Interesting Links for 3-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• The joy of making model aircraft
  (tags: toys funny)
• UN defends human right to WikiLeaked info.
  (tags: wikileaks un)
• What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011 if 1977 copyright laws were still in effect.
  (tags: copyright law culture publicdomain publishing)
• The New Year's resolutions of various tech companies. I love Apple's.
  (tags: technology funny)
• New clues uncover how 'starvation hormone' connects insulin, fat levels and cancer.
  (tags: hormones health fat insulin diabetes)
• Why Star Wars is not Entertainment (although it sure as hell entertained me).
  (tags: scifi sf starwars movies)
• Women working in technology discuss whether they would recommend the profession to other women.
  (tags: career feminism work computers technology)
• The Female Character Flowchart
  (tags: feminism)
• Bill Sienkiewicz speaks about Big Numbers #3
  (tags: BillSienkiewicz alanmoore comics)
• Good Lord, government ministers want stable house prices. Altogether too sensble.
  (tags: housing uk government)
• Microsoft not allowing NES emulator on WP7 phones - this kind of thing is why I won't be getting one.
  (tags: mobile_phones microsoft censorship)
• Calories, fat or carbohydrates? The problems with current diet studies
  (tags: science health food diet nutrition research)
• Jesus not actually related to Mithras (or Horus, or Dionysus).
  (tags: religion christianity jesus)

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

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.

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?.