The role of the prinitng press in standardising

Ekancone

Before the invention of the printing press the standards of copying in written texts was very sporadic. Generally, each time a copy of a book was made, mistakes were made and the writers allowed themselves a little room for their own interpretation. (Also considering the butchering of texts by council of Nicea, Latin Vulgate, etc) Following the invention of the printing press this led to greater circulation of texts and greater standardisation of these texts which could not be reversed, unless of course all books were burned ad Stalinism/Inquisition.

So considering this, how can any copies of the bible be considered to be true to the original pre-printing press? Also, how can any post-printing copies of the bible be considered when they are based on pre-printing press copies?

PDN

Do you know what the Council of Nicea was? All the Council's rulings etc are preserved as historical records and there was no editing (or butchering, as you put it) of the Bible at all carried out. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

The Vulgate was a translation of Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin. As such it was not perfect (no translation of anything ever is) but that hardly equates to butchery since we can easily look back to the Greek and Hebrew and attempt better translations.

Modern readers often misunderstand the extraordinary care that scribes took in copying Scripture by hand. Also, we have so many ancient manuscripts (24,000 partial or complete manuscripts of the New Testament + 86,000 direct quotations in other early church documents) that if one made a mistake we can readily see that by comparing it with the other 23,999.

Most variants in early manuscripts consist of a missing letter in a word; or reversing the order of two words (such as "Christ Jesus" instead of "Jesus Christ"); or the absence of one or more insignificant words. They would be similar to the typos & spelling mistakes we see on these boards in virtually every post - they seldom, if ever, stop us understanding what the writer really meant to say.

Indeed, in all these 24,000 manuscripts and 86,000 quotations there are only about 50 cases where scholars have any real doubt as to what the original text actually said. Even in these cases no doctrine of Christianity or moral commandment is affected by them. For example, in Luke 9:54 the majority reading reads: "Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elijah did?" However, there is some doubt as to whether a variant reading was original, in which case the words "even as Elijah did" would be omitted. Interesting to theologians and Bible freaks like myself, but hardly likely to send anyone headlong into heresy!

The testimony and agreement of the manuscripts is extremely clear. We know, to a remarkably accurate degree, the exact wording of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, and the few details where uncertainty remains are not going to cast doubt on any serious Christian belief.

robindch

PDN wrote:

there was no editing (or butchering, as you put it) of the Bible at all carried out. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Well, the earliest extant NT text, the Codex Vaticanus, has that great marginal note "Hey, twit and fool, leave the old stuff alone and stop changing things!" which suggested that changes were not unknown.

And while the very high figures you mention are certainly impressive, unfortunately, they vast majority of them refer to texts which were produced after 350 or so, when christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire and the texts were in a position to be copied and distributed widely. Prior to 300 or so, the number of extant texts is very, very small indeed. With the earliest piece of text (two inches by four) from around one century after the events described and no information at all about what happened to the earlier texts.

As our crew point out regularly, there is no continuous line of historical documents available to verify that the bible is exactly what the first scribes wrote, and neither do we have any decent level of external corroboration, one way or the other, of any of the events described.

Consequently, you are betting the work of your life that the first scribes described events with perfect accuracy, and that it remained utterly unchanged for a very long time indeed. The egregious and recent case of L Ron Hubbard is just one case among many which suggests that the disciples of a religious teacher are not always the best people to write wholly accurate biographies.

Ekancone

PDN wrote:

Do you know what the Council of Nicea was? All the Council's rulings etc are preserved as historical records and there was no editing (or butchering, as you put it) of the Bible at all carried out. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

The council of nicaea has original documents still surviving? Source? You are suggesting that the NT wasnt touched? Source?

Sangre

Wasn't the 1st Council of Nicea in 325? Surely thats a long time in age of memorisation and oral teachings.

Excelsior

Granted, Robin, that the majority of texts come after the church got up out of the sewers at the end of the Roman persecution. We would all expect that, wouldn't we?

But the pre-400 texts, as relatively rare as they are, are still comparatively huge in number and they do correspond with the post-persecution texts. As "our crew" rarely point out, the non-Canonical dialogue also supports the massive stability of the primary Christian doctrines as explicitly recorded in Scripture. Writer after writer refer to the Canonical texts in their correspondence and advance theological positions obviously influenced by the 27 books. There is of course a complex tapestry to be uncovered here. Neither PDN nor I are claiming that the 27 books arrived on etched stone from the skies. But its a kind of historical naivety to claim that the Christian message can't be traced back to the generation of the first Easter that can only be maintained in the domain of boards.ie. It isn't shared in the academy or in the church.

Robin wrote:

Consequently, you are betting the work of your life that the first scribes described events with perfect accuracy, and that it remained utterly unchanged for a very long time indeed. The egregious and recent case of L Ron Hubbard is just one case among many which suggests that the disciples of a religious teacher are not always the best people to write wholly accurate biographies.

As such, comments like this are just out of line. PDN, myself, BrianCalgary and others may be Christian leaders who have "bet" their life on the testimony of the Scriptures but we are not claiming that it was "perfect accuracy" in the sense you claim. We are not saying that it has "remained unchanged", which is a shallow cartoonish picture of what we would say. And as I have argued many times, the Gospels and the other New Testament texts have no similarity whatsoever with Scientology's texts. To compare them as you do is to make the catastrophically simple-minded evaluation that since Christianity is a religious movement and Scientology is a religious movement then they must be alike. Underlying it is a religious relativism that you must see is bankrupt. Its like me claiming that Michael Schumacher must be a pretty good golfer since he is an expert in an other sport.

Excelsior

More crucially, to answer the topic at hand, as someone who worships in the Presbyterian church I do sometimes wonder if we live as Christians today utterly ignorant of the fact that our day to day spiritual life would be unimaginable for the average Christian through history. The much vaulted "quiet time" presupposes a private copy of the Bible, for example. Our Word-based communal worship (at least in my tradition) presupposes a familiarity with the text, or more specifically, an ability to comprehend the text as written word. This was impossible in an illiterate, pre-Gutenburg era.

How differently would our debates about the role of Scripture, its authority, its inspiration (issues I touched on in the post above) would be if we remembered that for three quarters of the Church's life we shared Scripture, literally?

Out of interest, what is your view of the Bible?

PDN

daithifleming wrote:

The council of nicaea has original documents still surviving? Source? You are suggesting that the NT wasnt touched? Source?

There are plenty of eye witness accounts of what occurred at Nicea. Source? Just about any history book that deals with the period.

The only people who think Nicea was something to do with defining the canon of Scripture, or that Nicea altered the Bible, are the people who gain their historical 'facts' from mind-rotting fiction like the DaVinci Code. That, IMHO, is like basing your opinions on marine biology on 'Watching Nemo'.

This link compares the facts of Nicea with the fiction: http://www.religionfacts.com/da_vinci_code/nicea.htm

PDN

Sangre wrote:

Wasn't the 1st Council of Nicea in 325? Surely thats a long time in age of memorisation and oral teachings.

I don't understand. A 'long time' from what? What has the Council of Nicea got to do with memorisation and oral teachings? How is this relevant?

PDN

robindch wrote:

Well, the earliest extant NT text, the Codex Vaticanus, has that great marginal note "Hey, twit and fool, leave the old stuff alone and stop changing things!" which suggested that changes were not unknown.

It shows that a quality control system was in place, which would argue against the OP's point, wouldn't it? The consistency among the thousands of handcopied manuscripts still extant shows that the products of the real 'twits and fools' failed to pass quality control.

And while the very high figures you mention are certainly impressive, unfortunately, they vast majority of them refer to texts which were produced after 350 or so, when christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire and the texts were in a position to be copied and distributed widely. Prior to 300 or so, the number of extant texts is very, very small indeed. With the earliest piece of text (two inches by four) from around one century after the events described and no information at all about what happened to the earlier texts.

Of course, by the very nature of things, we should expect more of the later manuscripts to have survived. However, you appear to be missing the point. All of the manuscripts we have, either early or late, show a remarkable consistency and demonstrate that handcopying, prior to the printing press, was not the inaccurate process that the OP tried to portray.

Of course you may choose to believe that for 100 years copyists made all kinds of widespread changes to the text, and then suddenly a revolution took place among copyists so that, overnight, they wonderfully became much more conscientious in their work. To maintain this belief, of course, you have to believe that the sudden revolution in copyists' standards of accuracy somehow conveniently occurred at just the right moment to ensure that you had zero extant manuscripts to support such a wild theory. You are free to believe this if you want, but I think a true skeptic would want evidence to support such a notion.