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Fri 13 Jumada Al Akhira 1444AH 6-1-2023AD at 12:37 pm #83008
The authenticity of a text, and of even the most venerable manuscript, is always open to debate. The Codex Vaticanus is a good example of this. The facsimile reproductions edited by the Vatican City, 1965, contain an accompanying note from its editors informing us that “several centuries after it was copied (believed to have been in circa the Tenth or Eleventh century), a scribe inked over all the letters except those he thought were a mistake”. There are passages in the text where the original letters in light brown still show through, contrasting visibly with the rest of the text which is in dark brown. There is no indication that it was a faithful restoration. The note states moreover that “the different hands that corrected and annotated the manuscript over the centuries have not yet been definitively discerned; a certain number of corrections were undoubtedly made when the text was inked over.” In all the religious manuals the text is presented as a Fourth-century copy. One has to go to sources at the Vatican to discover that various hands may have altered the text centuries later.
One might reply that other texts may be used for comparison, but how does one choose between variations that change the meaning? It is a well-known fact that a very old scribe’s correction can lead to the definitive reproduction of the corrected text. We shall see further how a single word in a passage from John concerning the Paraclete radically alters its meaning and completely changes its sense when viewed from a theological point of view.
O. Culmann, in his book, The New Testament, writes the following on the subject of variations:
“Sometimes the latter are the result of inadvertent flaws: the copier misses a word out, or conversely writes it twice, or a whole section of a sentence is carelessly omitted because in the manuscript to be copied it appeared between two identical words. Sometimes it is a matter of deliberate corrections, either the copier has taken the liberty of correcting the text according to his own ideas or he has tried to bring it into line with a parallel text in a more or less skilful attempt to reduce the number of discrepancies. As, little by little, the New Testament writings broke away from the rest of early Christian literature, and came to be regarded as Holy Scripture, the copiers became more and more hesitant about taking the same liberties as their predecessors: they thought they were copying the authentic text, but in fact, wrote down the variations. Finally, a copier sometimes wrote annotations in the margin to explain an obscure passage. The following copier, thinking that the sentence he found in the margin had been left out of the passage by his predecessor, thought it necessary to include the margin notes in the text. This process often made the new text even more obscure.”
The scribes of some manuscripts sometimes took exceedingly great liberties with the texts. This is the case of one of the most venerable manuscripts after the two referred to above, the Sixth-century Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis. The scribe probably noticed the difference between Luke’s and Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, so he put Matthew’s genealogy into his copy of Luke, but as the second contained fewer names than the first, he padded it out with extra names (without balancing them up).
Is it possible to say that the Latin translations, such as Saint Jerome’s Sixth century Vulgate, or older translations (Vetus Itala), or Syriac and Coptic translations are any more faithful than the basic Greek manuscripts? They might have been made from manuscripts older than the ones referred to above and subsequently lost to the present day. We just do not know.
It has been possible to group the bulk of these versions into families all bearing a certain number of common traits. According to O. Culmann, one can define:
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a so-called Syrian text, whose constitution could have led to the majority of the oldest Greek manuscripts; this text was widely disseminated throughout Europe from the Sixteenth century A.D. onwards thanks to printing. the specialists say that it is probably the worst text.
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a so-called Western text, with old Latin versions and the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis which is in both Greek and Latin; according to the Ecumenical Translation, one of its characteristics is a definite tendency to provide explanations, paraphrases, inaccurate data and ‘harmonizations’.
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the so-called Neutral text, containing the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, is said to have a fairly high level of purity; modern editions of the New Testament readily follow it, although it too has its flaws (Ecumenical Translation).
All that modern textual criticism can do in this respect is to try and reconstitute “a text which has the most likelihood of coming near to the original. In any case, there can be no hope of going back to the original text itself.” (Ecumenical Translation)
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Fri 13 Jumada Al Akhira 1444AH 6-1-2023AD at 6:37 pm #83006
HISTORY OF THE TEXTS
One would be mistaken in thinking that once the Gospels were written they constituted the basic Scriptures of the newly born Christianity and that people referred to them the same way they referred to the Old Testament. At that time, the foremost authority was the oral tradition as a vehicle for Jesus’s words and the teachings of the apostles. The first writings to circulate were Paul’s letters and they occupied a prevalent position long before the Gospels. They were, after all, written several decades earlier.
It has already been shown, that contrary to what certain commentators are still writing today, before 140 A.D. there was no witness to the knowledge that a collection of Gospel writings existed. It was not until circa 170 A.D. that the four Gospels acquired the status of canonic literature.
In the early days of Christianity, many writings on Jesus were in circulation. They were not subsequently retained as being worthy of authenticity and the Church ordered them to be hidden, hence their name ‘Apocrypha’. Some of the texts of these works have been well preserved because they “benefitted from the fact that they were generally valued”, to quote the Ecumenical Translation. The same was true for the Letter of Barnabas, but unfortunately, others were “more brutally thrust aside” and only fragments of them remain. They were considered to be the messengers of error and were removed from the sight of the faithful. Works such as the Gospels of the Nazarenes, the Gospels of the Hebrews and the Gospels of the Egyptians, known through quotations taken from the Fathers of the Church, were nevertheless fairly closely related to the canonic Gospels. The same holds good for Thomas’s Gospel and Barnabas’s Gospel.
Some of these apocryphal writings contain imaginary details, the product of popular fantasy. Authors of works on the Apocrypha also quote with obvious satisfaction passages which are literally ridiculous. Passages such as these are however to be found in all the Gospels. One has only to think of the imaginary description of events that Matthew claims took place at Jesus’s death. It is possible to find passages lacking seriousness in all the early writings of Christianity: One must be honest enough to admit this.
The abundance of literature concerning Jesus led the Church to make certain excisions while the latter was in the process of becoming organized. Perhaps a hundred Gospels were suppressed. Only four were retained and put on the official list of neo-Testament writings making up what is called the ‘Canon’.
In the middle of the Second century A.D., Marcion of Sinope put heavy pressure on the ecclesiastic authorities to take a stand on this. He was an ardent enemy of the Jews and at that time rejected the whole of the Old Testament and everything in writings produced after Jesus that seemed to him too close to the Old Testament or to come from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Marcion only acknowledged the value of Luke’s Gospel because he believed Luke to be the spokesman of Paul and his writings.
The Church declared Marcion a heretic and put into its canon all the Letters of Paul, but included the other Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They also added several other works such as the Acts of the Apostles. The official list nevertheless varies with time during the first centuries of Christianity. For a while, works that were later considered not to be valid (i.e. Apocrypha) figured in it, while other works contained in today’s New Testament Canon were excluded from it at this time. These hesitations lasted until the Councils of Hippo Regius in 393 and Carthage in 397. The four Gospels always figured in it, however.
One may join Father Boismard in regretting the disappearance of a vast quantity of literature declared apocryphal by the Church although it was of historical interest. The above author indeed gives it a place in his Synopsis of the Four Gospels alongside that of the official Gospels. He notes that these books still existed in libraries near the end of the Fourth century A.D.
This was the century that saw things put into serious order. The oldest manuscripts of the Gospels date from this period. Documents prior to this, i.e. papyri from the Third century A.D. and one possibly dating from the Second, only transmit fragments to us. The two oldest parchment manuscripts are Greek, Fourth century A.D. They are the Codex Vaticanus, preserved in the Vatican Library and whose place of discovery is unknown, and the Codex Sinaiticus, which was discovered on Mount Sinai and is now preserved in the British Museum, London. The second contains two apocryphal works.
According to the Ecumenical Translation, two hundred and fifty other known parchments exist throughout the world, the last of these being from the Eleventh century A.D. “Not all the copies of the New Testament that have come down to us are identical” however. “On the contrary, it is possible to distinguish differences of varying degrees of importance between them, but however important they may be, there is always a large number of them. Some of these only concern differences of grammatical detail, vocabulary or word order. Elsewhere, however, differences between manuscripts can be seen which affect the meaning of whole passages”. If one wishes to see the extent of textual differences, one only has to glance through the Novum Testamentum Graece.[Nestlé-Aland Pub. United Bible Societies, London, 1971] This work contains a so-called ‘middle-of-the-road’ Greek text. It is a text of synthesis with notes containing all the variations found in the different versions.
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Wed 18 Jumada Al Akhira 1444AH 11-1-2023AD at 11:01 pm #83002
The general outline that has been given here of the Gospels and which emerges from a critical examination of the texts tends to make one think of literature which is “disjointed, with a plan that lacks continuity” and “seemingly insuperable contradictions”. These are the terms used in the judgement passed on them by the commentators of the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible. It is important to refer to their authority because the consequences of an appraisal of this subject are extremely serious. It has already been seen how a few notions concerning the religious history of the time when the Gospels were written helped to make certain disconcerting aspects of this literature apparent to the thoughtful reader. It is necessary to continue, however, and ascertain what present-day works can tell us about the sources the Evangelists drew on when writing their texts. It is also interesting to see whether the history of the texts, once they were established, can help to explain certain aspects they present today.
The problem of sources was approached in a very simplistic fashion at the time of the Fathers of the Church. In the early centuries of Christianity, the only source available was the Gospel that the complete manuscripts provided first, i.e. Matthew’s Gospel. The problem of sources only concerned Mark and Luke because John constituted a quite separate case. Saint Augustine held that Mark, who appears second in the traditional order of presentation, had been inspired by Matthew and had summarized his work. He further considered that Luke, who comes third in the manuscripts, had used data from both; his prologue suggests this and has already been discussed.
The experts in exegesis at this period were as able as we are to estimate the degree of corroboration between the texts and find a large number of verses common to two or three Synoptics. Today, the commentators of the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible provide the following figures:
verses common to all three synoptics ————– 330 verses common to Mark and Matthew ———— 178 verses common to Mark and Luke —————-100 verses common to Matthew and Luke ———— 230
The verses unique to each of the first three Gospels are as follows: Matthew 330, Mark 53, and Luke 500.
From the Fathers of the Church until the end of the Eighteenth century A.D., one and a half millennia passed without any new problems being raised regarding the sources of the evangelists: people continued to follow tradition. It was not until modem times that it was realized, on the basis of these data, how each evangelist had taken material found in the others and compiled his own specific narration guided by his own personal views. A great weight was attached to the actual collection of material for the narration. It came from the oral traditions of the communities from which it originated on the one hand, and from a common written Aramaic source that has not been rediscovered on the other. This written source could have formed a compact mass or have been composed of many fragments of different narrations used by each evangelist to construct his own original work.
More intensive studies in circa the last hundred years have led to theories which are more detailed and in time will become even more complicated. The first of the modem theories is the so-called ‘Holtzmann Two Sources Theory’, (1863). O. Culmann and the Ecumenical Translation explain that, according to this theory, Matthew and Luke may have been inspired by Mark on the one hand and on the other by a common document which has since been lost. The first two moreover each had his own sources. This leads to the following diagram: Mark
Common Document
M. E. BOISMARD SYNOPSIS OF THE FOUR GOSPELS [1] GENERAL DIAGRAM (1) Synopse des quatre Evangiles
Culmann criticises the above on the following points:
1. Mark’s work, used by both Luke and Matthew, was probably not the author’s Gospel but an earlier version.
2. The diagram does not lay enough emphasis on the oral tradition. This appears to be of paramount importance because it alone preserved Jesus’s words and the descriptions of his mission during a period of thirty or forty years, as each of the Evangelists was only the spokesman for the Christian community which wrote down the oral tradition.
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Fri 4 Shaban 1444AH 24-2-2023AD at 1:00 am #83004
This is how it is possible to conclude that the Gospels we possess today are a reflection of what the early Christian communities knew of Jesus’s life and ministry. They also mirror their beliefs and theological ideas, of which the evangelists were the spokesmen.
The latest studies in textual criticism on the sources of the Gospels have clearly shown an even more complicated formation process of the texts. A book by Fathers Benoit and Boismard, both professors at the Biblical School of Jerusalem (1972-1973), called the Synopsis of the Four Gospels (Synopse des quatres Evangiles) stresses the evolution of the text in stages parallel to the evolution of the tradition. This implies the consequences set out by Father Benoit in his introduction to Father Boismard’s part of the work. He presents them in the following terms:
“(. . .) the wording and form of description that result from a long evolution of tradition are not as authentic as in the original. some readers of this work will perhaps be surprised or embarrassed to learn that certain of Jesus’s sayings, parables, or predictions of His destiny were not expressed in the way we read them today, but were altered and adapted by those who transmitted them to us. This may come as a source of amazement and even scandal to those not used to this kind of historical investigation.”
The alterations and adaptations to the texts made by those transmitting them to us were done in a way that Father Boismard explains by means of a highly complex diagram. It is a development of the so-called ‘Two Sources Theory’, and is the product of examination and comparison of the texts which it is not possible to summarize here. Those readers who are interested in obtaining further details should consult the original work published by Les Editions du Cerf, Paris.
Four basic documents-A, B, C and Q-represent the original sources of the Gospels (see general diagram). Page 76.
Document A comes from a Judeo-Christian source. Matthew and Mark were inspired by it. Document B is a reinterpretation of document A, for use in Pagan-cum-Christian churches: all the evangelists were inspired by it except Matthew. Document C inspired Mark, Luke and John. Document Q constitutes the majority of sources common to Matthew and Luke; it is the , Common Document’ in the ‘Two Sources’ theory referred to earlier.
None of these basic documents led to the production of the definitive texts we know today. Between them and the final version lay the intermediate versions: Intermediate Matthew, Intermediate Mark, Intermediate Luke and Intermediate John. These four intermediate documents were to lead to the final versions of the four Gospels, as well as to inspire the final corresponding versions of other Gospels. One only has to consult the diagram to see the intricate relationships the author has revealed.
The results of this scriptural research are of great importance. They show how the Gospel texts not only have a history (to be discussed later) but also a ‘pre-history’, to use Father Boismard’s expression. What is meant is that before the final versions appeared, they underwent alterations at the Intermediate Document stage. Thus it is possible to explain, for example, how a well-known story from Jesus’s life, such as the miracle catch of fish, is shown in Luke to be an event that happened during His life, and in John to be one of His appearances after His Resurrection.
The conclusion to be drawn from the above is that when we read the Gospel, we can no longer be at all sure that we are reading Jesus’s word. Father Benoit addresses himself to the readers of the Gospel by warning them and giving them the following compensation: “If the reader is obliged in more than one case to give up the notion of hearing Jesus’s voice directly, he still hears the voice of the Church and he relies upon it as the divinely appointed interpreter of the Master who long ago spoke to us on earth and who now speaks to us in His glory”.
How can one reconcile this formal statement of the inauthenticity of certain texts with the phrase used in the dogmatic constitution on Divine Revelation by the Second Vatican Council assuring us to the contrary, i.e. the faithful transmission of Jesus’s words: “These four Gospels, which it (the Church) unhesitatingly confirms are historically authentic, faithfully transmit what Jesus, Son of God, actually did and taught during his life among men for their eternal salvation, until the day when he was taken up into the heavens”?
It is quite clear that the work of the Biblical School of Jerusalem flatly contradicts the Council’s declaration.
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