Subject: Re: tc-list History of transmission

From: Jim West <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 17:37:34 -0500

At 01:26 PM 1/24/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Jim West wrote:
>
>> On this one would do well to turn to Bart Ehrman's "Orthodox Corruption of
>> Scripture"- an excellent book for anyone even remotely interested in
things TC.
>
>Jim,
>
>Could you give bibliographical information on this? It sounds
>intriguing.
>

Bart Ehrman- "The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture", Oxford University
Press, 1996 (?).

>Regards,
>Bernard Taylor
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
Adjunct Professor of Bible
Quartz Hill School of Theology

[email-masked]

---

From: "Roderic L. Mullen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 17:51:07 -0500

In re the pericope of the woman caught in adultery, I've been reading a copy
of D. C. Parker's *LIVING TEXT OF THE GOSPELS* (just out with Cambridge
U.PR.) for a review.  Parker devotes a very interesting chapter to the
textual ins and outs of the passage.  --Rod Mullen

At 03:56 PM 1/24/98 -0600, you wrote:
>I have to admit Ehrman's influance on my thoughts.  
>
>My premise is this: scribes did not intentionally corrupt the text.  They
>either "corrected" it or "supplemented" it.  I think that what was changed
>and when is valuable information that we should preserve and pass on to the
>other fields of study.  From the other fields we can learn why the change
>was considered to be an improvement. These insights in turn may help us
>recognize other passages that may have been altered for simular reasons.
>
>For example, some scribes added the story of the woman caught in adultery
>to John's Gospel.  We know the aproximate age of the oldest manuscripts to
>contain it.  We know from patristic evidence that the story circulated in
>slightly different forms before landing between chapters seven and eight of
>John.  Now we can provide that information to church historians and
>theologians.  Perhaps they can provide us with insights as to why it may
>have been added. 
>
>Studying the changes in the Vulgate Manuscripts potentially yields a
>harvest of information on the Western Church and the Latin language, The
>Byzantine Manuscripts the same for the Eastern Church and Greek.  Neither
>the Vulgate or the Byzantine text is likely to lead us to the original
>text, but they are both worth studying for their own merits.
>