Greek Geekery - A little about variants

The end goal of textual criticism (that is, of looking at all the differences between the copies we have of a text) is to discover the reading of the original text. Granted, there's a new bunch of New Testament textual critics like Fee and Ehrman who say it's about charting the history and seeing how scribes corrupted the text (or, as some would have it, edit the text under divine inspiration) but that begs the question - how can you see where the scribes have changed the text to fit their interpretations if you don't know what the original was? I can argue until I'm blue that Shakespeare enlarged the roles of Beatrix and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing but until I have some sort of proof that they were originally smaller roles then there's something seriously lacking in my logic.

But then, having read Ehrman's work, I have a high view of his writing abilities and a very, very low view of both his ability to think logically and his integrity. He's still a fundamentalist at heart (of the sort that would make a staunch KJV-only-ist quell from his fervor) without a god to believe in besides liberalism. It's really quite sad.

But enough about Ehrman (who is, I believe, still a redeemable scholar and a poster boy for why Christians, especially Christians in leadership must be intellectually honest - he is what happens to those who are told not to question their faith - read his "testimony" sometime), this post is supposed to be about variants and how many there are and of what type.

So back to that.

As I said, the goal of textual critics is to rediscover the original wording of the text, whether they're looking at Shakespeare, Plato, or the Gospel of John. This is made difficult by the variants - no two texts are exactly the same. Each has some variant from another. Hearing this is, at first, enough to shake some people's faith. It was enough to break Ehrman's. So do we have a reliable NT? After all, as some have pointed out there are three times as many variants as there are words in the New Testament. Which is a rather disturbing number, right? At first blush, yes, it is. But let's look at that statistic. Out of all those variants a vast majority of them (exact numbers pending for me to get my notebook) are completely and totally inconsequential. They're either spelling variants (for example, John verses Jon) or very clear nonsense errors. For exampe, if your a ntive englich speeker u shuld hvae no problm reeding thiis senntence evan tho its fuul ov full ov mispellings nd noncents errs. Things like that show up a lot in our known Greek NTs - not surprising when you realize that the dictionary had yet to be invented and monks sometimes worked on these manuscripts long after they should have retired. Just think about how many times, when typing, you need to go back and change because you keyed something in wrong. Same with these scribes only the backspace key was far in the future for them. So there's something like 80% of variants in the NT - ones that don't cause us to question what the original text said, though it might cause us to wonder how it was spelled. On a side note, I am ever so grateful for spell checker.

So that's 80% of the variants. How about that other 20? Most of those are variants which do call the meaning of the text into question but aren't really viable. That is, they're changes that announce themselves with big red flags. A common one is changing the pronoun "he" to "Christ" or "Jesus," particularly at the beginning of a lectionary reading. After all, when you're reading the text for the day what works better, "He went into the town" (when the referent, "Jesus" is stuck back in the previous day's reading) or "Jesus went into the town." Yeah, thought so. There are some that wave red flags because the ONLY place you find the variant is in a 14th century manuscript. How likely is it that, of all the manuscripts we have, that's the ONLY one that got the reading right? Um hm. Possible ... but very, very unlikely. Kinda like my undergrad beating Ohio State in football. My undergrad doesn't have a football team. When it did it suffered one of the largest losses in collegiate history. Two hundred something to zero. Against a teacher's college. About that likely. Then there's the variants that are just crazy, like the one in "my" manuscript (mine in the sense that I'm working through it - I don't actually have any claim to it beyond that, unfortunately) that says that Jesus was given a road mixed with gall to drink. Somehow I don't think that's what Matthew originally wrote.

Anyway, that grouping of variants that change the meaning but aren't possible make up a good 18% of the whole.

And that remaining 1-2% which are both changes to the meaning and possible? Well, that's a post for another time!

Proposed Blog Schedule - aka, how long do you think this idea will last

As one of the nursery workers I oversee notes, I am a list fanatic. I have lists for what needs to be done each day, lists for how the nursery runs, lists for homework, books I've read, books I want to read, sewing projects I want to do ...

I have a lot of lists.

This is not because I'm an organized person, as she seemed to think. This is because I am disorganized. Horribly disorganized. If a project is not on a list then I WILL forget it. Even if it's something like my own birthday. It's happened before.

So, in honor of my obsessive list-making, I'm testing out a schedule for this blog. My hope is that the schedule will limit the "what should I write about today" blocks that come up and keep me from camping too long on one topic. Like I said, it's a hope.

The proposed schedule:

Monday - Weekend Sewing Report I do most, if not all of my sewing on Sunday since that's my official day of rest. Or afternoon of rest - funny, when you work at a church Sunday's not very restful at all. But despite half of the day being spent herding cats - er, kids - and then sleeping to recover, I try to spend that second half doing whatever I want which usually means sewing. So I figured Monday's a good time to report what's been happening in my sewing corner.

Tuesday - Greek Geekery Greek manuscripts, Greek grammar, Greek trivia - if it's (koine) Greek expect it to show up on Tuesday. Current ideas are a series on collating manuscripts for those who are interested (and to hopefully raise interest in those who aren't!) and a post or two on my very favorite NT city, Colossae.

Wednesday - Patterns and Fabric I spend more time looking at patterns and fabric then actually working with them so figure I should give at least 1/5 of blogspace to that. Hey, it gives me an excuse to keep it up!

Thursday - Randomness Whatever I feel like from sewing to Greek to children's ministry to neat stuff I find online. Both things that don't fit elsewhere in my tidy list and those things that fit but I don't want to wait to post them.

Friday - Monthly Series See the poll over on the right? This would be the day you get to see the results of your voting. And unless something strange happens it looks like this Friday will start a 5 part series on my sewing corner and it's organization (or, at present, lack there of).

So there's the plan. Let's see if it lasts through November!

Oh, and this schedule takes effect tomorrow ... right now Hebrew is kicking my little rear.

Manuscript Treasures

Today was spent staring at jpgs of "my" 13th (or so) century manuscript of the Gospels, going line by line through Mark 8 to see where it differs from the Majority Text and writing down variants. There weren't many, this is a pretty unoriginal copy, so it got a little boring in that respect, but it's ok. It just meant that instead of finding different possibilities of the original wording of the New Testament (well, book of Mark at least), I got to know the manuscript and it's writer just a little better.

It's amazing to see how much is hidden on each page. Today, when books are printed by printers not unlike what we have at home, bound by machine, and packed in boxes there's a good chance that, picking a book up off the shelf, you are the first human to ever see those exact pages.

Ancient, hand written manuscripts are different. In them the personality, habits, and beliefs of the scribe are woven into every line. The handwriting shows a bit about who they were as a person, the ink and vellum tells about where they live and how careful those who prepared them were, the notes around the text serve as a commentary on beliefs, and the wear around the edges and smudges on the page tell the story of the book's use. It's a very personal thing, like a diary almost, in vivid contrast to our modern books.

Don't get me wrong, I rate the printing press as one of the greatest inventions ever. But I can still appreciate what we lost, right?

At the top of this post you can see just a small section out of the manuscript I'm working in right now. Due to a number of reasons I won't post a larger picture or even give the name of the mss at the moment - but if ever I'm allowed I'll show more. In a later post I'll show pictures of more famous manuscripts (which I CAN name and link to larger pictures of) but right now I want to show off "my" manuscript. Isn't it beautiful?

Neat things to note:

• The eusebian canon letters (well, numbers here to a Koine Greek speaker) in the far left margin
• The places where the ink gets dark right after the pen's been dipped then lightens for a while
• The red lectionary abreviations TE (telos - end reading here) and AP with and X above (begin here)
• The margin notes in red - unfortunately my Greek isn't yet to the point where I can read them without a dictionary and some guesswork
• The large capital letters filled in with gold ink

What this picture doesn't show is that the entire text is written in the shape of a cross. This is at the bottom of the cross where the text is narrower. In all it's a beautiful piece of art and a window into another's life. There's something very ... human, I guess about it all and I love it.

Greek Discoveries

I'm an New Testament (NT) Greek Geek. For better or worse it's who I am. I'm currently working towards a degree in this and, as a current class assignment, get to go through a currently unpublished Greek manuscripts (ca. 1300s) and see where it differs from other texts. Sometimes those differences will suggest new variants, or possible wordings of the original texts. Sometimes those differences are just silly.

Yesterday I was working through Matthew 27, the crucifixion narrative, and all I can figure is that the scribe was tired. It was a long day, he'd been up before the sun with prayers then he had to work a bit in the gardens, maybe brother John stole his ink and he had to make more ... who knows. But towards the end his writings just got odd. He'd drop the end of a word so it just didn't mean anything or skip a very vital word(but not it's adjective ... like saying "I gave the girl a which was large and yellow). My favorite came right after Jesus says he's thirsty. In most manuscripts they give him vinegar mixed with gall. Not so tasty. But my scribe went one worse. They gave Jesus a road to drink.

Granted, there's just two letters difference between the two ... but still.

Things like this get me wondering about the men (and women! There were female scribes!) who wrote these manuscripts. Did he ever pick up his own hand-written text and read it? Would he, every time he came to this verse, chuckle a bit or was he embarrassed? Did he have a fellow monk that he shared the joke with? What about the next monk who inherited this text? Did the odd word ever trip him up? Why did no one correct it?

I wish there were some way to travel back in time within the manuscript and see those who paged through it, were changed by it, who threw it aside, and who first put pen to vellum to record the words of Scripture.

I guess that's part of why I do what I do - while I can't travel back in time I can take the few clues the text gives, from ink types to margin notes, and trying to piece together what story I can. It's like having just 8 pages out of the Fellowship of the Ring and trying to figure out the whole story, but it's worth it for what details do come out. I love what I do. :)

Mental Health Day

Yesterday while cleaning out the fridge I stood up a little too quickly and met the fridge door. Hard. I'm still dizzy, a little weak, and having trouble focusing my eyes today. Since most of those symptoms are also common to me when I'm exhausted (which I am, it's been a rough week), my guess is that the head injury is just a small part but I'm using the excuse to take a mental health day off from work. Unfortunately instead of sewing I need to spend the time collating some Greek manuscripts for class. Right now I'm going through Codex Sinaiticus (pictures of it, not the original!) and matching it with a newly produced critical edition of the Majority Text and seeing where they differ. All this is being done so that we can see if some newly discovered manuscripts are more like the text of Sinaiticus or the Majority Text. It's pretty tedious work since most differences are spelling - the difference between the American "theater" and the British "theatre." At the same time it's oddly exciting. I love reading the New Testament as it was written (by hand!) well over 1000 years ago. It's amazing how perfect most of the writing is and to think about how much a labor of love it must have been to some scribe (at least you hope!). So anyway, off to do that. I might post more vintage fun later, we'll see how the head's doing!