From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Sun Mar 02 2003 - 06:14:14 EST
Iain Strachan wrote:
>
> Hence Don's claim that the NT is known with better certainty than the OT
> appears to be incorrect. I don't doubt that the variations are just
trivial
> ones in spelling, that don't alter the meaning; but the exact letter
> sequence needs to be correct for the gematria calculations to work. Hence
> we tend only to work on texts where we can be reasonably certain that
there
> are no variations. The OT text may be better preserved because the
scribes
> regarded what they were doing as a sacred duty, and were intent on
> preserving the exact copies. If variations were known, then they would be
> carefully noted.
>
The very paucity of Hebrew manuscripts, along with the major known
discrepancies in existing manuscripts, makes knowing
the original Hebrew text much more problematic than knowing the
original Greek NT text. For the NT we have lots of manuscripts and so we
can judge the kinds of variations that likely existed with a high level of
confidence. By studying all the known variations we can make a good, informed
guess about the original.
If we had only two NT manuscripts, and the two had significant differences, we
couldn't justifiably say that either was close to the original. Lacking
independent evidence to the contrary, we'd have to assume the original would have
come perhaps somewhere between the two.
But this is like the situation we actually have with the OT: The very few
existing manuscripts, including the Hebrew text from which we assume LXX
came, have differences that are often appreciably more significant than most
variations we see in the NT manuscripts. They do alter the meaning. Therefore, where there are differences, it would be risky to
assume that any of the existing manuscripts is close to the original: The
original may have lain somewhere between two that differ. Even if two are
identical and a third differs, we can't assume that the two that are
identical are closer to the original than the third. The samples are too
few.
(Can we assume that the very first sentence of a book would be less
likely to suffer variation than later material? Unfortunately, a quick
glance at the Greek NT indicates this assumption is probably not a good
one.)
Here's a relevant quote from a lengthy old Encyclopaedia Britannica article:
The Dead sea scrolls "...make clear the existence of several textual
traditions even in Hebrew; they have therefore made important contributions
to the textual criticism of the Old Testament, but they have not solved its
fundamental problem. Barring a major discovery of manuscript materials,
this problem is probably insoluble, and the best that can be achieved is an
approximation of the text of the Old Testament."
Don
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