greek studies by the Humanists in the Renaissance; Erasmus’ printed Greek NT (1516); the Complutensian Polyglot (1514); the "Textus Receptus."

ERASMUS and the "TEXTUS RECEPTUS":

Race to publish before Cardinal Ximenes’ Complutensian Polyglot

Interpolations from Vulgate: Acts 9.6, Paul asks "And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" (in V, // Acts 22.10). Rev. 22.16-20 added from V (missing in his MS)

Used late MSS; had no MS of Rev., had to borrow one from friend Johann Reuchlin.

Erasmus’ edition reprinted many times, with minor corrections;

Stephanus (Robert Estienne): 4 eds. of Gk NT, 1546-1551). 1st, 2d ed. = compound of Complutensian & Erasmus’ eds.; but 3d ed., close to Erasmus’ 4th-5th ed., became standard Gk NT text.

Verse Numbers introduced in Stephanus’ 4th ed. (1551)

1624 Elzevir brothers published at Leiden (text = mainly Beza’s 1565 ed.). Publishers’ boast = "[the reader has] the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted." (textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum ...).
This publisher’s blurb became a theological catchword; the text became the only popularly accepted one, and was in an earlier edition the basis for the King James (or Authorized) Version.

"Its textual basis is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected miniscule manuscripts, and in a dozen passages its reading is supported by no known Greek witness." (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 106).

Modern Greek New Testaments

Textual Criticism Arises as a Science:

the work of J. A. Bengel (Gnomon); J.S. Mill; J. J. Wettstein; C. Von Tischendorf; B. F. Westcott & F. J.A. Hort and the critical text of 1882; the Nestle-Aland text; the United Bible Societies' text.

The Home Paige Back to Houghton's Home Page.