Monday, May 11, 2009

Can We Trust the Gospels? 1

Can we know what the original Gospel manuscripts really said?

As we begin working through Mark D. Roberts’ Can We Trust the Gospels?, that’s the first question we come to.

The Gospels are the source of the majority of what we know about Jesus. If we can’t trust them, we really know little about Him, so it’s appropriate that Roberts begins by addressing whether we can know what the originals said.

Standards
Chapter two starts with an introduction to the nature of manual copying and scribal errors, then launches into four standards by which we can evaluate the reliability of our existing Gospel manuscripts.

1. Antiquity of Manuscripts – obviously, the older the manuscript, the closer it is to the original.

The oldest known copy of any portion of the Gospels is a fragment of John known as Papyrus 52 (P52). It is dated to about 125 a.d. The next oldest manuscripts are from the latter second and early third centuries. These are more complete but “about a century later than the original writings” (p30).

Roberts points out that this compares quite favorably with other ancient documents, but we’re not being asked to make life-changing decisions based on those documents, so it’d be really nice to have older copies. But we don’t.

So how do we know these copies bear any resemblance to the originals given 100 years separate them? We’ll address this question in a bit. First, let’s look at the rest of Roberts’ criteria.

2. Multiplicity of Gospel Manuscripts – the more manuscripts we have available, the better our chances of determining what the originals looked like.

We have a couple of thousand manuscripts containing some or all of the Gospels. That is about 20 times greater than all other ancient documents, which isn’t surprising when you consider how our ancestors valued the NT.

Why is that important? Two reasons. First, it gives textual critics much more to work with.

Second, it tells us that if someone wanted to change the Gospels – replace the real version with a false version – they would face the impossible task of rounding up all of those copies. The farther you get from the originals in time, the more difficult that task would become.

3. Trustworthy Scholarly Methodology – if textual critics, those who look at all these manuscripts and try to figure out what the originals looked like, have “reliable methods … that maximize objectivity,” we can be more confident in our modern Bibles.

Of textual criticism, Roberts says, “It is by far the most objective discipline in New Testament studies. If you were to take two different teams of text critics and ask them to work independently … they would agree more than 99 percent of the time” (p32-33).

4. Quantity and Quality of Textual Variants – our confidence in our modern Gospels is dependent on what kind of and how many textual variants we have in our source manuscripts.

Here Roberts goes into detail I won’t repeat explaining how this works, but the short version is that many textual variants is actually a good thing. Because the number of variants is a function of the number of manuscripts, the fact that we have a very large number of variants is ok, even helpful to those who work with the texts.

As for the kind of variants, “the vast majority … are insignificant, either because they appear so rarely that they are obviously not original, or because they don’t appear in the older manuscripts, or because they don’t impact that meaning of the text. In fact, the majority of variants that show up in enough older manuscripts to impact our reading of the text are spelling variations or errors” (p34).

Also, the remaining troublesome variants are in less important places. “If you actually took out of the Gospels every word that was text-critically uncertain, the impact on your understanding of Jesus would be negligible” (p34-35).

An Ehrman Aside
Bart Ehrman has made quite a name for himself questioning the Gospels. His Misquoting Jesus made a big splash a few years ago, and the ideas he taught continue to pop up – namely that the Gospels are so hopelessly corrupt that we can have no idea what Jesus actually said or did. Well, that was his sound-bite version, anyway.

When you actually read the book you see that he is, as Roberts put it, “too good a scholar not to tell the truth.” Though he wants to pull the rug out from under the Gospels, his book actually does the opposite.
“One would expect Ehrman to put forth dozens of examples where we simply don’t have any idea what the autographs actually said. … In virtually every case, Ehrman confidently explains what the change was, what the earlier manuscripts actually said, and what motivated the copyist. In other words, Ehrman’s book … actually demonstrates how the abundance of manuscripts and the antiquity of manuscripts, when run through the mill of text-critical methodology, allow us to know with a very high level of probability what the evangelists and other New Testament authors wrote” (p37).
The Point
So, given that we have a large number of mostly insignificant textual variants in manuscripts that are, in many cases, extremely old, we can be confident that modern textual criticism can give us copies of the Gospels that are, to a high degree of confidence, very similar to the originals.

But 100 Years is a Long Time
Still, I’m less than thrilled that the closest we can get to the original Gospels is 100 years, barring a couple of sentences from John. How do we know there weren’t lots of changes in that period?

Roberts never addresses this question directly, but some of the things he says in this chapter and elsewhere are applicable. The rest are simply my thoughts or things I’ve read elsewhere.

First, we know the Gospel writers and the community of early Christians were committed to honesty and the preservation of Christ’s words. This is seen in what they left in and left out of the Gospels as well as elsewhere. If the early Church felt free to edit the Gospels, we would not expect passages that were embarrassing to Christ (e.g., John 7:1-5) or the apostles (e.g, Matt 20:20-28) or were simply inconvenient (e.g., Matt 3:13-17, Mark 6:1-6).

We also would expect Jesus to say something about problems the post-Pentecost Church encountered, e.g., the Gentile controversy. Instead, we see the community dealing with these problems without resorting to convenient sayings of Jesus and even differentiating between the word of apostles and the Lord (c.f., 1Cor 7).

Even Bart Ehrman said, “For the most part, [the scribes’] intention was to conserve the tradition, not to change it” (quoted by Roberts, p36).

Second, as we’ll see in a later chapter, when the early Christians were presented with an opportunity to “clean up” the Gospels by Tatian’s Diatessaron, they declined.

Third, even though we don’t have the original Gospels, within 100 years of their writing we would expect people to be familiar with them and to have reasonably recent copies. We believe the Gospels spread fairly far fairly quickly because the aforementioned P52 fragment of John, which originated in Asia, was found in Egypt. If someone wanted to doctor the Gospels, they would have been forced to contend with those who were familiar with the originals or at least their contents.

Fourth, unless someone was actually able to track down and destroy all the originals, any changes in the Gospels would show up in the manuscript history. No changes like that appear. Yes, there were attempts to harmonize the Gospels, but not right away, and that shows up in the manuscript evidence.

Though I would probably give a limb in exchange for one or more of the original Gospels, we will probably never have them. But we can be confident beyond a reasonable doubt that the copies we do have faithfully represent what the evangelists wrote.

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Recommended:
This book in blog form: Are the NT Gospels Reliable?

Related:
Can We Trust the Gospels? 0

13 comments:

Nancy said...

Yea! I'm glad you are confident and will be able to remain... whole and complete in every way! If the originals were absolutely necessary...we would have them...God would see to that!

Vinny said...

Still, I’m less than thrilled that the closest we can get to the original Gospels is 100 years, barring a couple of sentences from John. How do we know there weren’t lots of changes in that period?The answer Chris is that we don’t, which is why Roberts never addresses the question. There are many solid reasons to believe that the transmission of the texts in the first century after they were written was considerably less stable than it was in the later periods for which we have manuscript evidence. The context in which the manuscripts were copied was completely different in the earlier period.

The overwhelming majority of the extant manuscripts come from after the time of Constantine. At this point, Christianity was virtually the state religion of the Roman Empire. It had an established hierarchy and an established creed. Most importantly, it had professional scribes.

In the first hundred years after the texts were written, on the other hand, Christianity was a persecuted minority composed of competing sects with conflicting theologies. The copies were not made by trained scribes. The copyists did not know that they were copying “scripture.” In the case of the gospels, there is little evidence to suggest that the copyists thought they were copying anything other than anonymous collections of stories about Jesus.

The manuscript evidence shows that the majority of the known variants arose prior to the fourth century. The manuscript evidence also shows that the earliest manuscripts show the highest rate of variance. This makes it reasonable to believe that those first one hundred years would have had an even higher rate of variance. This is also consistent with the observation of scholars that the greatest corruption in ancient documents generally occurs in the first hundred years after they are written.

In sum, there is are plenty of reasons to think that the texts were much less stable in the first one hundred years of transmission than they were in later years.

A couple other points:

The Diatessaron was embraced by the Syrian Church where it became the standard liturgical text for several centuries. The question is why harmonization fell out of favor in the rest of the church. I would suggest that it was the need to respond to heretics like Marcion who were claiming that their texts were the only authentic ones. The inclination to harmonize was outweighed by the need to claim apostolic origins for the orthodox texts.

I think the fact that Matthew and Luke wrote theologically distinct gospels using a common source demonstrates that early writers were willing to edit earlier writings if they thought it necessary. Many scholars believe that Luke and Matthew were on different sides of the gentile controversy and that their gospels were written in order to put Jesus on one side or the other.

Unless we have some evidence that P52 was written in Egypt (which there may well be for all I know) rather than being brought there at a later date, it may not tell us anything about when the gospels started circulating. I think that citations in writings of the early church fathers are probably a better indicator of when the gospels became generally known and accepted.

Of course, we cannot prove that the texts of the gospels did not remain stable and uncorrupted during those first one hundred years after they were written, but there is much that we know that would point in the other direction. Anyone who is confident beyond a reasonable doubt about the transmission of the texts in that period is relying on faith rather than evidence.

Nancy said...

"Anyone who is confident beyond a reasonable doubt about the transmission of the texts in that period is relying on faith rather than evidence."

Yup...that would be me...*: )

Vinny said...

That's great Nancy. I know many people of faith who I admire. My problem arises when people claim that faith-based beliefs are objectively provable facts.

ChrisB said...

Sorry to take so long getting back. It's been terribly busy.

Vinny, citing some sources would really further the conversation.

"In the first hundred years ... Christianity was a persecuted minority"
True

"The copies were not made by trained scribes."
True

"The copyists did not know that they were copying “scripture.”"
Conjecture. What historical information we have suggests the canonical Gospels were very highly regarded from the beginning.

"The manuscript evidence shows that the majority of the known variants arose prior to the fourth century. "
Care to define "variant?" Considering that every misspelt word is a "variant," you're going to have to do better than point out typos. Ehrman even says the vast majority of variants were insignificant.

"the observation of scholars that the greatest corruption in ancient documents generally occurs in the first hundred years after they are written."
A great place to cite a source. "Scholar" and "corruption" could both use more precise definitions.

Your approach assumes that the ancients were as ignorant of the autographa as we are. That is not a reasonable assumption. It's no surprise that mss are fewer in number as they get older, but we would expect the early church to be familiar with copies much closer to the sources. And, again, if there was this great creativity in the early church, we would expect to see it in the manuscript tradition.

That Matt & Luke have different theological leanings does not constitute taking sides in the questions over circumcision, women, or tongues.

In short, your case, such as it is, for doubt in the manuscripts from this early era is based on conjecture, not evidence of corruption.

Vinny said...

I am on vacation til the 26th so I can't look up everything I would like until I get back.

The term "variants" does include typos, but I am talking about the variants where there is some real doubt about the correct reading. Most of these arose before the 4th century.

I will have to track down the business about the first hundred years of ancient documents. I am pretty I have seen it cited by both conservatives and liberals.

Your case for confidence in the early transmission is at least as much conjecture as mine for doubt. I think I can show that it is more, but it will have to wait until after the 26th.

Vinny said...

What historical information we have suggests the canonical Gospels were very highly regarded from the beginning.I would submit that what historical information we have points in exactly the opposite direction.

Around 180 A.D., Irenaeous identified the authors of the canonical gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and declared these writings to be the only authoritative and apostolic accounts of the life of Jesus. However, working backwards towards their origination, we find less and less evidence of their significance.

Circa 150 A.D., Justin Martyr makes reference to the “memoirs of the apostles” without identifying authors and Tatian composes the harmonization that became the standard liturgical text in the Syrian church. Neither circumstance suggests that the canonical writings enjoyed the same status that Irenaeous attributes to them.

From 110 A.D. to 150 A.D., there are a few allusions and references in Papias, Ignatius, and Polycarp that establish the existence of written accounts of Jesus’ life. However, these references do not seem to be sufficient to establish either the extent to which these accounts conform to the canonical gospels. Nor do they seem sufficient to establish the status which these writings enjoyed in the early church, e.g., whether these written accounts were regarded as any more authoritative than stories that were passed on by oral tradition.

Prior to Ignatius, there appears to be no external confirmation of the existence of the gospels. Writing around 95 A.D., Clement of Rome attributes a couple of fairly generic sayings to Jesus without indicating whether they came from a written source or the oral tradition. Clement does not reference any stories about Jesus’ earthly life and ministry.

The writings of Paul as well as the other New Testament epistles reflect almost no familiarity with the vast majority of the traditions behind the canonical gospels. There are no references to the empty tomb, the passion narratives, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of God, or his teachings about his own mission.

I don’t see how any of this can be interpreted as pointing towards anything other than the gospel stories and writings acquiring increasing significance over a period of time rather than enjoying a high status from the very beginning.

I will concede, however, that the evidence is not overwhelming and that it is not sufficient to eliminate any number of possibilities. There is no way to know whether one of the lost Pauline epistles contained references to events in Jesus’ life or writings by other apostles. Such references might completely overturn the conclusions of liberal scholars about the development of the gospels. Nevertheless, the historical record as it exists does not give any indication that the canonical gospels enjoyed a high status from the beginning, unless of course the beginning was much later than the scholarly consensus currently places it.

ChrisB said...

Of all the things I could say in response to your comment, and they are many, I think the most important one is this:

So?

Even if everything you assert is true, what does that have to do with the accurate transmission of the Gospels from their birth to our first extant copies?

Vinny said...

Even if everything you assert is true, what does that have to do with the accurate transmission of the Gospels from their birth to our first extant copies?I suppose it depends on whether your assertion that "the canonical Gospels were very highly regarded from the beginning" has anything to do with the accuracy of the early transmission of the gospels. If not, then the fact that the evidence doesn't support that assertion wouldn't really matter. However, I assumed that you offered the assertion about high early regard in support of your earlier assertion that “we can be confident beyond a reasonable doubt that the copies we do have faithfully represent what the evangelists wrote.” That was why I addressed it.

BTW, I managed to find the source for a point I raised earlier. It was a talk at the 2008 Greer-Heard Forum held at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary given by the Chair of the Department of Biblical and Theological Studies at Bethel University, Michael W. Holmes: “It’s widely recognized in the ancient world that the first century or so of a document’s existence was a critical period for the transmission of the text, a time when alterations or disruptions, if they were to occur, were most likely to take place and for this crucial period in the transmission of the New Testament, we know relatively little.”

If you get the chance, I think you might find the find audio of the Greer-Heard Forums enlightening. It started with a debate between Bart Ehrman and Dan Wallace that was followed by presentations by two conservative scholars, William Warren of NOBTS and Holmes, and two liberals scholars Dale Martin and David Parker. Unlike Mark Roberts, Warren and Holmes were very frank about the uncertainties caused by the lack of manuscript evidence from the first couple centuries of the church. Their conclusions were more optimistic than Ehrman’s, but I'm pretty sure that neither would subscribe to the level of confidence that you have drawn from Roberts’ work.

ChrisB said...

I recently saw someone else refer to that NOBTS debate. If I can find it, it might be interesting.

But unless someone offers up actual evidence for this creative period in early Christianity, it's nothing but smoke.

As I understand it, the manuscript evidence we have to simply does not support this notion that the Gospels were changed during that period.

Vinny said...

It’s true that the only manuscript evidence that is firmly within the first hundred years of the gospels’ composition is p52. Still, scholars of ancient history are routinely faced with gaps in the records. From what I can see, trying to draw reasoned inferences based on trends or surrounding periods or analogous situations is standard historical methodology.

I just finished listening to one of those Great Courses on The History of Ancient Rome. The professor talked frequently about the gaps in the sources and the types of educated guesses that historians try to make such as projecting trends that are observed in earlier or later periods or looking at Grecian city-states at a similar point in their development. It may be difficult to achieve any level of certainty, but they can often identify the likely possibilities.

I think that there are enough clues to what might have happened in those first hundred years to at least talk intelligently about the possibilities. The first thing is the trend in the manuscript evidence that we do have. We see variants occurring at a higher rate in the fourth century than in the fifth century and at a higher rate still in the third century. That would seem to point to the possibility of an even higher rate of variants in the second century.

We have some evidence from the apostolic fathers. Early in the third century, Origen complained about the practices of the copyists: “The differences among the manuscripts have become great either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”

There are also the variations that appear when the early fathers quote the gospels. Some scholars see this as evidence of the instability of the early texts. Others think that the fathers simply were not terribly precise in their quotations. Personally, I tend to think that copyists and theologians of the same period would probably have had similar levels of concern for accuracy, but I have never seen that question addressed.

We have Dr. Holmes observation that the first hundred years of any ancient document was the period in which corruption was most likely to take place. I don't know the exact scope of this theory, but it sounds like the kind of thing that scholars use to make educated guesses in the absence of hard data.

We also know of problems with forgeries from early times. Paul warned the Thessalonians that there was a letter in circulation being falsely attributed to him. The Gospel of Peter was accepted as authentic and orthodox in some communities. This indicates that some early Christians lacked the capacity to recognize inauthentic writings. It seems reasonable to me to think that these same Christians would have lacked the capacity to recognize alterations and corruptions of authentic writings.

We also know that heretics like Marcion altered texts in order to make them conform to their own theological views. I know of no reason to think that orthodox scribes would have been immune to the same temptation.

So while we have no way to know what specific changes might have been made in the first hundred years of the gospels’ transmission, I think it’s a pretty reasonable bet that there were changes in manuscripts prior to 200 A.D. that were at least as significant as those made after 200 A.D. I don’t think that you can dismiss the likelihood of changes as “nothing but smoke” without rejecting the practices that historians and textual scholars routinely employ to deal with gaps in the historical record. That seems to me to reflect the kind of hyper-skepticism towards historical knowledge of which apologists like Roberts accuse unbelievers.

ChrisB said...

"It’s true that the only manuscript evidence that is firmly within the first hundred years of the gospels’ composition is p52."

You miss the point. It's not P52 that matters; it's every ms afterwards. Changes early will be copied later. We do not see anything like you're concerned about in the ms data.

"I tend to think that copyists and theologians of the same period would probably have had similar levels of concern for accuracy"

They saw no difference between a quote and a paraphrase in use, but that doesn't necessarily extend to a copyist who has a very different role -- not without evidence.

I'm not denying that copyists made errors. I'm not denying that some made intentional changes. But there is no evidence of this period of great creativity or liberty with the texts that so many skeptics believe existed.

Vinny said...

That “[c]hanges early will be copied later” is exactly the problem. We don’t see the changes in the manuscript data from the first 100 years because there is virtually no such data. The manuscript data that we have comes overwhelmingly from a much later period where it was produced under different circumstances. The data we have shows that the rate of variants increases as we approach the period for which data is lacking.

As far as evidence goes, we have the uncontradicted statement of Origen from early in the third century: “The differences among the manuscripts have become great either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.” In the absence of the manuscripts themselves, I cannot imagine what better evidence we could hope for. We can certainly quibble over whether this indicates a “period of great creativity or liberty with the texts” or one of “moderate creativity or liberty,” but we cannot deny that it is evidence.

We also cannot deny that the quotations in the early fathers are evidence of what was in the manuscripts. I think that Professor Holmes described these as indicating “fluidity” in the texts rather than “great creativity,” but it is nonetheless evidence; not conclusive evidence, but certainly evidence.

Frankly, I tend to agree with scholars like Parker and Ehrman who do not believe that it makes much sense to talk about “the originals.” As with many things in the ancient world, the evidence is simply too sparse to do much more than talk about the various possibilities. One of those possibilities may be that “the copies we do have faithfully represent what the evangelists wrote,” but expressing any degree of confidence or certainty in this possibility is a theological conclusion rather than an historical one.