Misquoting Jesus - Chapter 2

Part of a continuing series of reactions to the Mind on Fire reading group's reaction to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. You can also read my entries on the Introduction and Chapter 1.

The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings


The general theme of the chapter is that Christian writings were painstakingly hand-copied and re-copied by non-professionals early in Christian history, then by more professional groups later on. And in all cases, errors occurred, sometimes mistaken ones and sometimes deliberate ones. In fact, the errors were so common that authors themselves referenced the potential, and scholars wrote about the frustration of having their studies thwarted by a text which was clearly rife with errors. Interesting to me to read this discussion and really sit to think about it. I mean, in modern West, we're fairly literate, but we probably haven't had to undertake the task of hand-copying a book. The task is quite daunting to think about. I just hand-copied my math homework earlier this week and kept making mistakes doing that. And it took a lot of time. And was generally not fun. I just can't imagine doing it.

Interesting point made about scriptuo continua, copyingatextwithoutspacingorpunctuationwhatapainintheassthatmustbetoreadandcopydefinitepainintheass. This was probably a result of the previous chapter's discussion of what "literate" really meant at the time. Some of the literate class could recognize letters, but not syllables. Could write symbols, but not spell.

Another interesting point is the type of error made by a person who was making a copy for personal use or for their community's use. These people might not have had the literacy issues previously mentioned, but might have had agendas in the changes they made, much less of an issue when the copying was being done by an impartial professional. Indeed, professional scribes might make a different kind of change to the text, namely fixing an error which they believed had crept into the source copy!

Ehrman muddies the water even more by pointing out that quite often the source material might have been written by a secretary taking dictation. And like modern day dictation, the secretary might have been given a broad outline of material to cover as opposed to a word for word dictation. In fact, in my mind, this is much more likely than the word for word dictation, because of the time-consuming nature of doing so. I wonder if it might even have been easier to rely on an assistant to do that due to the high level of training one would need to have to assist someone at that specific task. The secretary might have been one of the highest educated people around. Ehrman then points out that the secretary might have made multiple copies of the writing to send to multiple cities in a region, possibly making mistakes in doing so.
The meaning of the word autograph (original copy) in this case is very muddied: Which copy was the original? Did it necessarily even reflect the original intent of the person giving dictation?! I can imagine a situation where the person giving dictation says one thing, and the transcriber writes something different, unnoticed by the originator of the thought (or noticed but perhaps the 'author' like the change better than his own words). Actually I think that's a major plot point in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.

The last few sections describe the problems which scholars come across when trying to reconstruct original texts, namely sections which clearly don't seem to match the text they're included with. Sometimes that means that the vocabulary doesn't match. Sometimes they have older copies of text without the included passages. I'll mention the most famous passage, The Woman Taken in Adultery in John 7:53-8:12 ("Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her") [by the way, I originally typed "one who is without son among you"]. Ehrman writes:

Despite the brilliance of the story, its captivating quality, and its inherent intrigue, there is on other enormous problem that it poses. As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes.
[..]
Here I can simply point out a few basic facts that have proved convincing to nearly all scholars of every persuasion: the story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. the conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

Again, I have to be very careful in my state of mind when reading this information, for I've always assumed that this type of mistake exists in the Bible, but to have a scholar confirm it feels a little like someone telling me something I very much want to hear. I'm very interested in the future sections which promise more description of the evidence. Also worth pointing out that this information is traceable back to the sources which Ehrman is making his judgements on.

It was a nice, tight chapter which got down to business, made it's points, and finished. Would read again.