I'm currently about halfway through the historian Robin Lane Fox' fascinating book The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible which paints a rather different picture about the historical consistency of the Bible, and rather supports anton_p_nym's comment about it having been rewritten by committee, or at least variously revised by a succession of different early Christians.
On those issues I guess the question is whether Fox's book is in line with mainstream scholarship or not. [edit] .. and what is *actualy* claimed by Fox (particularly re: the NT). At least with Bart Ehrman people seem to think he's said things that he hasn't actually said, he just sort of hinted in those directions. I found the Ehrman / Williams discussion on the Unbelievable radio program to be quite instructive. [/edit]
I've not read Fox's book myself, but from what I've heard it doesn't support the contention that the NT was rewritten (which is what was claimed here). Can you quote me where it says that?
I'm only about halfway through Lane Fox' book and it's something that I've been reading sporadically for the past couple of months, so I'm not confident that I can entirely accurately summarise what he says. Also please bear in mind that I'm a pure mathematician and devout agnostic who's idly interested in this stuff, rather than someone who has studied it all in detail because it has some central importance to my life.
As for the rewriting, though, he certainly does give examples of both actual revisions and differences between early texts, although he makes the point (as do I) that none of this need cause problems for the core of the Christian faith or those who follow it, just for those who claim that the Bible is the unerring and eternally unchanging word of God, and who base important bits of doctrine on the literal truth and accuracy of the surviving texts.
He gives two particular examples of influential second-century Christians who edited the scriptures: Marcion of Sinope, who went off down a rather Gnostic route, cutting bits out of Luke's Gospel and editing ten of Paul's letters to support his theology, and Tatian the Assyrian, who combined the four canonical gospels into one (the Diatesseron), again deleting and modifying bits he didn't agree with. Marcion was denounced as a heretic, although his followers retained some influence for a while after his death, while the Diatesseron of Tatian was the standard text in Eastern Christianity for some time. Lane Fox makes the point that if this sort of thing was routinely going on, then a gap of even as little as a hundred years between the events themselves and the oldest surviving texts is potentially disastrous: If the earliest extant written fragments date from the middle of the second century, then we have no way of knowing which bits have been altered during the previous hundred years since the original events themselves.
Lane Fox makes the point that if this sort of thing was routinely going on, then a gap of even as little as a hundred years between the events themselves and the oldest surviving texts is potentially disastrous: If the earliest extant written fragments date from the middle of the second century, then we have no way of knowing which bits have been altered during the previous hundred years since the original events themselves One question would be whether this was common place or not, but another would be whether even if it were that the effect would be as he claims.
I think the answer to the first question is that it wasn't common, although scribes did make certain types of copying errors and would on very rare occasion alter a reading or add a a new verse (usually to make a reading 'easier'). I don't have appropriate quotes to hand, but I believe this is the mainstream scholarly position.
With respect to the second question, I don't think that sort of scenario would corrupt the copies we have today. People often think about the Bible being corrupted in this way as if it were a big game of chinese whispers, but of course the Bible wasn't transmitted like that. There isn't a series of released copies leading from the autographs to us, rather there's a tree spanning out from the autographs, of which certain nodes on the tree remain (or at least have been discovered) today. It doesn't matter whether the Bible was changed before year X when we first have a copy of some part of it's text, what matters is whether all copies that existed in the world at point X (of which later child positions on the tree exist today) were similarly changed.
The only way this could really happen would be extremely early corruption (e.g. the immediate copies were corrupted) but that is unlikely for obvious reasons (not just that the copies circulated in the lifetime of the authors), or if there were a central authority that controlled all the copies in the world who could impose some textual change on all existing / future copies. Although that sort of thinking might make for a good Dan Brown novel it doesn't match what actually happened - there was no central authority which could control all the texts in the world, the church was not as we think of the Vatican now, but a disparate group of people spread throughout the Roman empire, and similarly the manuscripts that exist today are from throughout the Roman world.
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I've not read Fox's book myself, but from what I've heard it doesn't support the contention that the NT was rewritten (which is what was claimed here). Can you quote me where it says that?
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As for the rewriting, though, he certainly does give examples of both actual revisions and differences between early texts, although he makes the point (as do I) that none of this need cause problems for the core of the Christian faith or those who follow it, just for those who claim that the Bible is the unerring and eternally unchanging word of God, and who base important bits of doctrine on the literal truth and accuracy of the surviving texts.
He gives two particular examples of influential second-century Christians who edited the scriptures: Marcion of Sinope, who went off down a rather Gnostic route, cutting bits out of Luke's Gospel and editing ten of Paul's letters to support his theology, and Tatian the Assyrian, who combined the four canonical gospels into one (the Diatesseron), again deleting and modifying bits he didn't agree with. Marcion was denounced as a heretic, although his followers retained some influence for a while after his death, while the Diatesseron of Tatian was the standard text in Eastern Christianity for some time. Lane Fox makes the point that if this sort of thing was routinely going on, then a gap of even as little as a hundred years between the events themselves and the oldest surviving texts is potentially disastrous: If the earliest extant written fragments date from the middle of the second century, then we have no way of knowing which bits have been altered during the previous hundred years since the original events themselves.
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One question would be whether this was common place or not, but another would be whether even if it were that the effect would be as he claims.
I think the answer to the first question is that it wasn't common, although scribes did make certain types of copying errors and would on very rare occasion alter a reading or add a a new verse (usually to make a reading 'easier'). I don't have appropriate quotes to hand, but I believe this is the mainstream scholarly position.
With respect to the second question, I don't think that sort of scenario would corrupt the copies we have today. People often think about the Bible being corrupted in this way as if it were a big game of chinese whispers, but of course the Bible wasn't transmitted like that. There isn't a series of released copies leading from the autographs to us, rather there's a tree spanning out from the autographs, of which certain nodes on the tree remain (or at least have been discovered) today. It doesn't matter whether the Bible was changed before year X when we first have a copy of some part of it's text, what matters is whether all copies that existed in the world at point X (of which later child positions on the tree exist today) were similarly changed.
The only way this could really happen would be extremely early corruption (e.g. the immediate copies were corrupted) but that is unlikely for obvious reasons (not just that the copies circulated in the lifetime of the authors), or if there were a central authority that controlled all the copies in the world who could impose some textual change on all existing / future copies. Although that sort of thinking might make for a good Dan Brown novel it doesn't match what actually happened - there was no central authority which could control all the texts in the world, the church was not as we think of the Vatican now, but a disparate group of people spread throughout the Roman empire, and similarly the manuscripts that exist today are from throughout the Roman world.
If when you've finished Fox's book you're planning to read something with an alternate perspective I'd recommend (the much much lighter) The New Testament Documents: Are they reliable?.