Scribes and their "authentic" copies

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

To date, scientists know more than 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. Absolutely all of these manuscripts are not the author's originals. These are copies full of errors and inaccuracies, distorting the meaning and hindering the correct understanding of the essence.

The error came out

There is an old English anecdote about scribal monks. To my great chagrin, it is impossible to adequately translate the essence while preserving the play on words. I am telling you with explanations.

A young monk once came to his father-abbot and said:

- Father, why do we rewrite our sacred books every time from a previous copy? After all, if a mistake has crept into it, the brothers will repeat it over and over again! Isn't it wiser to copy the text from the most ancient manuscripts?

The abbot of the monastery weighed these words and came to the conclusion that the monk was right. Taking a candle, he retired to the library to check the latest copies of Scripture against the oldest tome in the monastery. An hour later, the monks heard his terrifying screams and ran to see what had happened.

The Father Superior cried and shouted loudly, beating his head on the table and repeating:

- Not "celibate", but "celebrate"!..

(Not "celibacy" - a vow of celibacy, but "celebrate" *!)

The funny thing about this anecdote is that it is amazingly close to the truth.

In the middle of the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg published the first printed edition of the Latin Bible (this Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, was created by St. Jerome in the 4th century).

Everything - absolutely everything! - the texts of the Holy Scriptures circulated in the conversion of Christians for almost 14 centuries before that were handwritten (however, the practice of manual copying did not disappear with the advent of printing and for some time still existed in parallel with it).

This means that each copy of the Bible was rewritten manually from some previous text, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the source was not the author's original, but another copy, taken in turn from an even earlier copy.

When copying manually, distortions of the text inevitably occurred - missing words or letters, misspellings, errors. This was due to the scribe's inattention, fatigue, poor lighting, illegible handwriting in the original manuscript, and even a lack of literacy. Sometimes the scribe took notes in the margins as part of the text and rewrote them, adding to his work. Sometimes the source text was read aloud, and the scribes wrote it down - this workflow was more convenient if several copies had to be made at once. Tell me honestly - who has never made a mistake on a dictation?..

In some cases, the scribe might have made deliberate changes, for example, by considering that a word in the original text was misspelled and “correcting” it.

And all these errors and mistakes, all the results of inattention and carelessness to the text migrated to the next copy of the Holy Scriptures, becoming, in fact, a part of it!

In addition, you need to remember who exactly copied the books. After all, the scribal monks, who could at a stretch be called "professionals", appeared relatively late. For the first few centuries, Christian texts were copied by random people. Some of them were very literate and well versed in reading and writing. But there were also those who could only mechanically copy the text letter by letter, not even understanding the meaning of the written words. After all, most of the early Christians came from the poorest (and, as a result, the most uneducated) sections of the population. This means that even the earliest copies of the texts of the New Testament must have been replete with inaccuracies and errors. Let us not forget that these texts did not immediately acquire the status of sacred, and the first scribes treated them quite freely, supplementing and reshaping the narrative in accordance with their religious beliefs.

We cannot reproach these people for distorting the text - they did what they could, and probably did their best to work. But this was definitely not enough to keep the original copyright texts unchanged.

Of course, this was well known to everyone who dealt with books. In some texts there are even warnings to future scribes - for example, the author of the Apocalypse threatens that anyone who adds too much to the text will be rewarded with ulcers, and whoever subtracts from the text will lose “participation in the book of life and in the holy city” (Rev. 22: 18-19).

Even the goat understands that all these threats were useless. Year after year, century after century, errors in manuscripts have accumulated and accumulated. They could have been corrected by comparing the text with the oldest manuscripts - but the oldest manuscripts available to scribes, of course, were also inaccurate copies. Moreover, in a world where the book itself was a rarity, getting access to at least one copy of the text was already a luxury - there is no time to find out the antiquity and accuracy of the text!

Even worse, until the beginning of the 18th century, no one thought about how serious such changes in the texts could be. In 1707, the work of the English scholar John Mill was published, who analyzed about a hundred Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (as you remember, it was in Greek that the New Testament was originally written). Mill found more than 30,000 (in words: thirty thousand!) Discrepancies in these manuscripts - an average of 300 for each manuscript! Moreover, this list includes not all, but only important distortions and obvious errors.

What follows from this?

Nothing special. Simply, when reading the text of the Bible (and the New Testament in particular), you need to understand that you are reading words that have only a distant relationship to the original, authentic text.

Many words in the text that have come down to us are confused, many are missed or distorted, due to which the meaning of whole phrases changes (or even completely lost!). The scribes added a lot "on their own", violating the logic and consistency of the author's text and introducing new meanings.

Here are just a few examples.

The Greek words “redeemed” (λύσαντι) and “washed” (λούσαντα) are homophones, they sound identical, but are spelled differently. It is not surprising that once some inattentive scribe, apparently working under dictation, confused these words. The manuscript with an error became the basis for subsequent copies - and this error was replicated until it got into printed books, which finally approved it as the “correct” version of the text: “… to him who loved us and washed us from our sins …” (Rev. 1: 5) instead of "delivering us." In the end, this error was included in the Russian Synodal translation.

Do you think this is an insignificant trifle? These are flowers!

One of the first printed editions of the Greek text of the New Testament was undertaken by the famous Dutch scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam in the early 16th century. Preparing his text for publication, Erasmus was in a hurry (he wanted to get ahead of other authors). Therefore, in order to save time, he did not do any serious critical work on the Greek text. He had all the texts of the New Testament in a single copy - this copy (created in the XII century) became the basis for publication.

When it came to the Apocalypse, it turned out that the book was missing the last page with the Greek text. Do you think Erasmus went to the library and found what was missing? No matter how it is! Libraries for weaklings. Our scientist, without any hesitation, simply took the Latin version of the Bible (Vulgate) and … translated the text from there.

The result was a book based on the random Greek manuscripts that Erasmus had at his disposal, and on top of that, with his own addition to the Revelation of John!

But the story did not end there. After the book was published, it turned out that it was missing a fragment that was extremely important for believers. This small piece, which includes only a few words, is of great importance: on it (practically on it alone) the whole statement about the trinity of God is based. The phrase is so important that it even received its own name, accepted among theologians and scientists: "Comma Johanneum", or "John's Insertion". It sounds like this: "For three testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one."

This fragment should be (or, on the contrary, should not - depending on whether you consider it the original text or a late addition) in the first epistle of John (5: 7). The Greek manuscript used by Erasmus did not contain this fragment, while it was in the Vulgate (and the Vulgate has been the basis of worship throughout the Western world for a thousand years). Of course, the church authorities were outraged: was this an attempt on holy words? Is it not unbending the braces?..

Erasmus of Rotterdam, in response to the accusations, only shrugged his shoulders and said:

- If you show me the Greek text, where such words are, I will include them in the next edition.

It is easy to see how quickly the desired Greek manuscript was found. It was made specifically for such a case and presented to the scientist - he had to keep his word and really write the fragment into the text. Since the second edition of the Greek New Testament, the declaration of the divine trinity has been present in it, although it is not found in any earlier Greek text.

Do you think this is nonsense?

Published by Erasmus of Rotterdam, the New Testament has gone through many reprints. About a hundred years later, a tome appeared, the publishers of which did not hesitate to declare that the text in it was "accepted by all and does not contain anything erroneous." Since that time, the proud title of "Textus receptus", that is, "generally accepted text", has been assigned to the text of Erasmus - and, as a result, this version of the New Testament has become the most widespread.

It is on it that many translations into other languages are based - for example, the King James Bible (17th century), which is popular in English-speaking countries.

At the beginning of the 19th century, there was talk of a new translation of the Bible into Russian. And guess what text was taken as a basis for the translation of the New Testament?..

Right. It was the Textus receptus.

Summarize.

The Russian Synodal Translation of the New Testament - all four Gospels, Acts and other books - is based on the medieval publication of the Greek text edited by Erasmus of Rotterdam.

This publication, in turn, is based on a random 12th century manuscript, and at the request of the Church, the "John's Insertion" was included in it, which is absent in the original.

As for the Apocalypse, the Russian text of his last poems is a translation from the Greek text, which Erasmus translated from the Latin text of the Vulgate, which St. Jerome translated from the Greek text in the 4th century - and this text, no doubt, was also a copy of an earlier list. Are you confused yet?..

I only talked about two cases of text distortion.

300 years ago, John Mill found 30,000 variations in one hundred Greek manuscripts.

Today, scientists know more than 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, written in Greek (and this is only in Greek!). Absolutely all of these manuscripts are not the author's originals. These are copies full of errors and inaccuracies, distorting the meaning and hindering the correct understanding of the essence.

The number of discrepancies in these manuscripts, according to various estimates, is from 200 to 400 thousand.

By the way, the complete Greek text of the New Testament includes only about 146 thousand words.

Therefore, there are more mistakes in the New Testament than there are words in it.

I have everything, comrades.

* In addition to the anecdote. As the scientist Google suggests, on rare occasions the word celebrate can mean "to send a church service."I leave it up to you to decide which value is preferable in this case.