Excised from another thread:

I thought perhaps someone is interested in how this looks in practice. So here are a few scans:

This is a page of the Nestle-Aland 27th edition. In the debate you'll hear that referenced a couple of times as NA 27.



Above the text, below what's called the textual apparatus. All the little symbols you can see in the text refer to differences in other manuscripts. To decifer those, you'll get a cheat sheet that decifers the meaning of the symbols as well as what abbreviation refers to which textual witnesses.

So, just taking the heading: What the NA 27 has as the text is "kata markon" - "according to mark". In the Apparatus you find "euangellion kata markon" - gospel according to mark; and after it you find the abbreviations for the manuscripts; then "to kata markon agion euangellion" - the gospel according to the holy mark; then txt - here you have the which manuscripts have the version of NA 27 - kata markon.

So just in the headline we would have six of the differences Ehrman is talking about. If I had scanned Luke, there you'd have an additional variant "arché tou kata loukan agiou euangeliou" - the beginning of the gospel accoding to the holy luke". Mathew has yet another version: "arché syn theo tou kata matthaion euangeliou" - the beginning, with god, of the gospel according to mathew.

None of these difference would be of the sort that "matter". Essentially any scribe could think of any ol' thing to preface his gospel with - it doesn't change a thing. On top of that: greek (and latin, for example) have a very clear grammar that makes relations of words clear by tense, casus etc. So it does not matter at all in which order you put words (very much unlike english). However, all of these would be counted as differences. So it's easy to see how you get a mindblowingly large number of textual differences quite quickly.

In the first line of V1 at the end, you see uyiou theou - son of god. Note the symbols, look in the apparatus and you find uyiou tou thou - son of the god. Another one of those that don't matter. To each of these the apparatus tells you which manuscripts have them and why/why not the main text accepts it as primary/secondary reading.

Decifering this is pretty much an art in itself and I really have no deeper clue about any of this (as it's NT, ldo), but if I were an NT scholar, anytime I'd consult the NT at all it would be through this text, and everytime I'd find a fly spot in the text, I'd have to check the apparatus.

Someone in the audience asked how this would relate to the OT and White (I think) said somewhat sweepingly that the situation with the OT is "completely different". Well, he's right. Here's a scan of Lam 1,1-9 of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, BHS in short, the hebrew text I use for my work:



The basic outline is the same: Textual apparatus below, text itself above. However, much less apparatus. The reason is simple: We have far fewer textual witnesses and they are from far far later. The basic idea is the same, however. In V6 (left page) you can see min-bat-zion in the text. In the apparatus you find for V6 mibat - i.o.w. elision of one "n" (think "y'all" instead of you all). And so on.

Thanks for starting this thread. Hopefully it can be a kind of reference point in the future. For example in other threads when textual criticism and context comes up people can be directed back here to gain some insight. Well I guess we can see how it goes...

I think White's point in the debate was that the OT was always controlled by a few people. The people of Israel were guardians of the text and transmission process. Therefore the different copies all remained pretty similar. Conversely, the NT was widely disseminated and copied down by many different people groups.

Great post. I have a question if you would care to comment. I've heard that during Old Testament times there were specialists in Israel dedicated to copying the text - that it was a very detailed, formulated and laborious process and that there were quality controls that guaranteed the texts were copied correctly, such as counting the number of letters to midway in a book, and if the copy didn't agree with the main text the copy was ditched. Also, that the main copy was generally destroyed after the copy was verified so that there would not be a lot of old, degrading copies lying around. Appreciate any insight you can give on these Hebrew practices, thanks.

This is basically right up to this date. Jews have elaborate ways of making sure that scribal errors don't happen (or only to a very limited degree). Even more so, they would faithfully copy obvious errors in the manuscripts. There are words where we really don't have any clue what they are supposed to mean - yet they are more or less unchanged (in their apparent wrongness) from very early on. Every synagoge has a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genizah, where old books, ritual instruments etc. are being stashed and finally, they'd be buried. Since copies of the torah had to be of parchment, the price alone would guarantee that you don't have many extant copies lying around.

Regarding the texts as such, the process of NT and OT is basically inverted: With the NT we have a text that very soon reached "canonical status" (i.e. was considered to be unchangeable) and errors/variants etc. wer primarily the result of the process of transmission. With the OT, it took a considerable time before the text reached canonical status, yet once it did, the transmission was with very few errors.

That is why the focus is different for NT and OT studies. NT studies deal primarily with text criticism - Which reading is the one of the "real" text? - while OT studies deal with literary criticism - Which parts of the text are the oldest, which are later additions?