Excised from another thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by LEMONZEST
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.