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In Acts chapter 4, starting at verse 24, it says, when they had heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord. So they were in prayer and said, Lord, you are God who has made heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is, who by the mouth of thy servant David has said, why did the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things? and the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ." They're quoting there Psalm 2, and you'll note what it says is that God, whom they're addressing, they're saying, he, by the mouth of his servant David, has said these things. We just need to remember, I know on Sunday afternoons as we're going through this series, We're not digging into the biblical text itself, and it's driving me crazy to not do it. I think this is important, but let's remember the end goal of why we're doing it. We need to remember that the scripture is given by God, that God spoke using these men as his tools in order to give us his word, to give us his truth. Before jumping into this afternoon's lesson too deeply, I want to give an explanation for why I'm going into some of the detail that we are. And there's essentially two main reasons. First, when we get later, and we'll actually get a little bit this afternoon, when we get later to the issue of English translations and also discuss things about, well, which English translation is the best or what ones are acceptable. This background is going to prove helpful, at least I think so. Some of what we'll talk about today with manuscript families is going to have a bearing on that translation question. There's really only two questions in evaluating a translation or one version of the Bible. And those two questions are what Greek text is it translating from? And the second question is what method is it using to translate it? And really that's it. We could call it like the manuscript and the method, right? And I don't want to hold, I don't want you to hold a position just because I said, well, here's what you should think. I want you to understand why I think what I do and then have some basis to evaluate whether or not you agree with it. And by the way, if you don't agree with it, that's okay. I'm not going to be mad at you. That's the first reason we're going into detail. The second reason really, if I'm honest, isn't about y'all in the church as much as it is what I expect at some point from outside the church. At some point, I fully expect there is going to be criticism from those on the outside, and I don't wanna gloss over difficult issues and pretend that they don't exist. So let's address them. It's a complicated study, I know. While this series is simplifying it, believe it or not, it is simplifying it, there's just things we can't skip. And incidentally, that's why I would encourage you, if you have questions, ask them, right? If you've been told something and you're not sure if you believe it, ask. If you've been told something and you are sure that you believe it, you're not sure if I believe it, ask, right? And if you don't want to do it in group setting, send me a note, write me a text, like drop something under my door, talk to me, you know, let's just be open about this stuff. So the last couple of lessons, we noted how not all Greek manuscripts read exactly identically. We dealt with a lot of reasons why. It's easy to misspell a word or mishear a word or drop stuff between repeated phrases, that kind of thing. Mistakes happen. Then we dealt with Tony's question about the ending of Mark's gospel. And is it, you know, original to what Mark wrote? Why do some manuscripts leave it out? And some Bible translations have it in brackets. And if you missed that, let me just sum it up by saying, I think it belongs there. But now, because no manuscript reads identically to another, It's helpful for them to be classified in some sort of system, kind of lumped together into groups. And we call those groups manuscript families. Okay, so my definition of a manuscript family is going to be a grouping or classification system which identifies ancient manuscripts by age, geographical location, and textual similarities. So by knowing that a manuscript is in a particular family, we'll know, okay, here's about how old it is. Here's probably an area where it was found. And these are the variant readings I would expect it to have. There are three basic manuscript families for the Greek New Testament. And remember, we're only talking about manuscripts, right, handwritten copies in Greek, not translations into other languages. Those three families are here on the first page. You've got a map and a bit of a description. The map shows you the basic area where these groups are found, and that's going to be important for an argument I'm going to make later. You see the Byzantine manuscript family. It's called Byzantine because it was from the area of the Byzantine Empire. We talk about it as Asia Minor, or a lot of times we think of it as Turkey nowadays. It contains about 85% of manuscripts we have. Remember, we have about 5,800 manuscripts in whole or in part. About 85% of them would go into this text family. So it's sometimes called the majority text for obvious reasons, right? This is what most have. most fall into. It is found mostly in concentration close to Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire. The oldest ones date back to about 450 AD. They range in production date from the 5th to the 15th centuries, right up to the time where we have a printing press and then we don't really have manuscripts anymore because nobody's hand copying. These are possibly the majority of manuscripts because they are from an area that retained Greek language and was predominantly Christian, although the the sort of Christian we're talking about here is Catholic, later on what we would call Eastern Orthodox Catholic, right, Greek-speaking Catholics. And that lasted until the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in about the 15th century. This text type is the most uniform and contains the smoothest readings. And by smoothest readings, I mean there's not as much to trip you up in the language of these manuscripts, right? They're smooth. You don't have verbs that are disagreeing with each other, right? They're just an easier read. The Alexandrian family, about 10% of manuscripts fall into this category, and they're found in North Africa, particularly around Alexandria, Egypt, which is why it's called the Alexandrian family. The oldest manuscripts date back to about 125. Quick quiz, anybody remember what we're talking about with the 125 manuscripts? that little piece of manuscript that's about the credit card size, right? That's what we're talking about. It dates back that far. They range in production date from the 2nd to the 9th centuries. Newer manuscripts, like why does it stop in the 9th century? Well, newer manuscripts are probably not existing. Because Islam, Muslims progressed and started to take over all of Africa and took over northern Africa in about the 7th century. And so you have fewer Christian manuscripts being made when, you know, Muslims take over the area. These manuscripts tend to contain more variant readings from each other. So just comparing to other manuscripts in the same text family. They have more differences. They tend to display less skilled scribesmanship. We talked about that before, and the variants in this type include what we would call more abrupt or more difficult readings, right? If the Byzantine readings are usually smooth, the Alexandrian readings are a little more difficult to read. They've got more things to trip you up. Now, that becomes important because later on when you think, well, what's original, Right? Some people are going to argue, well, the smoothest readings original because that's how God gave it. And you have these difficult readings because people made mistakes over time. Others will argue, well, no, the difficult readings are probably original. And over the course of time, scribes decided to help and smooth things out. Right? It really depends on how you approach the issue. The Western family, is about 5% of manuscripts. They come from the Western Mediterranean, right, particularly Italy, date back to about 250 AD. There are fewer of these because the, what we'll call the Western Church or Roman Catholicism switched to primarily using Latin very early on. If you remember, the Latin Vulgate was translated about 383 AD. And so, that's what the region used mostly and what it copied mostly. So, there's not a lot of Greek manuscripts over there. The variants in this type sometimes have, we'll say, more wordy readings because they tend to do glosses. They paraphrase things. And also, they like to harmonize parallel passages. No text type is identical in all of its manuscripts. In fact, it is very likely that no two manuscripts in any family read exactly alike. There are very minor differences in the course of hand copying things. So, none of them are identical to each other. There are variants between manuscripts. Sometimes there's cross-variation between these families. For example, you could have a Byzantine manuscript and you can be reading along and you can run into a variant and go, oh, it has the Alexandrian wording there. You can have an Alexandrian manuscript that'll sometime have a Byzantine wording, right? These aren't perfect categories, but general categories. The real debate between these families comes with the first two, Byzantine and Alexandrian. because Byzantine has the most and Alexandrian has the oldest. I don't really know of anybody who argues that the Western text family is the one that should be considered superior. It's really a debate between those first two. So we're already done with page one of your handout. Go ahead and turn over to page two. See how quick that went? Why I prefer the Byzantine manuscripts. We talked a little bit about this before when we talked about, well, are the oldest always the best? Okay. I don't necessarily think the oldest are always the best. And here's why. If the Alexandrian manuscripts, if they're generally older, that doesn't necessarily mean they're the best because we know that manuscripts didn't necessarily produce one after another in like this linear fashion. Right? They got grouped together, and as mistakes were made, you would have those mistakes show up in different areas geographically. So there's several reasons why I prefer the Byzantine text type. The first is there's proof of antiquity. So while the Alexandrian's ones are generally older than those in the Byzantine group, we know that the Byzantine readings are, in fact, very old. People who want to argue this will point out that there are no papyrus manuscripts that are part of the Byzantine family, right? Papyrus, those old scrolls like 300 AD and before. And while that's true, there's none of those that we would necessarily categorize into the Byzantine family. Those papyrus manuscripts include Byzantine-type readings in the manuscripts. In his book, The Byzantine Text Type and New Testament Textual Criticism by Harry Sturz, who I'm I'm sure you're going to run out and get that later on today, identifies 150 distinctly Byzantine readings in papyrus manuscripts. Now, what that proves is that while we might not have a manuscript in our hand that we would say this is a Byzantine manuscript and it's that old, well, we don't have that. What we do have is in the manuscripts that are that old, we have distinctly Byzantine wording. So we know that the wording from Byzantine manuscripts are actually older than the documents themselves that we have. They're just as old as the Alexandrian reading. Additionally, scripture quotations, as you read the early church fathers, demonstrates that they used both Alexandrian readings when they quoted scripture and Byzantine readings when they quoted scripture. Both of them show up way back. So the majority of manuscripts, whether they are as old or not, contain readings that absolutely are as old. The second argument is from quantity. It is by far the majority of the textual evidence we have available, right? 85% of them fall in that group. The sheer number of Byzantine textual readings is a valid, it's not necessarily conclusive argument, but it's a valid argument for preferring them. I don't want to get too simplistic in that, right? Some people would say, well, it's just as easy as this. Anytime there's a variant reading, line up all the manuscripts. Every manuscript gets a vote, and whoever has the majority wins. I don't think we want to go as simplistic as that. It requires a little more scrutiny. Within this argument of quantity, we need to ask ourselves why there are more Byzantine manuscripts than others. And so I'm going to read you a quote from a guy named Harold Greenlee. He wrote a book called Scribes, Scrolls, and Scripture. Very clever title. And in this quote, I agree with what he says at first, and I'm going to disagree with what he says next, okay? But here's just the whole quote so you have it. He says, As he's talking about these text families developing very early and variants were noted by Christian writers very early, this is what he says. This evidently led to some attempts to bring the manuscripts into greater agreement by making changes in the existing manuscripts themselves or by making changes as the manuscripts were copied. This was not done in any really thorough manner, however, nor by following any well-developed principles. It appears that the preference was given to the readings of Constantinople since that city was the center of the Greek-speaking church." So what he's saying there is that textual criticism, right, trying to determine what the original reading was, is something that has always been done. And that's absolutely true. He's right. Textual criticism gets thrown around today by some guys like they're naughty words, but they're not. Scribes have used common sense throughout history to determine what the original reading is. We saw that. Last time when we talked about the scribe who, right, made a marginal note expressing his frustration that someone had changed the reading, right? You have never in your entire life read a Bible that wasn't the result of textual criticism, okay? Textual criticism has always happened. And the problem, though, is he points to that And he makes the assumption that way back then they weren't really using any sensible rules or good patterns. They just went kind of haphazard and said, well, okay, what are the readings near Constantinople say? We'll just follow that. Which I don't know why we would assume that the earliest scribes who were doing textual criticism who clearly had the advantage over guys 1800 years later, right? I mean, they're closer to the original, would make such haphazard choices. It's more reasonable to assume that they made decisions that were thoughtful and logical and then duplicated those decisions that they made, and as a result, they preferred the Byzantine readings, which is why the majority of text we have has those readings. Okay, we should give them some credit that they made good choices back then. Third, scribal quality. Let me say again, I absolutely reject the idea that the scribes of the Alexandrian manuscripts were intent on altering the scripture to suit their theology. If that's what they were doing, they didn't do a very good job. Every major doctrine, every doctrine that I know of is in fact intact. Whenever you read a family of manuscripts, the differences between those families are incredibly minor, but the uniform message of every manuscript of the New Testament is repent of your sins and turn to Jesus for the salvation of your soul. No manuscript that's giving a different message than that. Okay? There are variants in the text because mistakes happen, but the message doesn't fluctuate at all. I want to be clear about that. That being said. the existence of variance, right, differences in the Alexandrian family of manuscripts shouldn't be ignored either, right? As they're being copied, human error happens. We talked about the earliest Christians who were producing those manuscripts, right? Alexandria in northern Africa is part of the Roman Empire. They would have been suffering round after round of persecution. They couldn't have gone to professional scribes, so it's probably laymen, you know, putting up with the danger of potential death on their part to copy these things. So they're to be respected for what they've done, but the quality of the scribesmanship shows that they weren't professional scribes, right? We would expect there to be more errors in that case. And so of all the textual families, the Alexandrian family has the most variant readings between the manuscripts of its group, right? It's not just that they disagree with the other text families, they disagree with each other in variant readings more often than any other group does. So that would tell me they're probably not the best. The fourth argument is the role of geography, and I think this is important. The books of the New Testament, we know that they were written and distributed in areas which would have become later on the Byzantine Empire, right? If you look at the map on the front page where manuscripts are found, you're going to see the Byzantine manuscripts covering up Asia Minor. And when you look at this map on the backside where you say, well, okay, where were these books of the New Testament written to? Who had the originals? It fills up that area of Asia Minor, right? Now, there are some books in the New Testament we can't identify a specific geographical location. So you've got a little box over there that lists some as unspecified locations because Matthew just wrote to Jewish readers and we don't know particularly where his original document went. Although I suspect Jerusalem's pretty logical, we just don't know that. Other ones we can make reasonable guesses like Luke and Acts were written to, you know, most excellent Theophilus, which sounds like a Roman dignitary name if I've ever heard one in my life. But again, because we don't know that for sure, I can't put it on the map somewhere. But those things that we do know and can put on the map, none of them are going to be in North Africa. None of them are going to be anywhere near Alexandria, Egypt. Right? They're all going to be from that region where those Byzantine manuscripts come from. So Paul's letters are written to cities there. Peter's letters written to the region of Galatia, which Galatia is a region, not a city. So that's why you have kind of that oval there. And then, or actually Galatians is written to the region of Galatia. Peter's letter is written to like Galatia, Cappadocia, but then, yeah, it's a huge area, but it's still Asia Minor. None of the New Testament writings were written to the specific area of the Alexandrian manuscripts. So we know for those documents to get from where they were originally down to North Africa, they had to, it was going to take time and distance as they were copied and copied in order to get there. And that time and distance and copying allows for errors to take place before it reaches down there to Alexandria. I don't know of anybody who argues that the actual autographs, remember autographs are the original documents written by the New Testament writers, would have ever been near Alexandria, Egypt. But they were certainly near and in the area of the Byzantine manuscripts. And so as scribes are copying and comparing and doing that textual criticism that they've always done, looking to see, well, okay, you know, there's a mistake here, so which reading is right? The people in the Byzantine area had the most original documents to look at and to make those cross comparisons to. So here's, just to explain it differently, kind of an imaginary example. Let's say me here in central Illinois, right, I write a letter, because I love writing letters, and I send you a letter, handwritten, and you receive it, and it is such a great letter that you decide you're going to hand copy it. And everybody loves to, they're just hand copying. So there's all these hand copies being made. And they are spreading all over the United States, okay? So there's now 5,800 handwritten copies of this letter that I wrote. Now we pause, go forward several centuries, and nobody knows where the original that I wrote is, right? It's gone, right? We don't have that. And you can get any of those 5,800 letters, and you read them, and they don't read quite exactly the same. Some have a punctuation issue here. Some have a spelling error. Somebody corrected all my spelling errors that I put in the, no. That's not a good comparison. There were mistakes. But you get the idea. Now, let's say that down near, you know, New Mexico, Arizona, right, there's a big group of those letters found. And they're the oldest. We know they're the oldest. And they're the oldest because down in New Mexico and Arizona, it's a dry, arid, Right? Desert climate. So they're not rotting. They're not falling apart. Right? They're in an environment that allows them to be preserved. But all of them read just a little bit differently. Meanwhile, here in central Illinois, where the original letter went, you've got the most copies Of those copies, they read the most similarly to each other, right? So, you've got the most manuscript, you've got the most evidence for it here, and you've got fewer odd readings here. Which would you assume is accurate? Would you assume that the oldest ones, just because they're the oldest and they're down there in New Mexico, Arizona, are the best? Or would you say, well, I know in central Illinois, there is a lot of them. I know that's where the original was. I know that they're not very different from each other at all, right? And so even though they're not the oldest ones, I think those are probably the best ones, right? That's the argument I'm making with the Byzantine family. Right? This is where the original documents went to, and this is where they were copied. Alexandria, Egypt happens to be a desert, a dry, arid climate. I would expect things to last longer down there, so I'm not shocked that some of the oldest ones are from there, but that doesn't mean the most accurate ones are from there. Does that make sense? Okay, I have nobody shaking their head, so I'm going to assume it makes sense. That's why I think geography matters. We can be confident the original documents and the copies that were made from them were in those areas and allowed for those comparisons, corrections to be made. So, at the bottom of your second page is why that background is important. Translations based on Byzantine texts, and we'll have to talk more about this, but this is just sort of a very brief introduction to it. In about 1516, a Catholic priest named Desiderius Erasmus got six to 10 Byzantine manuscripts, probably six, okay, but maybe up to 10. and combined them using textual criticism, because that's what scribes do. They look at them and say, well, this one seems to be the right reading. And he combined them into one document that got printed. That document would later, after many changes and many printed editions, well after he was dead and, frankly, well after the King James Version was translated, that document would become known as the Textus Receptus or the TR. It's representative of the Byzantine text family in most cases. The commonly available English translations using the Byzantine text would include the King James Version, New King James Version, the modern English version, or the World English Bible. Now, you've probably never heard of the MEV, the modern English version. It's actually produced, the goal of it was to be a Bible from the same text as the King James in modern language that would get distributed to military members in the British and American branches of the military. Right, so it was a bunch of military chaplains, and they got other scholars involved in translating it, but that's what the MEV is. If you're curious about that or the Web Bible, I've got them. I can show them to you. The Web Bible is a public domain work. It has not gained much traction at all. I don't know of any publishing house that's actually mass producing them, but you can order a printed version, and they will, like, print it on demand and send it to you, and I can show you one of those. Those are the ones from the Byzantine text type. Translations from the Alexandrian texts. In about 1881, two guys with great names, Brook Westcott and Fenton Hort, published the New Testament in the original Greek, which really promoted the Alexandrian text type. I mean, look, if they were going to print something, it might as well be new if you're going to do it, right? Otherwise, why bother? Their Greek New Testament almost exclusively favors Alexandrian readings of textual variants, especially those two manuscripts we've talked about, the Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. The commonly available English translations using Alexandrian text, or the Westcott and Hort text, or the American Standard Version, the English Revised Version, the ERV, not to be confused with the ESV, and the Good News Bible, or the Good News Translation, although I hate calling it a translation. It's more of a paraphrase, but that's another story altogether. Then the third category you've got there is translations based on what's called reasoned eclecticism. This is trying to strike a balance between the argument that the oldest is best and the argument that the most is best, right? Reasoned eclecticism is this move in textual criticism nowadays. Eclectic just means taking from several sources. So if anybody's ever said you have a, you know, Andrew's got eclectic music tastes, he will listen to just about any kind of, you know, take from a lot of sources. Reasoned eclecticism will draw from texts, manuscripts from any family by just applying some rules that are mostly very common sense logical rules to determine the original reading. Now, you don't want me to get into those rules. It gets really complicated. But I will say, they use the Byzantine reading in a lot of places. But unless there is some compelling reason not to, one of the rules they follow is, for lack of an easier way of saying it, all things being equal, right? Unless there's a compelling reason, we're going to use the oldest reading, right? And I wish that they would change that rule to, well, unless there's a compelling reason, we're going to use the majority, the Byzantine, Okay. But this publication is known as the Nestle-Alland from the two guys who first did it in 1898. Or the United Bible Society, the UBS text, United Bible Societies who actually prints this nowadays. The first edition, like I said, was 1898. It is constantly being tweaked. There is a committee that is constantly looking at textual variants and having debates and applying those rules to determine the original reading, they are currently on the 28th edition published in 2012. The English translations based on that text include the English Standard, the New International Version, the NASB, The CSB or HCSB, depending on when you bought it, it could be called a Christian Standard Bible or a Holman Christian Standard Bible. The Revised Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, and New Living Translation, which again is more of a paraphrase. Okay, so those lists are just for information. They're not prioritized in any way, any particular translation being endorsed above all others. We're just not to that point yet. there's more stuff to deal with. And we've said nothing really about the method of translation, because some of these are very literal word for word approaches to translating, and some of them are very much paraphrased, you know. Instead of saying, here's what the original Greek says, it says, here's what we think it means, and that's not really what we want. But these lists are there for your, Information, you can know where they came from. If you have any questions about one that's not on that list and you're curious about it, let me know. I'll try to find out which text family it uses. Yes? No, no. You can. No, that's usually coming from weird carbon dating stuff. And, you know, generally speaking, we're talking about believers. Although I cannot in any case tell you that every time, you know, we have something in Bible history where we get more information or a manuscript or a date or even a translation, that it's believers that we would endorse, right? Like I use the King James Version, but as far as I know, everybody who translated that baptized babies, right? So I couldn't endorse everybody's belief system, but all of them claim to be believers. Those dates are usually the result of paleography, right? The looking at handwriting and looking at the ink and looking at the kind of paper. and making a determination of the age. You can do carbon dating, but it's expensive, it ruins a portion of the manuscript, and it doesn't do much for you that paleography can't do. Yeah, there was some fruitcakes. Yeah, it would be hard to identify any place where you couldn't find heresy in the first few centuries or any time past that, actually. Now, there was a guy called Origen, had some very bad theological ideas. There's a position called Arianism, which basically argues that Jesus is not God in the flesh. And that would have been based in that area. But in fairness, we could probably point out heretics from every area, right? I know, I've heard the same argument. And I don't dismiss that those issues existed. But I keep saying, I am not going to argue that anybody's producing manuscripts of the New Testament at the risk of their own life because they're not believers, right? I don't see where they've intentionally tried to change things in order to embrace their particular theological position. In fact, I know what's been pointed out to me is there's places where, oh, the Alexandrian manuscripts seem to remove the deity of Jesus. In later weeks, at some point, I'll show you, well, there's places in the Alexandrian manuscripts which are much more clear about the deity of Jesus. For example, John 1, verse 18, the King James Version says, no man has seen God at any time. The only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father, he declares him. You get a modern translation based on the eclectic or Alexandrian text, and it's going to say, no man's seen God at any time. The only begotten son who is himself God declares him. So they're not trying to remove the deity of Jesus. Like I said, if they were, they didn't do a very good job. Anything else? Yeah, cultural influences like the onslaught of Islam probably had a major impact on the development of the manuscripts that were in northern Africa. Ultimately in like the 15th century over in the Byzantine area too. Cultural influences like the change from, you know, in and around Rome from Greek to Latin. caused them to stop really producing a lot of Greek manuscripts. They were just copying the Latin Vulgate. So yeah, there are all kinds of things that go into that. It's a vastly complicated thing. Anything else?
Manuscript Families
Series History of the Bible
The lesson shows how Greek manuscripts are categorized into text families and how those families are reflected in English translations.
Handouts are available at the "View PDF" link above
Three questions at the end of this lesson:
- Is the dating method applied to manuscripts similar to the way evolution supporters speak of "billions of years"?
- Was Alexandria, Egypt a hotbed of heresy, resulting in the corruption of the Greek text?
- Did cultural changes influence the development of text families?
Sermon ID | 1129211929532621 |
Duration | 40:23 |
Date | |
Category | Sunday - PM |
Language | English |
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