Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

We're going to be looking at copying both the Old and New Testament and how that came about. Obviously, until the printing press, copying was something necessary in order to even maintain anything. There are no originals of any of the Old Testament or New Testament documents.

So a good question is, do we have enough to have a certainty that we know what the original said? So that's a question that we'll be looking at here this morning. So this is kind of the third part in how we got the Bible, this copying Part, you know, how do we get what we have now? How is it that we've got, you know, both the Old New Testaments in English here and the Purax and then we've got the the Greek Interlinear and the Purax in a number of places as well. A lot of this copying issue was going to center from the early New Testament times into the 1500s, and we're not going to focus real particularly on time spans, but that's the time span I think we're looking at. The hand copies continued to be made after the printing press was invented. Why would that be? Why would they continue to make some hand copies after the printing press was invented?

Yeah? Yeah, and so one is, yeah, the more the better. But aside from that, can you think of other reasons why? Yeah, the printing was still costly and it was still kind of slow. So, you know, you could make hand copies and of course that took time and whatnot.

But, you know, it wasn't like we have today where you just plop it on the copy machine and press go, right? So hand copies were still made even into the 1500s, decades after the printing press had been developed. Imagine having to set one letter at a time, and by the way, all those letters are backwards, right? One letter at a time, and you set it in there, and all the spaces and everything, and have to make sure, and here it's backwards, how do you proofread it? Well, that's a special skill, right? and getting that all in there, you see, you know, hand copying still had some attraction.

So, in copying the Old and New Testaments are really two different stories to tell. The Old Testament was copied almost entirely by the Jews, except for later copies of the Greek version of the Old Testament. The Greek version of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint or the LXX. The reason for that being is the story goes that they had actually not 70 but 72 scholars doing the translating from the Hebrew into the Greek.

And then the New Testament was copied by the Christians and increasingly those Christians were of Gentile background. So imagine initially for the first 10 years of the church, it was just Jews and some Samaritans, you know, half-breed Jews. That was all there was in the way of Christians for the first decade. And then when Peter introduced the gospel then to Cornelius and his household, that broke the ice and then By the end of the first century, the church was largely composed of Gentiles.

The Old Testament documents written in Hebrew, except for portions of Daniel and Ezra, which are written in Aramaic, except for portions there, has come to us from the Talmudic and Masoretic textual copying tradition, and we'll talk about what that means.

From the Dead Sea Scrolls and those Old Testament texts number in the tens of thousands. We have tens of thousands of copies of those Old Testament texts, hand copies. This is the Nash papyrus, which aside from the Dead Sea Scrolls is the oldest piece, but that's all we have. It's just a fragment from around New Testament times. piece of the Old Testament. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls stretching from 1947, and actually there were subsequent discoveries made during the 1950s. They continued to look in other caves and find, oh hey, there's one in here too, right? The earliest copies of the Old Testament were dated around 900. So you had, because of the date of the Dead Sea Scrolls, about a thousand years of time earlier once the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

So the Jewish copying tradition credits Ezra as the founder. It was to see copying of the Old Testament as a sacred work, something to be done with prayer and care, and to see it as something exceedingly valuable, defined by explicit Jewish traditions. And we'll talk about what those traditions are.

Scribes who copied the text were to wash their hands before and after copying, praying before each day of copying. So there's certain procedures. You've got to follow this and observe it. Do this very carefully. The name of God was left blank to be filled in later with a pure ink. So leave the name of God out so you can fill it in later with a very special ink.

So great care was taken to make sure the copying You have this as a picture, and one of the reasons for putting that there is to recognize that a lot of the copying was a two-person job. What would be the advantages of having two people working on the copy?

That's right, just a cross-check. Did you mean this? Are you going to do this? Just cross-checking all the time because this has to be done very carefully. That's right. Your brain accepted the mistake whereas somebody else could see it, right? So that was done as a cross-check.

Why else might you have a couple of people working on it? Pardon? Speed? Possibly, possibly, but you know, you ever write for hours and hours and hours? What happens? Yeah, you get cramped and your neck gets tired and your eyeballs, you know. And so just having somebody to trade off with keeps you fresher and you can do it for longer just because you've got somebody that can switch off with you. You don't get writer's cramp, right? Now, the scribe would check the middle word of each section with the original, also counting a number of words in each section.

Flawed copies were to be withdrawn. You made a mistake. You take that and you put it in a scripture closet. You don't use it. You don't erase it and try to fix it. So we messed up on this one. This one is going into the scripture closet. Here is from the Dead Sea Scrolls. A lot of them were found in jars like this storage jar. And then here is some of the caves that you see there that they found these jars with scriptures in them. Here is the Great Isaiah Scroll. It's one that's in very good condition. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are nothing more than black fragments. But this is one that was in very good condition. Several copies of Isaiah were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And this is Qumran excavations by most scholars considered to be the town of this group called the Athenes that copied and hid the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yes? Did they put them in the jars and caves to secure them from high altitudes too? Probably both. You know, just put them in, and matter of fact, if you look at this cave, that's not something you're going to just drop into easily. So the bottom line is, they put them in these caves along the edge of the Dead Sea, in caves that were hard to get access to. So they wouldn't be something that would be easily discovered and ruined. So, yeah, I think the answer is yes to both of your questions there.

There are several different textual traditions. One of them is the Masoretic Text, the entire Hebrew Old Testament copied by the Masoretes after a scribal tradition. We'll talk more about what that tradition was. The Dead Sea Scrolls, one or more copies of the entire Hebrew Old Testament except Esther. And so they would go through this meticulous, careful copying, and then let's preserve this. Let's make sure that this doesn't get wiped out.

The Samaritan Torah, what happened with the Samaritans, the Samaritans were a mixture as a result of the Assyrians taking different populations and scrambling them. So a mixture of Gentiles and Jews. The Samaritans, coming from the northern kingdom, had their own temple and their own priesthood right up above where Jacob's well was. Remember where Jesus talked to the woman at the well? Right up on the mountain, right up above them. there was their temple and they also had a set of Torah, that is the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. They had a set of Torah scrolls that were very close to the Jewish version except that it had changes to allow them to have their temple up on the mountain there and not in Jerusalem. So they had a few little modifications. Other than that, that's another copying tradition, the Samaritan scrolls.

And finally, the Septuagint, the LXX is the Roman numerals for 70, translated about 200 BC, most New Testament quotes are from the Septuagint. That is, most of the time, the authors of the New Testament would quote from an already made copy of the Greek Old Testament rather than going to the Hebrew and doing kind of a right there impromptu translation of the Old Testament.

And in some cases, particular families of the Septuagint are recognizable. For instance, Ephesians, Hebrews, and Revelation quote from a version of the Septuagint that was used in Ephesus. In Ephesus. Yeah, very interesting. So though originally translated at the request of Greek-speaking Jews, the Christians adopted the LXX or the Septuagint for quoting the Old Testament and the New, and for other purposes. The eastern half of the Roman Empire was Greek-speaking, all because of Alexander the Great having come in and conquered them.

And so for them, once you had these Gentiles becoming Christians, for them it was far easier to just read the Greek Old Testament. And so the Christians ended up adopting it, which caused the Jews to back off from it. If the Gentiles are going to use this, and especially these heretical Christians, we're not going to use it. So it was originally a Jewish document, but then the Christians ended up copying it. and using it. So the Jews abandoned it.

Most of the New Testament quotes of the Old Testament come from the LXX. So the quote of the Old Testament in the New Testament and the original Old Testament text vary. Why would there be a difference between what you see in the Greek Old Testament and what you see when you read the Old Testament directly?

Why a difference? Yeah, Tom? A difference in culture, and that's one reason why. Difference in culture, and why else? In the Old Testament that we have, it's translated directly from the Hebrew, or in cases of Ezra and Daniel, Aramaic. So there's a direct translation. In the Greek Old Testament, what you have is a translation from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek, into English. So that's why you'll see, here's a quote out of the Old Testament, and it doesn't look exactly the same as the Old Testament portion. And it's because you've got two languages that you're translating through, not just one. So every time you translate, you have a possibility of a difference.

Copying by the Mazarites, this is 500 to about 1030 AD, the Mazarites developed a system of checks to make sure. Let me get that in front of me here. All right. They had a system of checks to ensure that every copy was nearly perfect as humanly possible. To make certain they had not added or left out even a single letter, they counted the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurred in each book. They noted and recorded the middle letter of the entire Old Testament. They recorded the middle letter of each page and the number of letters and words in each column, and they examined every copy of the Old Testament and withdrew from circulation all copies in which an error was discovered.

So we're talking, you know, very careful. Very careful. Oops, we got an oops here. Let's recount it. Yep, we do have an oops. This goes in the closet. Okay. How would you like to have worked on something for days and weeks and months and then you have to put it away? You're going to let that slide? Yeah. Yeah, Stan? Yeah. Pardon?

Basically, it's a Jewish group, and so the copyists would be somewhat like at a larger church, you have not just the pastor, but you have different staff people, and it would be like that, where they would say, I'm willing to contribute to this copying process. And that would be something that they would say, I'll go ahead and fund that. Because that's, after all, how we're going to maintain, at a quality level, how we're going to maintain the continuity of scripture.

And some of those copies, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, some of those copies, the oldest ones, will be half. So the New Testament documents, we have their difference. They're over 5,300. And I think we give the number at least 5,309 surviving hand-copied Greek manuscripts that contain all or parts of the New Testament. That number keeps growing because they've found some even this year, some additional copies this year.

There are more than 19,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts in Latin, about 8,000, Syriac, Arminian, and other languages. So in addition to the Greek manuscripts that we have there, 5,309 at least, there are these 19,000 additional translated copies, hand copied. So the oldest copies of the New Testament known to exist are the Syriac and Old Latin versions. So the oldest copies are these translations and not the Greek. All total, more than 24,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament have survived. And I've seen some figures that that's now approaching 25,000 with subsequent discoveries.

Yes. Well, okay, right now we're hearing in the news all about Syria, right? And so this is the ancient Syrian language and writing. Yes, yeah. As a matter of fact... Right, right, it's the language of Armenia. So then we have there, Copius for the New Testament documents did not have a consistent tradition like the Copius of the Old Testament, as a consequence of not having that careful tradition. Okay, we're going to wash our hands and count all the letters and all that. That tradition was not in place for copying the New Testament. So there was more variation. However, we also have a great many copies to work with, right, to work with. Yeah, Tom? Right. And that's a good point.

Sometimes I'll see pictures of, here's the Apostle Paul and he's got a book open. Well, you know, this idea of binding things on one side, none of the authors of the New Testament ever saw something bound on one side like this from any evidence that we have. Things were in some other form often, but not always a scroll. Sometimes it would just be a stack of pieces of papyrus.

Yeah, Tom's right. What was bound like this was called a codex. Now, there's a term, textual criticism. This is not what we mean, okay? I don't like your shoes. Your shirt has too many flowers. Your pants are too short. That's not what we mean by textual criticism. What we do mean, however, is that textual criticism is a matter of sorting through and analyzing all these documents and drawing conclusions about this was copied from this, etc. You have this chart here and what it's intended to show is this.

In the 2nd century, 3rd century, 4th century on into the 19th century, you had Papyri, that is, these are the pieces of papyrus where you have collections of those that constitute, for example, the Book of Philippians, right, that are written on that in that form.

And you have one of those from the 2nd century, 31 of them from the 3rd century, and so on into the 8th century, three of them. So that's what that is telling you. The uncials are those where they were written in all capitals, okay? And of those, we have those starting in the 3rd century and extending on into the 11th century. And then the minuscules is where they're using the smaller lettering like you see here, right?

In our interlinears that are in the pews, and the smaller lettering there We have this pattern and those we have a great number of them starting in the fourth century and then there is the the lectuaries that is Just like just like a lot of churches would have we've got Bibles here, right? but in addition to that they would have things that they would read from and Those would include quotes of scripture But they might include other things, too.

We're going to have words to a song. We're going to have something that we say as a regular thing. Those kinds of books would be the thing that you would have in the next category, and those often contain much of the New Testament. Yes. Yeah, so there would be quotes of scripture, there would be words to songs, there would be the Apostles' Creed, there would be something that you might say regularly at Christmas, all those kinds of things. And in those kinds of books, and we have a number of copies of them, you see that there, In those kinds of books we have quotes of scripture. So you have another means of copying the New Testament aside from just straight copies of the New Testament.

So those are the four categories and by those you start to see the numbers and what age they are from. Is this making some sense? Now, there were different text variations, and we have, here is, for example, this is all caps, so that's the uncial, right? And then this one would be minuscule, that is, it has some capitals, but largely lowercase lettering. And so there was that, and of course now they would start off major sections with, here's Paul, and they'd have a huge P with a bunch of filigree in there in order to start off a chapter, for instance. You also have local variations in spelling or meaning. Theater, ending with ER or RE.

And where did you go to school? And how did my teacher teach me? Those kind of differences. You have savior. Is it S-A-V-I-O-R or S-A-V-I-O-U-R? Differences in spelling. So you'll have that. And then you had what's the meaning of dinner, supper, and lunch? Different parts of the country and different families even will have different traditions. Tom? Going to chow. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So traditions about what do I call something, you know. Those get reflected when you're making.

If you were making a copy and it wasn't some intense tradition and you came across, you know, theater is RE, would you copy that RE or ER? You'd kind of make a choice on the fly, wouldn't you? And so then other people later on getting your copy and then looking at something copied from you, would then say, oh, well, he copied from this person, right? Or likely did, right?

So you have those kinds of variations, and those are included in the differences from one copy to the next. That accounts for most of the differences that we find. Some cases, we're going to talk about copying errors. some cases there are some copy questions that are copy error kinds of questions. In some cases the error is pretty evident. We know what the error was.

Another problem you have with hand copied notes that we don't have when we make, you ever make notes in your Bible? I used to have a pen that would make tiny, tiny print. So I would print tiny, tiny print. Now I can't even read it. Anyway, I'd print tiny, tiny print in my Bible and so then I'd be able to fit in lots and lots of notes. Well, it was easy to tell. In fact, this is a part of it right there. I could easily tell what was printed and what I had handwritten.

But when you have a hand-copied Bible, and somebody makes a note in it, is that a note that somebody added, or does that belong in the text? And then you run into issues, and sometimes what would happen is something would be put in a note, maybe even a footnote, and then that would get included in the next copy. So sometimes that happened. Then there are copying errors.

Just to give you an English example, I will go to the roof. I will go to the root. Easy error? Yeah. And especially because right there we see them, you know, in print. But when they're done by hand, that might be a little tougher. Right? Here's another one. Blessed are you, blessed were you. Just a couple letters different.

Yeah, you get this and it's ripped up. And that's where having a number of copies helps as well because there are ones like this where you get pieces missing. Here's another one, go to my house, go to the house. So you have those kinds of things where a copyist is doing it. And now let's make one more complication.

You're making a copy and it's against the law to make a copy. which it was under the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church also made that illegal, right? So you're making a copy and you're constantly listening, distracted, because somebody might catch you, because you're going to get killed if you're caught. So just the distraction factor and the idea of talking with somebody about it and having two people work on it might be a little scary, because then you might be more easily caught. Here's some key definitions.

The majority text is part of the later Byzantine textual family, and we'll talk about what that means in a bit here. Later, but more numerous. Notice there were lots of them, but they were from later on and after the various kinds of errors and whatnot were introduced.

The minority text is the Alexandrian textual family. In the area around Egypt and North Africa, it was a drier environment, and so a lot of the earlier copies were more likely preserved. So you had a tradition where earlier copies were preserved out of Egypt and North Africa, and then you'd go more to the northern part of the Mediterranean, and they would have copies as well. But the earlier ones were not as well preserved. Textus Receptus, that's the received text. It's basically a marketing term from a couple of Dutch printers, and then that got adopted as this, you know, received text.

It is a majority text, in other words, it's part of this, not identical, but similar. And then finally, the critical text, that's where People have gone through and they said, well, this was copied from this and this was copied from that and this part's genuine and that part's not. And so the critical text is what you see as the basis for a lot of our modern translations and Bibles. And we'll talk about that in a minute here.

Here's this generalized family tree for hand copied Old Testament or New Testament documents. You can imagine from one original was made, you know, a number of different copies. Some of those were then copied again and so on and so forth. So you essentially have a genealogy of copies. And so they will study through those and say what was copied from what and essentially make a family tree. of copies.

The idea is to say, what was the original? That's the intent. Now, you have this, I think, on page four, and this is a good diagram. I got permission from Rodney Decker to use this. But what it tells you is these autographs here are the originals, right?

And then from those copies were made, but many of them lost, right? And then we also have the persecutions where copies were made, but a lot of those were lost because of the persecution, right? So that's why you see some areas that are sort of erased and blanked out. You also have persecutions right at the very end before Christianity became legal, right? And so here you have a copying tradition out of Antioch and there's a number of those but the Muslim invasions ended up destroying some of those and so this is substantially the source for the King James Version.

They had up about a dozen copies of the New Testament to work from when they made the King James Bible. How many copies are we working with today? Over 5,000, right? So we've discovered a great many more since the time when the King James was put together.

But the Alexandrian copies, which tended to, a lot of those survived older, that's a substantial source for their critical text. So if you have, here's the King James and then here's the more modern Bible versions, and they're working from a rather different set of documents. So, that explains some of the differences. The King James used a majority text tradition, about 16 printings of the Greek text for the New Testament by 1611. They had about a dozen documents to work from. most of those being fairly recent, that is, closer to the time of the translation. So the New International Version, for example, uses the critical text, makes minimal note of variations, doesn't mention when there's a lot of variations in the writings. The New American Standard Bible reflects some discernment between the two.

That is, they tried to go out and look at it and say, well, we think this one is more correct, or we think this one is more correct. All totaled, where you got variations, about 40 lines of text are in question. At times, the critical text reveals a puzzling bias towards certain manuscripts.

So, here's Galatians 6.15 reads, for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything. The critical text does not have in Christ Jesus.

Okay, drops that out. The basis for the deletion of these words is that among the hundreds of texts that include it, Only four do not, so they drop it out. Hmm. Hundreds of texts have it, but four don't, so we drop it out. That's a little puzzling, I think. Why? The critical text has been formulated without any spiritual criteria. There's no spiritual criteria, and yet we're talking about a spiritual book. So that's, I think, something that I would look at and question. Then, we have some questions here.

How do I deal with a marginal note that gives an alternate reading? Ever see those? You look in the Bible, and there's some little note, and here's an alternate reading. Well, what do I do with that? Yeah. And so, huh? What do I do with that? Well, one thing is sometimes there are commentaries that will give you a clue about what that's about. And F.F. Bruce is one of the scholars. He's, you know, not alive anymore, but one of the scholars that makes notes about that. You know, here is an alternate reading.

We are thus minded. This variant has no serious claim to consideration. So basically he's saying, set it aside. It doesn't matter. So he gives you an opinion there. Variant readings at odds with the usual teaching and style of the biblical author are suspect. Variant readings that are out of character with what that author would teach or the way that author would write are suspect.

Philippians 3.12, one variant reads, or have already been justified. That is, this is the place where Paul is saying, you know, I've not already attained or already been made perfect.

He didn't use the word justified anywhere in Philippians. That's part one. And part two, did Paul write that we were justified? Did Paul ever write that we were justified as Christians? Yes, he did. He wrote that in Romans and Galatians, made it very clear.

So to claim, you know, I've not already been justified would be inconsistent with the Apostle Paul. So there are a couple of reasons for saying, we just set that aside. We're not even going to consider that. That claim that he's not been justified is contrary to everything else Paul has written. So, and then here's another one. Variant readings at odds with the flow and word pattern of the context are suspect.

Here's Philippians 3.12. Paul has already used the word perfect in 1.6 and will use it again in 3.15. Justify does not use anywhere else in the book. So that would be another reason for just casting aside that variant reading.

Out of the 20,000 lines in the New Testament, only about 40 lines are in question because of the variant. Only one-eighth of the New Testament variants amount to anything more than a stylistic difference or an evident misspelling. How we might interpret a passage, a particular passage, might be at issue in a few places, but none of the variations impact Christian doctrine. This this is key if you have somebody saying all there's all kinds of different copying errors and also none of the points in question impact Christian doctrine That's something we can stand on the Lord has through all these copies and the even with people not Copying very carefully the Lord has made it such that there is not at issue any Christian doctrine that's of any concern at all in all these copyings and variations from one to the next. Now, how about major sections?

You ever notice in some of the Bibles, a lot of them will have some note about Mark 16, 9 through 20? Some Bibles have notes like the NIV does here. The two most reliable ancient sources do not have Mark 16, 9 through 20. Hmm. So should we just rip it out of our Bible or scratch it out or what should we do there? The Net Bible's footnote gives more detail, but basically leans in the same direction. That's another more modern translation. Sometimes these notes oversimplify a much more complex situation and make statements that are not all that insightful, sometimes misleading.

Many more of the ancient texts have Mark 16.9-20 than do not.

And Mark 16.8 seems a strange place to end the gospel, which leads one to believe there should be more verses. Should be more, right? And this I think is significant. Some have said that a different style of writing than the rest of Mark, but that's also debated.

Several early church authors quote from Mark 1609 through 20, more than 100 years before these two most reliable documents. As a matter of fact, I'll give you the names. Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, Shepherd of Hermas, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Vincentius, all those authors quote from Mark 1609 through 20 before our earliest copies of the book. Why are they quoting from it if it's not real? And why do we have seven of them quoting from it if it's not real? I think there's something else. Here's Vaticanus that's referenced there as the most reliable.

Vaticanus is missing 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews 9.14, and the entire book of Revelation. So if it's missing the end of Mark, Do I say that that's not real scripture? That's not a good basis, in my opinion. The fact that it's missing these others, and the fact that seven authors quote from the end of Mark 16, 9 through 20, tells me that that note that's in the NIV probably shouldn't be there. So, my opinion.

What about John 7.53 through 8.11? This is the account of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery.

So that's missing in some texts. We have a copy of this. I won't go into all the detail on it. You can certainly do that. One of the things that Augustine and sometimes pronounced Augustine, but one of the things that Augustine wrote is that a lot of people were embarrassed by that and didn't want to read that in church. And so they left it out of their copies.

And that may be the explanation of why some of the copies don't contain it. Here is a quote from Sir Frederick Kenyon. basically says what we have now is so well sorted through. And this was made in 1940. This quote is made in 1940. So we've had 70 years of additional finds of documents and whatnot. But 70 years ago, he could state that what we have is very well founded, substantially the original.

So how should we regard these marginal notes when we find them? Since the tendency of the marginal notes is to put the New Testament documents ahead of early church references to those documents and to favor certain texts over others. Curious biases. The best approach would be to accept the printed text as is unless it is very clear that a different reading of the text is the correct one.

I'll give you an example. 1 John 5, 7, and 8 is one example of a text where it's clear. And so I've quoted here, the longer reading, which the King James has, appears to be incorrect. And what the New American Standard has there is the correct reading. But that is one of a fairly rare set of instances where it's quite clear that it ought to be corrected. The longer reading is found only in eight Greek manuscripts made after 1500, after the printing press was developed, and four of those have the extra words in a marginal note off to the side. All the earlier versions in the Greek do not have the backing for the extra words that you see there in the King James. So that would be one instance that is quite clear. It would be one of fairly few instances where it's clear.

And so we can take it as Jesus said in Matthew 4, Jesus answered and said, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Which we have in the word of God. Okay, questions? Comments? Okay, let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for as we look at these things, we can count upon what you have had written because you love us, what you had written and inspired, what you intend to use to transform us as we behold the Lord through your word. And we thank you that you just love us so amazingly. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.