Hot answers tagged textual-criticism
17
Professor Bart D. Ehrman's Curriculum Vitae reveals an academic with impeccable credentials. Perhaps the most important line is:
Ph.D. Princeton Theological Seminary (magna cum laude), 1985
His doctoral adviser was none other than Bruce Metzger, who wrote the book on textual criticism of the New Testament. Ehrman doesn't simply ride on the coattails ...
13
To answer your first question, we should not simply accept Sinaiticus as the source of the truth for the New Testament. It has great weight in debates from its age, but age is not the final arbiter in textual considerations.
Codex Sinaiticus was made in the 4th century on parchment using capital letters (a manuscript in all capitals is called an "uncial"). ...
9
There are plenty of web sites that will give you comparatives, however, my broad take on the subject is that the LXX is not generally speaking considered more authoritative than any Hebrew text. The translators were not especially careful (though certainly not sloppy.) The amount of textual variants in the Hebrew text are MUCH smaller than in the Greek, for ...
8
Fraser Orr's answer is excellent and I only hope to supplement his excellent answer with a few thoughts regarding "reliability."
When asking a question like this, it's important to state your purpose. Why are you asking this question? The logic is such that they have reliable uses and applications within their own domains and we need to know the domain in ...
7
I know you asked for contextual evidence and I hope to get there. However, when it comes to these sorts of things, contextual (which is part of internal) evidence is really only one of the factors that goes into these sorts of things. overview of internal and external evidence
The UBS (4th ed.) also has αὐτοὺς (which is unsurprising given the overlap ...
7
According to the NET Translator's notes,
The vast majority of witnesses have αὐτούς (autous, “them”) here,
while the Textus Receptus reads ἡμᾶς (Jhmas, “us”) with insignificant
support (pc gig vgcl sa Prim Bea). There is no question that the
original text read αὐτούς here....
The textual problem here between the present tense βασιλεύουσιν
...
7
user959 has a good answer which tells me that I should probably spend more time reading the translation committee's commentary. Having said that, textual criticism is quite interesting.
While using text criticism, we look at two primary areas of evidence to support a reading: external evidence and internal evidence. With external evidence we evaluate the ...
7
Check Tommy Wasserman's new(ish) critical edition of the text with commentary, it is more recent than NA28 and is certainly more complete with regard to manuscript evidence. His comments will be more detailed than those in UBS, though the comments there are often quite good. It should address the issue quite nicely. I don't have it on hand right now or I ...
7
I accessed "The Wisdom of Ben Sira: portions of the Book Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah collection," edited by S. Schechter and C. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899. It is accessible here.
Fortunately, this book did have verse 3:17 in it, which follows:
.בני בעשרך התהלך בענוה ותאהב מנותן מתנות
בני ...
7
My understanding is that a strong majority of scholars (including conservative scholars) take the position that the long ending of Mark was not in the original and was not written by the same author as the rest of the text, but nonetheless was added very early on (probably in the early 2nd century). However, the evidence is not as overwhelming as for the ...
7
The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) has a lot of scientific backing but is not without critique. The method assumes an initial stemma and essentially just applies least-sum-of-squares statistics to find the linear regression line (the stemma that fits best). I suspect that it will actually fall in line with existing local text types (or be ...
6
In response to your question:
I am curious if any scholars have argued that either [ὁ] κύριος ([the] Lord) or ὁ θεός (the God) are the preferred reading of this passage, [...]
Yes.
I have treated Jude 5 (and the whole book) extensively in my monograph on Jude. The book is available here.
You might find this blogpost is a helpful summary of my ...
6
This is a case where the argument for inauthenticity is quite clear. The Comma Johanneum does not appear in any ancient Greek sources (1 John, like all the other books of the New Testament, was written originally in Greek). The earliest Greek version of 1 John with the Comma Johanneum is from 1516! The extra line was added to some Latin manuscripts ...
6
A reinked manuscript is indeed a manuscript where a later scribe wrote over the letters. The scribe might be trying to preserve a text that otherwise would be lost or might be making "corrections." Reinking a manuscript makes paleographic analysis very difficult because the original handwriting is overwritten. Reinking also tends to obscure accent marks and ...
6
Although Frank has a great answer above, I thought I'd add a couple of things. The question of the proximity of a text to the original depends on a number of factors, age being an important one, but certainly not the only one.
To think about this, it is necessary to think about the process of manuscript manufacture in the early years of the church. ...
5
Even if we didn't know anything about the weight behind the Textus Receptus and NA27 traditions, based on the context of John's letter we should prefer "them" rather than "us" as a reading.
Earlier in John's introduction to the letter (1:5b-6), he writes to the seven churches:
Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, And ...
5
I think "which is more reliable" is too imprecise a question. There are situations where the Dead Sea scrolls agree with the MT against LXX and vice-versa, and in some cases there's just no way to know which version is older. One more precise question is how often are the Qumran manuscripts close to MT and how often are they close to LXX. Wikipedia says ...
5
He is not respected by most conservatives when he slips into theology. Textual criticism, he is very good and knows what he is doing. However, I find him sloppy in his work if it pushes his agenda. What's worse is that he knows how to do the work, but since his faith lapsed, he misapplies and misquotes the rules of determining historicity. For example, ...
5
I Sam 12:11 in 4QSam Frg.d has only the word "Jerubal", the rest of the verse is missing.
Leningrad and Allepo have "...Jerubbaal and Bedan and Jephthah and Samuel...", same in Brenton's English LXX.
RASHI says Bedan is Samson as he was "in [the tribe of] Dan" ("b'Dan") or "of the tribe of Dan" ("ben Dan").
The targum has "...Gideon and Samson and Jephtah ...
4
A traditional assumption of many translators is that in general the best available avenue back to the “original text” of the Old Testament is through the Masoretic Text (MT). This text is preserved in the great medieval codices such as Leningrad Codex (c. A.D. 1008) used as the basis of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Aleppo Codex (c. A.D. 952) the ...
4
The name Barabbas is clearly a patronymic (bar-Abbas or "son of the father") rather than a given name. As it turns out, a handful of manuscripts provide another name for that individual: Jesus. As the NET Bible points out:
Although the external evidence for the inclusion of “Jesus” before “Barabbas” (in vv. 16 and 17) is rather sparse, being restricted ...
4
A good case can be made for the reading as a verb instead of a noun with a preposition prefixed.
Regarding verse 16, Walter Kaiser (The Messiah in the Old Testament, footnote 10 pg. 115 and 116) lays out his argument for the verb by referencing the Vulgate, the Syriac, and the Septuagint, all of which have verbs. He takes the form ka'ari as the irregular ...
4
It is true that all Jewish prayerbooks and scriptural resources exclude a "nun" line in Psalm 145. It is also true that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible read by Greek-speaking Jews and Christians, the Peshitta – the translation used by the Syrian church, and one of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Psalms texts, presumably used by members of the ...
4
Most every critical text I have (including the NA27, the SBL GNT, UBS4, Westcott/Hort, and the Robinson/Pierpont Byzantine GNT which usually follows the TR) all say εἰς ὑμᾶς, which would support the KJV translation. Metzger and other textual commentators that I have available say nothing about a variant reading.
Stephen's 1550 TR reads εἰς ἡμᾶς, as does ...
3
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the only ancient Hebrew Bible manuscripts that we have. Everything else in Hebrew is from the 11th century or later. Thus it's natural that the Dead Sea Scrolls loom large in studying the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. However, the Dead Sea Scroll texts don't always agree with each other, and their age is no guarantee of ...
3
It would be a oversimplification to claim that Aleppo and Leningrad have any simple evolutionary relationship. Aleppo is older, Leningrad is younger. However, if you could arrange all the lost manuscripts in a tree, they might have a common ancestor. Anyone reading Hebrew Bible spends time puzzling over textual variations between Leningrad and other ...
2
Bible allusions are simpler than that. It is a simple reference to the numbers of bars of gold collected by Solomon in his first year, breaking one of the three Mosaic laws for Israelite kings (Deuteronomy 17) thus beginning Solomon's, and Israel's, downfall:
Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents of gold, besides that ...
2
καταλλάγητε is the 2nd plural aorist passive imperative of καταλλάσσω.
Breaking this down, 2nd plural is you (all) "y'all." Passive makes the subject of the verb the recipient of the action. Imperatives are commands and aorist imperatives generally indicate a command to start something.
So what would "we reconcile them" look like? καταλλάσoμεν αὐτοῦς.
...
1
Greek Primacy Point A) How is it possible for Apostle Paul to speak Aramaic especially in Greek regions and in Rome? How is it also possible for Paul to speak Aramaic when early Christians were Greek such as Timothy and Titus?
AP Response: Through Acts 16-18, we read that Apostle Paul was preaching to Jews in Greek regions like Ephesus, Thessalonica, ...
1
These are the closest phrases I could find:
But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit -Jude 1:20
Behind the second veil there was a tabernacle which is called the Holy of Holies -Hebrews 9:3
In the Greek text, Jude uses ἁγιωτάτῃ and Hebrews uses Ἅγια Ἁγίων.
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