|
The manuscript evidence examined by the earliest editors no longer exists, yet the verdict reached upon examination of that evidence remains in the form of the majority text. What is the advantage of overturning a verdict founded on evidence in favor of one which is not? Let us post two men, one crouching behind the wall, one perched on a ladder from which he can see the plain spread out before him. If the observer stationed on the ladder reports that he sees the enemy hordes approaching, should the man crouched on the ground believe him, or reopen the question for himself, by studying what he can see from his station, the movements of birds in the sky? The man on the ladder, after all, might be lying. But the most rational procedure for the man on the ground is to believe his testimony. After the text began to be stabilized in antiquity, no one again can ever see what the man on the ladder can see. To make an assumption of bad faith on his part, as do the modern textual scholars, is arbitrary and unfounded. The early Christians did passionately care who had written the texts they read and revered. They accepted certain texts on the conviction they had originated in apostolic circles: "For in the memoirs which I say were drawn up by His apostles and those who followed them, [it is recorded] that His sweat fell down like drops of blood while He was praying, and saying, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass:’" (Dialogue of Justin with Trypho, a Jew, Chapter 103). "And the Elder used to say this: 'Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately everything he remembered, though not in order, of the things either said or done by Christ." (Fragments of Papias, p. 316, 'The Apostolic Fathers,' J. B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer) When an author provides, within the text itself, an authentication mechanism: "The salutation with my own hand—Paul’s." (1 Corinthians 16:21). Then is it not apparent persons familiar with Paul's hand-writing were able to authenticate his autograph copies? No one beyond the early centuries has any ability to do this, nor ever will again. Thus reopening the question substitutes worthless evidence, or no evidence at all, for usable evidence. Our entire legal system depends on testimony; if we adopt the rubric, 'most testimony is false,' we could never convict anyone of anything. Looking at the New Testament canon from the perspective of the easy cases rather than the hard,-- the four gospels and the letters of Paul,-- one realizes these works were accepted as scripture by the second century. Within this time frame, it was still possible to authenticate them, though it never will be again. Why assume bad faith?-- other than the sheer bigotry of modern critics' impression of first century people as children who told stories because they liked to tell stories. 
Bart Ehrman says we should do just like the man on the ladder does: we should look out at the field and report what we see. Jerome, for example, is a man on a ladder, albeit a late-comer, and a translator at that. For all the beautiful musicality of the Latin Vulgate, it is a quirky, personal translation filled with odd translation decisions that populated the medieval cathedrals with statuettes of the horned Moses and the leprous Christ. Nevertheless, Jerome had what no modern textual critic will ever have: a library of early Bible manuscripts to study and compare. He did not look at two fourth century manuscripts and a handful of papyrus fragments and then pronounce upon the state of the original text. He had real evidence, not no statistically meaningful evidence such as survives today. So when Bart Ehrman suggests we do as Jerome did: "On what grounds, though, did Jerome revise his text? On the grounds of earlier manuscripts. Even he trusted the earlier record of the text. For us not to do likewise would be a giant step backward -- even given the diversity of the textual tradition in the early centuries." (Bart Ehrman, 'Misquoting Jesus,' p. 103). How are we doing "likewise" as Jerome did when he is looking at evidence, and we are looking at none? |
|
What, incidentally, is the evidence that manuscripts descend from a common original? They are not, of course, date stamped! Why, the fact that they agree: "The validity of inferences based on this procedure depends on the genealogical principle that 'community of reading implies community of origin.'" (The Text of the New Testament, Bruce M. Metzger, p.131).
So a parade of witnesses take the stand and testify that I was not in the bank on the day in question. Their testimony is discarded, because they agree. Aleph and Beta then rise to testify. No one knows these ladies' shadowy past, but the fact that they agree with each other is given great weight...though, recall, it was their disagreement with everybody else that brought their testimony into prominence to begin with! They report that I robbed the bank.
In my request for a mistrial, I note that this procedure inverts the normal standards of evidence upon which all legal systems rest. Normally if many witnesses agree, that to which they testify is thought likelier to be true, not less likely. This principle was carried to its greatest extent by the rabbis, who required witnesses to agree about even peripheral matters like the time of day: "For many bore false witness against Him, but their testimonies did not agree." (Mark 14:56).
"For it is a fundamental principle in the law of Evidence that the very few are rather to be suspected than the many." (John W. Burgon, p. 55, Causes of Corruption of the New Testament Text, excerpted from The Traditional Text of the Gospels).
It is difficult to accept these principles, because they defy normal epistemology. In addition, it can hardly be a matter of chance that some manuscripts produce offspring and others do not. 'Survival of the fittest' must ensue when readers look for the best manuscripts to copy, not the worst. A manuscript held in such low esteem that no one copies it is not likely to be a better copy but a worse. The system as set forth assigns a negative value to majority agreement, which no plausible system for discovery of truth can do. Oddly enough it also assigns a negative value to internal consistency and good grammar, which are diagnosed as symptoms of editing, considered a form of contamination. It seems tailor-made to award a few wild copies an authority they could not otherwise claim.
The textural critics are ever solemnly warning against crediting majority testimony, even though that is a normal way to verify truth-claims:
"It would be a grave mistake, though, to think that because later manuscripts agree so extensively with one another, they are therefore our superior witnesses to the 'original' text of the New Testament. For one must always ask: where did these medieval scribes get the texts they copies in so professional a manner? They got them from earlier texts, which were copies of yet earlier texts, which were themselves copies of still earlier texts." (Bart Ehrman, 'Misquoting Jesus,' p. 74).
Thus the fact that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are dead-end avenues: no one wanted to copy these texts -- is not a problem for adherents of the minority text, but the very badge of authenticity for their preferred text. But why did no one want to copy them, if they were the very living, breathing, original text teleported into the fourth century? It is often demanded of KJV-only advocates that they prove Vaticanus and Sinaiticus to have been prepared under heretical auspices, as they sometimes suggest. Rather, the shoe should be on the other foot: those who propose to rewrite the Bible to conform with these two fourth-century manuscripts should prove that they are faithful to the earlier manuscripts. Surely such a bold and hasty undertaking requires some proof! But since there are no earlier manuscripts, other than fragments, we will wait in vain for any such guarantee.
When scribes make copies of copies of copies, through iteration after iteration, one must expect errors to accumulate and texts to diverge. And so they do -- up to a point. Then the trend reverses, or so it did with the Koran, the New Testament, and even the Iliad. As even Bart Ehrman admits, the later manuscripts show a declining amount of variation, approaching to, but never quite reaching, perfect agreement. What could possibly account for this? At some point, the variation in the text distresses people. They seek out the earliest exemplars to resolve the discrepancies. While there still are early manuscripts in existence to be examined, this can be done with some hope of success. Once there are none, it cannot be done at all. To redo this work with no surviving early manuscripts to go by is to take a wrecking ball to scripture.
Broken Promises
Early in the twentieth century, people heard marvellous news: mental illnesses like schizophrenia could be cured outright, troubled souls set on the right path, and unhappy neurotics see their chains of miserable compulsion broken, all just by talking. The 'talking cure' promoted by the Freudian analysts could work wonders, it was said. But skeptics asked: why is it that, if psychotherapy were a drug, the FDA would not allow you to sell it, because no one has ever demonstrated its efficacy? It may indeed be that these people are sick; but if so, where is the promised cure?
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church bought into this promise, deciding that pedophile priests ought most progressively to be 'treated' with the 'talking cure,' which would no doubt cure them of their affliction. After all, we 'treat' 'sick people,' we don't punish them.
Alas, Freudian analysis turned out to be most useful as a mythology by which some people liked to live. The schizophrenics and other genuinely ill people turned out to be much better served by the drug treatments which the Freudians had found so barbaric and backwards. Those suffering from moral and spiritual ills like pedophilia continued on the same, however much they talked about their childhood. It became apparent that, in moving pedophile priests from one place to another to receive 'therapy,' the Roman Catholic Church was doing no more than moving them about, and how could any church be so indifferent to the suffering of innocent victims as to do no more to their victimizers than to move them from place to place?
In a similar vein, the textual critics once promised that they could 'restore' the original text of the New Testament. Some eager believers 'bit;' after all, wouldn't it be wonderful to hold in one's hands the Bible of the early church? It was a wild ambition from the start; how can one reconstruct the original from two fourth century manuscripts and a pile of fragmented papyrus, when no one knows the provenance of any of these documents, no one knows if they came from the church or outside it? How could anyone establish, by any valid statistical analysis, that these meager and paltry surviving documents are an authentic survival of the original text, when no one has enough early manuscripts to comprise a representative sample?
Turns out it can't be done. If our inherited received text is not the true text of the New Testament, then we would have no way of knowing it, since we don't have the original texts. People in the secular textual critical field, realizing this, are moving away from talking about the 'original text:' "...a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the 'original' text, because it is inaccessible to us." (Bart Ehrman, 'Misquoting Jesus,' p. 58). If God did not preserve the Bible, as they claim, then we have no access to it. Those Christians who bought into the promise while it was still being made are like those cattle who gravitate to ever-shrinking islands when the Mississippi is in flood. They should drop their habit of confirming their claims by citing secular textual critics, because the secular textual critics do not confirm their claims.
