Subject: Re: tc-list History of transmission

From: "Huey Bahr" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 15:56:06 -0600

>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.

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.

---

From: Matthew Johnson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 19:22:26 -0800 (PST)

On Sat, 24 Jan 1998, Huey Bahr wrote:

[snip]
> text, but they are both worth studying for their own merits.

Actually, the Vulgate has surprising links with what could be the
original text.  This is because the Vulgate didn't really take over as
the standard until several centuries after it was written.  In the
meantime, people continued to copy the Old Latin version, even mixing
it with the Vulgate.

Now the Old Latin, although it has its own text types (African,
Spanish, etc), is in turn closely related to the 'Western' text-type.
I expect there are few subscribers to this list who doubt the value of
the 'Western' type in the search for original readings.

Besides, much of the New Testament, even in Jerome's Vulgate, was
copied almost unmodified from the Old Latin.  Perhaps the Pope was
putting pressure on Jerome to finish.

Matthew Johnson
Waiting for the blessed hope and the appearance of the glory of our 
great God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Ti 2:13).