Some such people were induced to provide financial support for Tischendorf's journeys to other lands in Europe and the Middle East to locate manuscripts. By all counts, his most famous discovery involves one of the truly great manuscripts of the Bible still available, Codex Sinaiticus. The tale of its discovery is the stuff of legend, although we have the account direct from Tischendorf's own hand.
Tischendorf had made a journey to Egypt in 1844, when not yet thirty years of age, arriving on camelback eventually at the wilderness monastery of Saint Catherine. What happened there on May 24, 1844, is still best described in his own words:
It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the Convent of St Catherine, that I discovered the pearl of all my researches. In visiting the mona stery in the month of May 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian who was a man of information told me that two heaps of papers like these, mouldered by time, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities of the monastery allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty three sheets, all the more readily as they were designated for the fire. But I could not get them to yield up possession of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed had aroused their suspicions as to the value of the manuscript. I transcribed a page of the text of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and enjoined on the monks to take religious care of all such remains which might fall their way.21
Tischendorf attempted to retrieve the rest of this precious manuscript but could not persuade the monks to part with it. Some nine years later he made a return trip and could find no trace of it. Then in 1859 he set out once again, now under the patronage of Czar Alexander II of Russia, who had an interest in all things Christian, especially Christian antiquity. This time Tischendorf found no trace of the manuscript until the last day of his visit. Invited into the room of the convent's steward, he discussed with him the Septuagint (the Greek 120
Old Testament), and the steward told him, "I too have read a Septuagint." He proceeded to pull from the corner of his room a volume wrapped in a red cloth. Tischendorf continues:
I unrolled the cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas. Full of joy, which this time I had the self-command to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamber to look over more at leisure.12
Tischendorf immediately recognized the manuscript for what it was—the earliest surviving witness to the text of the New Testament: "the most precious Biblical treasure in existence—a document whose age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts which I had ever examined." After complicated and prolonged negotiations, in which Tischendorf not so subtly reminded the monks of his patron, the Czar of Russia, who would be overwhelmed with the gift of such a rare manuscript and would no doubt reciprocate by bestowing certain financial benefactions on the monastery, Tischendorf eventually was allowed to take the manuscript back to Leipzig, where at the expense of the Czar he prepared a lavish four-volume edition of it that appeared in 1862 on the one-thousandth anniversary of the founding of the Russian empire.25
After the Russian revolution, the new government, needing money and not being interested in manuscripts of the Bible, sold Codex Sinaiticus to the British Museum for 100,000; it is now part of the permanent collection of the British Library, prominently displayed in the British Library's manuscript room.
This was, of course, just one of Tischendorf's many contributions to the field of textual studies.24 Altogether he published twenty-two editions of early Christian texts, along with eight separate editions of the Greek New Testament, the eighth of which continues to this day to be a treasure trove of information concerning the attestation of Greek and versional evidence for this or that variant reading. His productivity as a scholar can be gauged by the bibliographical essay written on his behalf by a scholar named Caspar Rene Gregory: the list of Tischendorf's publications takes up eleven solid pages.25
Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort
More than anyone else from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is to two Cambridge scholars, Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892), that modern textual critics owe a debt of gratitude for developing methods of analysis that help us deal with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. Since their famous work of 1881, The New Testament in the Original Gree k, these have been the names that all scholars have had to contend with—in affirming their basic insights, or in tinkering with the details of their claims, or in setting up alternative approaches in view of Westcott and Hort's well-defined and compelling system of analysis. The strength of the analysis owes more than a little to the genius of Hort in particular.
Westcott and Hort's publication appeared in two volumes, one of which was an actual edition of the New Testament based on their twenty-eight years of joint labor in deciding which was the original text wherever variations appeared in the tradition; the other was an exposition of the critical principles they had followed in producing their work. The latter was written by Hort and represents an inordinately closely reasoned and compelling survey of the materials and methods available to scholars wanting to undertake the tasks of textual criticism. The writing is dense; not a word is wasted. The logic is compelling; not an angle has been overlooked. This is a great book, which in many ways is the classic in the field. I do not allow my graduate students to go through their studies without mastering it.
In some ways, the problems of the text of the New Testament absorbed the interests of Westcott and Hort for most of their publishing lives. Already as a twenty-three-year-old, Hort, who had been trained in the classics and was not at first aware of the textual situation of the New Testament, wrote in a letter to his friend John Ellerton:
I had no idea till the last few weeks of the importance of texts, having read so little Greek Testament, and dragged on with the villainous Textus Receptus.... So many alterations on good MS [manuscript] authority made things clear not in a vulgar, notional way, but by giving a deeper and fuller meaning.... Thinks of that vile Textus Receptus leaning entirely on late MSS [manuscripts]; it is a blessing there are such early ones.26
Only a couple of years later, Westcott and Hort had decided to edit a new edition of the New Testament. In another letter to Ellerton on April 19, 1853, Hort relates:
I have not seen anybody that I know except Westcott, whom ... I visited for a few hours. One result of our tal k I may as well tell you. He and I are going to edit a Greek text of the N. T. some two or three years hence, if possible. Lachmann and Tischendorf will supply rich materials, but not nearly enough.... Our object is to supply clergymen generally, schools, etc., with a portable Greek Testament, which shall not be disfigured with Byzantine [i.e., medieval] corruptions.17
Hort's sanguine expectation that this edition would not take long to produce is still in evidence in November of that year, when he indicates that he hopes Westcott and he can crank out their edition "in little more than a year."28 As soon as work began on the project, however, the hopes for a quick turnaround faded. Some nine years later Hort, in a letter written to bolster up Westcott, whose spirits were flagging with the prospect of what still lay ahead, urged: The wor k has to be done, and never can be done satisfactorily ... without vast labour, a fact of which hardly anybody in Europe except ourselves seems conscious. For a great mass of the readings, if we separate them in thought from the rest, the labour is who
lly disproportionate. But believing it to be absolutely impossible to draw a line between important and unimportant readings, I should hesitate to say the entire labour is disproportionate to the worth of fixing the entire text to the utmost extent now practicable. It would, I think, be utterly unpardonable for us to give up our task.29
They were not to give up the task, but it became more intricate and involved as time passed. In the end, it took the two Cambridge scholars twenty-eight years of almost constant work to produce their text, along with an Introduction that came from the pen of Hort.
The work was well worth it. The Greek text that Westcott and Hort produced is remarkably similar to the one still widely used by scholars today, more than a century later. It is not that no new manuscripts have been discovered, or that no theoretical advances have been made, or that no differences of opinion have emerged since Westcott and Hort's day. Yet, even with our advances in technology and methodology, even with the incomparably greater manuscript resources at our disposal, our Greek texts of today bear an uncanny resemblance to the Greek text of Westcott and Hort.
It would not serve my purpose here to enter a detailed discussion of the methodological advances that Westcott and Hort made in establishing the text of the Greek New Testament.30 The area in which their work has perhaps proved most significant is in the grouping of manuscripts. Since Bengel had first recognized that manuscripts could be gathered together in "family" groupings (somewhat like drawing up genealogies of family members), scholars had attempted to isolate various groups of witnesses into families. Westcott and Hort were very much involved in this endeavor as well. Their view of the matter was based on the principle that manuscripts belong in the same family line whenever they agree with one another in their wording. That is, if two manuscripts have the same wording of a verse, it must be because the two manuscripts ultimately go back to the same source—either the original manuscript or a copy of it. As the principle is sometimes stated, Identity of reading implies identity of origin.
One can then establish family groups based on textual agreements among the various surviving manuscripts. For Westcott and Hort there were four major families of witnesses: (1) the Syrian text (what other scholars have called the Byzantine text), which comprises most of the late medieval manuscripts; these are numerous but not particularly close in wording to the original text; (2) the Western text, made up of manuscripts that could be dated very early—the archetypes must have been around sometime in the second century at the latest; these manuscripts, however, embody the wild copying practices of scribes in that period before the transcription of texts had become the business of professionals; (3) the Alexandrian text, which was derived from Alexandria, where the scribes were trained and careful but occasionally altered their texts to make them grammatically and stylistically more acceptable, thereby changing the wording of the originals; and (4) the Neutral text, which consisted of manuscripts that had not undergone any serious change or revision in the course of their transmission but represented most accurately the texts of the originals.
The two leading witnesses of this Neutral text, in Westcott and Hort's opinion, were Codex Sinaiticus (the manuscript discovered by Tischendorf) and, even more so, Codex Vaticanus, discovered in the Vatican library. These were the two oldest manuscripts available to Westcott and Hort, and in their judgment they were far superior to any other manuscripts, because they represented the so-called Neutral text.
Many things have changed in nomenclature since Westcott and Hort's day: scholars no longer talk about a Neutral text, and most realize that Western text is a misnomer, since wild copying practices were found in the East as well as in the West. Moreover, Westcott and
Hort's system has been overhauled by subsequent scholars. Most modern scholars, for example, think that the Neutral and Alexandrian texts are the same: it is just that some manuscripts are better representatives of this text than are others. Then, too, significant manuscript discoveries, especially discoveries of papyri, have been made since their day.31 Even so, Westcott and Hort's basic methodology continues to play a role for scholars trying to decide where in our surviving manuscripts we have later alterations and where we can find the earliest stage of the text.
As we will see in the next chapter, this basic methodology is relatively simple to understand, once it is laid out clearly. Applying it to textual problems can be interesting and even entertaining, as we work to see which variant readings in our manuscripts represent the words of the text as produced by their authors and which represent changes made by later scribes.
< An eleventh-century image of Christ's cruxification, with the symbolic representations of the Gospel writers in the four corners: an angel (Matthew), an eagle (John), a lion (Mark), and a bull (Luke).>
CHAPTER 5 Originals That Matter
In this chapter we will examine the methods that scholars have devised to identify the "original" form of the text (or at least the "oldest attainable" form) and the form of the text that represents a later scribal alteration. After laying out these methods, I will illustrate how they can be used by focusing on three textual variants found in our manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I have chosen these three because each of them is critical for interpreting the book it is in; what is more, none of these variant readings is reflected in most of our modern English translations of the New Testament. That is to say, in my judgment the translations available to most English readers are based on the wrong text, and having the wrong text makes a real difference for the interpretation of these books.
First, however, we should consider the methods scholars have developed for making decisions about which textual readings are original and which represent later changes made by scribes. As we will see, establishing the earliest form of the text is not always a simple matter; it can be a demanding exercise.
Modern Methods of Textual Criticism
The majority of textual critics today would call themselves rational eclecticists when it comes to making decisions about the oldest form of the text. This means that they "choose" (the root meaning of eclectic) from among a variety of textual readings the one that best represents the oldest form of the text, using a range of (rational) textual arguments. These arguments are based on evidence that is usually classified as either external or internal in nature.1
External Evidence
Arguments based on external evidence have to do with the surviving manuscript support for one reading or another. Which manuscripts attest the reading? Are those manuscripts reliable? Why are they reliable or not reliable?
In thinking about the manuscripts supporting one textual variant over another, one might be tempted simply to count noses, so to speak, in order to see which variant reading is found in the most surviving witnesses. Most scholars today, however, are not at all convinced that the majority of manuscripts necessarily provide the best available text. The reason for this is easy to explain by way of an illustration.
Suppose that after the original manuscript of a text was produced, two copies were made of it, which we may call A and B. These two copies, of course, will differ from each other in some ways—possibly major and probably minor. Now suppose that A was copied by one other scribe, but B was copied by fifty scribes. Then the original manuscript, along with copies A and B, were lost, so that all that remains in the textual tradition are the fifty-one second-generation copies, one made from A and fifty made from B. If a reading found in the fifty manuscripts (from B) differs from a reading found in the one (from A), is the former necessarily more likely to be the original reading? No, not at all—even though by counting noses, it is found in fifty times as many witnesses. In fact, the ultimate difference in support for that reading is not fifty manuscripts to one. It is a difference of one to one (A against B). The mere question of numbers of manuscripts supporting one reading over another, therefore, is not particularly germane to the question of which reading in our s
urviving manuscripts represents the original (or oldest) form of the text.2
Scholars are by and large convinced, therefore, that other considerations are far more important in determining which reading is best considered the oldest form of the text. One other consideration is the age of the manuscripts that support a reading. It is far more likely that the oldest form of the text will be found in the oldest surviving manuscripts—on the premise that the text gets changed more frequently with the passing of time. This is not to say that one can blindly follow the oldest manuscripts in every instance, of course. This is for two reasons, the one a matter of logic and the other a matter of history. In terms of logic, suppose a manuscript of the fifth century has one reading, but a manuscript of the eighth century has a different one. Is the reading found in the fifth-century manuscript necessarily the older form of the text? No, not necessarily. What if the fifth-century manuscript had been produced from a copy of the fourth century, but the eighth-century manuscript had been produced from one of the third century? In that case, the eighth-century manuscript would preserve the older reading.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Page 13