Some manuscripts have...

Today's topic is, The authenticity of the Bible with reference to manuscripts.

Have you ever noticed footnotes in your Bible that say “some manuscripts have…”?

Does this mean that there is uncertainty about the text of the Bible?

• How did we get the Bible?
• Reading in the ancient word
• What is a manuscript?
• What happens when we compare manuscripts?
• What happens when we analyse textual variation?
• What difference does textual variation make?
• Can we recover the original text?
• Redundancy

The Bible is a collection of books. (Βιβλια means books.) The first part is the Old Testament – the Law, the Prophets, and the other writings. The second part is the New Testament – Gospels, Acts, Paul's Letters, General Letters, and Revelation.

The canon is the rule that says what books should be included. How the books were chosen is better described as a gradual selection process rather than a sudden executive decision. Councils merely ratified what the people of the early church had decided were the best books to hear.

The literacy rate in the ancient world was low. Only about one in ten could read. Back then, normal people needed others to read and write for them. Reading was a performance, always done aloud. A book was like an audio recording. Put a book together with a reader and you have a way to reproduce recorded speech.

If you wanted someone else to have a copy of a book then you would have to get it copied. You could hire a scribe to do it for a shirt or a couple of chickens a day. A book like the Gospel of Mark would take days to copy. The scribe would read syllables, remember the sound, then write the syllables down. Being human, scribes sometimes made mistakes.

A manuscript is a hand copy of a text. You have probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are hand copies of the Hebrew Bible. Hand copies of New Testament books have survived as well. Here are two examples of New Testament manuscripts.

• written on papyrus (produced in Egypt, cheaper than parchment)
• a codex (probably a Christian invention)
• page number (ΜΑ = 41)
• στιχοι count (alpha with stroke = 1000 lines for the Letter to the Romans)
• title (προσ ἑβραιουσ)
• scriptio continua
• nomina sacra (e.g. θσ)
• corrections (e.g. ἡμων)

P46 is one of only 140 New Testament papyri. I am fortunate enough to have held a couple of them in my hands. They are typically placed between glass sheets and have the appearance of old brown cardboard.

Papyrus is a plant that grows to a height of two or three metres along the Nile River in Egypt. (Papyrus plants are the “bullrushes” among which Moses was hidden. I've seen them growing in various places around Perth.) The stalks are split into strips, laid crosswise, hammered together, dried, and polished, then glued together to produce rolls of durable writing material.

P46 was made by cutting papyrus rolls into about fifty sheets then stacking the sheets and folding them in half, producing a codex that tended to spring open. Book makers eventually worked out that it is better to stack fewer sheets, fold those, then stack the resulting “quires” to produce books that stay shut.

The ink was made by mixing carbon black with plant gum. The writing was done with a reed stylus.

• written on (high quality) parchment
• a codex
• a header
• scriptio continua
• nomina sacra
• written in four columns (justified)
• calligraphic
• Eusebian sections (for cross-referencing Gospel parallels)
• corrections

There are many manuscripts of the Bible. They might include a single book or multiple books. Old Testament ones are written in Hebrew and New Testament ones are written in Greek. I am focussing on New Testament manuscripts today. Many contain complete books but the older ones tend to be fragmentary, having been eaten by bugs, worms or mould, or torn up, or thrown on a rubbish tip (e.g. the Oxyrhynchus papyri). Others are hard to read because they have been washed and reused (palimpsests). The New Testament is preserved in (way) more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature.

There are almost 20,000 manuscripts of New Testament “versions”, that is, translations into other languages. There are about 10,000 in Latin and over 9,000 in languages such as Coptic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and Gothic.

Then there are patristic quotations where Church Fathers quoted parts of the Bible in their literary works. According to Bruce Metzger,

so extensive are these citations that if all the sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.

Christianity has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to hand copies of its foundational text. However, with the wealth comes a difficulty: when we compare the many copies we discover that there are differences. These are called textual variations.

The great majority of the differences are insignificant. For example, there were no dictionaries so people spelled as they thought best. Spelling variations comprise the great majority of differences between Greek texts. Happily they don't (usually) affect the meaning.

However, variations that do affect meaning remain. Most have little semantic effect. That is, they don't change the meaning much. Examples include changes of word order, substitution of a synonym, presence or absence of an article, that sort of thing.

So what does all this mean? Do textual variants affect anything? I would say that most differences fall into the “So what?” category. For example, I could take two of the most different texts of Mark chapter one, translate them, read them out, and you would have trouble noticing most of the differences.

Here are the first five textual variants from Mark chapter one listed in the UBS Greek New Testament. They should give you a feel for the magnitude of typical differences. Each option is called a “reading”.

Mark 1.1

The beginning of the Gospel of

• Jesus Christ Son of God
• Jesus Christ Son of the Lord
• Jesus Christ
• Jesus

Mark 1.2

As is written in

• Isaiah the prophet
• the prophets
• Isaiah and the prophets

Mark 1.4

• John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness and proclaimed a baptism…
• John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness proclaiming a baptism…
• John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism…
• John appeared in the wilderness baptizing and proclaiming a baptism…

Mark 1.6

John was clothed with

• camel hair
• camel leather

Mark 1.7-8

• After me comes one who is stronger… I baptize with water. He will baptize in the Holy Spirit.
• After me comes one who is stronger… I baptize in water. He will baptize in the Holy Spirit.
• I baptize in water. After me comes one who is stronger… He will baptize in the Holy Spirit.

Given that there are textual variants, we would like to know whether we can identify the original text. Various tests can be applied to help decide which reading is best. One might prefer the reading with the oldest or most diverse witnesses; the one that does not harmonise to a parallel passage; the more difficult one (less smooth); the less refined one (having “native dignity”); the one that best fits the author's usual style, vocabulary, or logic; the one least likely due to scribal error; or the one that best explains the others, all things considered.

All of these criteria have a contribution to make but none is decisive. In the end, we have to accept that we can't know for sure. The best we can do is to choose the one that we consider most likely to be the initial text but know that one of the alternatives may well be it.

Does that means that the text of the Bible is unreliable? Well, if this text is unreliable then so is every other text from the ancient world. Through its multiplicity of witnesses, the Bible text is more firmly established than any other text that went through a hand-copying phase.

An important consideration is redundancy. Information theory tells us that if I have a noisy communication channel (i.e. one that occasionally gets it wrong) then I can still transmit a message with a negligible error rate. One effective error reduction strategy is to transmit the message multiple times. That is what has happened with the Bible text – there are many manuscripts of the same thing. With a bit of work you can weed out most of the transmission errors.

There is another form of redundancy too. The important things are said over and over again at different places in the text. Taking the “Son of God” example from Mark 1.1, we are in no doubt that the Apostles say Jesus is the Son of God because their texts keep saying so all over the place.

Another consideration is the tenacity of readings. Once a reading appears, it tends not to disappear. Given that each Bible manuscript is part of a colossal family tree, the earlier the reading the more widely it can be expected to have spread, other things being equal. One can be confident that the initial reading is among the options wherever there is textual variation.

We have delved into the world of Bible manuscripts. The text is divine and the copying is human. The Bible text is reliable, with far better manuscript support than any other ancient work. There are places where we are not entirely sure about what the initial text actually is. The great majority of differences have little or no semantic effect, all saying pretty much the same thing. In a few cases there are significant differences, and that's where your Bible should have a footnote saying, “Some manuscripts have …”