{"id":1587,"date":"2021-03-08T23:23:52","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T05:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=1587"},"modified":"2021-03-08T23:23:52","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T05:23:52","slug":"the-imaginary-original-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/","title":{"rendered":"The Imaginary “Original Text”"},"content":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2021\/03\/istockphoto-1128639883-612x612-1.jpg\")
While the Church has always held that the Scriptures are free from error, within the realm of (particularly American) Protestantism, the concept of the inerrancy of the Scriptures came to take on a particularly pointed character in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries.\u00a0 Having posited the idea of Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures would be, for Protestant communities, the sole infallible rule of faith and life, modern modes of textual criticism became a threat to the entirety of traditional Protestant doctrine.\u00a0 While many conservative Protestant scholars have engaged, to varying degrees, with critical methodology, the defining aspect of their doctrinal conservativism for the past century and a half has been the affirmation that the Scriptures are free from error of any and all kinds.<\/p>\n
In order to make this position tenable, however, in the face of textual and historical evidence, certain qualifications have been made.\u00a0 There are, for example, nearly 6,000 manuscripts of New Testament documents.\u00a0 Every one of these individual manuscripts very clearly contains errors, from misspellings to omitted or added words to whole units of Scripture being missing or relocated.\u00a0 Because, again, Protestantism has historically placed the authority in the text itself, this is a significant problem.\u00a0 Conservative scholars, therefore, will point out that nearly all of these errors are easily identified precisely because of the wealth of textual evidence.\u00a0 None of these errors significantly touches any portion of Christian doctrine.<\/p>\n
The key and foundational qualification, however, which undergirds all the rest, is that the texts which make up the Scriptures are without any sort of error only in the autographs, the originals.\u00a0 The original text was without error, while later copies will have human errors as a result of the copying process.\u00a0 The wide range of manuscripts, it is then asserted, provides the means through comparison and now modern computerized compilation methods to establish the contents of those originals.\u00a0 As one important statement on inerrancy, the Chicago Statement puts it in Article X, “We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.”<\/p>\n
This may, at first blush, seem a perfectly reasonable statement.\u00a0 Pressing it even gently, however, causes it to fall apart in a way that makes it utterly unsuitable to support the super-structure which these scholars seek to base upon it.\u00a0 This assertion is being called upon to create an infallible standard that will then be used to argue that a whole system of doctrine and praxis is directly inspired by God and without error.\u00a0 One problem, immediately, is the phrase “with great accuracy.”\u00a0 To argue that a system of doctrine is true because it reflects an infallible rule “with great accuracy” creates a hole through which one can drive a small caravan of trucks.\u00a0 This is not just a theoretical possibility.\u00a0 It is reflected in the wide range of doctrinal positions and practices held by communities all claiming to be “accurately” following the same infallible rule.\u00a0 The degree to which any translation “faithfully represents” the “accurate” reconstruction of the original wedges this door even further open.\u00a0 Even if a foundation is theoretically solid, an edifice separated from that foundation by a layer of shifting sand will be able to derive none of that solidity.<\/p>\n
This presupposition, indeed this entire approach to the Scriptures, has a far more fatal flaw.\u00a0 Namely, the “original text” here posited to be inerrant is imaginary.\u00a0 It doesn’t exist.\u00a0 Not only is the Bible as a whole a collection of texts which was assembled across a vast span of time, but the individual texts were themselves not the product of a single moment of composition.\u00a0 It is telling that in these discussions of the inerrancy of the Bible, only the New Testament seems to be the subject of discussion.\u00a0 The number of New Testament manuscripts is given.\u00a0 The high degree of confidence about the text of the New Testament is described.\u00a0 The original is described as “what St. Paul wrote,” “what St. John wrote,” “what St. Luke wrote,” etc.\u00a0 As soon as one looks to the Old Testament, these arguments quickly become incoherent.<\/p>\n
While the Torah, or Pentateuch, is Mosaic in origin, the language and style in which our earliest manuscripts are written did not exist at the time of Moses.\u00a0 This means that minimally, these texts have been translated and edited.\u00a0 There are several texts in the Torah that describe Moses writing things (eg. Num 33:1-2).\u00a0 Indeed, there are portions of the Torah, such as the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 32, not coincidentally the first two Odes of the Canon, which appear to date back to the time of Moses in something very close to their present, archaic form.\u00a0 These archaic texts stand out precisely because they are of a centuries older style and composition than the rest of the text, however.\u00a0 In a number of places, the later editing makes itself explicit, for example by listing former and later names for the same place (eg. references to the city of Dan, previously Laish; Gen 14:14; cf. Jdgs 18:29) or referring to elements of narrated events remaining “until this very day” (eg. Deut 34:6).\u00a0 What, then, would constitute “the original text” of the Torah?\u00a0 Only what Moses wrote on tablets?\u00a0 If so, this text is not only utterly lost to us in its details, but is a text which hasn’t held canonical authority in any community, Christian or Jewish, in at least the last 2,500 years.\u00a0 One can point to our earliest or best manuscripts of the Torah, which postdate Moses by more than a millennium.\u00a0 These are not, however, “the original” in any meaningful way, but later heavily edited copies.\u00a0 Minimally, this would be applying a radically different standard to the Old Testament than that applied to the New.<\/p>\n
The book of the Psalms, likewise, consists of independent poetic units, the oldest ones attributed to Moses, others clearly from the time after the exile in Babylon nearly a thousand years later.\u00a0 Within the book of Psalms, there are five \u2018books\u2019 of the psalter, representing smaller collections of psalms that were later brought together to form the Biblical book as we now know it.\u00a0 Even within that finished book, however, the numbering of the Psalms differs in Hebrew and Greek because some psalm texts are united in one and divided in the other.\u00a0 The book of Proverbs is likewise a compilation of smaller compilations.\u00a0 What constitutes the “original” Psalm or Proverb?\u00a0 It’s original written, independent existence?\u00a0 Its first compilation?\u00a0 Its eventual final compilation into the canonical book?\u00a0 Only the first manuscript of that collection?<\/p>\n
The same difficulties hold true in the prophetic literature.\u00a0 We are told that Isaiah\u2019s prophecies were written and collected by his disciples (Isa 8:16-20).\u00a0 Isaiah did not write the book as a single act, and there is good evidence in our present book of Isaiah that it consists of more than one collection of Isaiah\u2019s prophecies brought together into one text.\u00a0 The book of Jeremiah exists in the original Hebrew in two distinct forms which are approximately one-third different in their texts, in addition to the other Jeremiah material, the books of Lamentations, Baruch, and Jeremiah\u2019s epistle.\u00a0 Are Isaiah’s spoken words the original?\u00a0 Their first recording?\u00a0 Their initial compilation?\u00a0 What about the narrative material written by Isaiah’s disciples to link and contextualize his statements?\u00a0 Are these elements of Isaiah subsidiary in authority or do they constitute part of “the original”?<\/p>\n
That the Christian Old Testament is the product of a millennium and a half long process is therefore obvious to the honest observer of the material.\u00a0 That the New Testament is the product of a similar process is perhaps less obvious.\u00a0 People tend to imagine St. Paul sitting down to write his letters to the churches, or St. John sitting down to write his Gospel, composing it as a single action.\u00a0 This is not accurate.\u00a0 We know that St. Paul did not hand-write his epistles as he states at certain points that he is writing \u2018with his own hand\u2019 and that this can be seen by the size of the letters (Gal 6:11, 2 Thess 3:17).\u00a0 Normally, St. Paul utilized a sort of secretary, known as an amanuensis<\/em> (Rom 16:22, 1 Cor 16:21, Col 4:18).\u00a0 The typical process for the composition of such an epistle would have been for St. Paul to deliver it orally to the secretary who wrote it down and would provide corrections for good written style and grammar.\u00a0 The author would then review the text, making any corrections he deemed necessary, and then the letter would be delivered by another person, who would read the letter aloud to the community to which it was written, and be expected to be able to answer questions regarding its content.<\/p>\nIn addition to this composition process, by the end of the first century, St. Paul\u2019s letters had been gathered into a collection and were circulating in that collected form.\u00a0 All of our extant manuscripts of the epistles come from this collection.\u00a0 This collection also involved editing.\u00a0 What we now call 2 Corinthians, for example, includes at least two of St. Paul\u2019s epistles edited together.\u00a0 Although many of the Fathers believed that someone other than St. Paul wrote the epistle to the Hebrews, it is still traditionally ascribed to St. Paul because it has circulated, from the beginning, as part of this collection.\u00a0 What, then, is the “original” of a Pauline epistle?\u00a0 Is it the words that left St. Paul’s mouth?\u00a0 The way they were recorded or edited by him in cooperation with his secretary?\u00a0 Is it the epistle as it was eventually collected and utilized in the earliest churches?<\/p>\n
What has been said here about St. Paul\u2019s epistles could be said as well for the other New Testament texts.\u00a0 Like St. Paul\u2019s epistles, the four Gospels and the general epistles were collected and circulated as collections from at least the year AD 150.\u00a0 St. Luke describes his process in the composition of Luke\/Acts as having compiled information from various eyewitness sources.\u00a0 Additionally, there are two versions of Luke-Acts found among Biblical manuscripts that are of considerably different lengths.\u00a0 One common thesis as to how this came about is that the longer form of these texts represents a sort of \u2018second edition\u2019 also written by St. Luke.\u00a0 Further, somewhat less than half of our extant manuscripts are lectionaries.\u00a0 While printed New Testaments typically ignore these manuscripts (the Patriarchal text utilizes solely lectionaries, but only 10% of those extant), they are some of our earliest textual witnesses.\u00a0 They preserve the text, however, out of order and with added words and phrases of introduction and conclusion.\u00a0 These texts sometimes build composite readings from multiple parts of a book or even multiple books.<\/p>\n
All of this is to say that it is not enough to state that a theoretical \u2018original\u2019 version of the texts which make up the Scriptures was inspired or breathed out by the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 In the case of most of the texts in question, it is difficult to even determine what this \u2018original\u2019 text would be.\u00a0 The text as it came to exist in the author\u2019s mind?\u00a0 What left his mouth?\u00a0 What was first written?\u00a0 What was produced following the initial edit?\u00a0 Later edits?\u00a0 The text as it existed in the earliest collections?\u00a0 The text as it existed at some particular point in the history of the church?\u00a0 The text produced by a particular translation?\u00a0 Unless this text is one that actually exists and can be agreed upon in its details, then any claims about that hypothetical text are essentially meaningless.\u00a0 This includes the statement that this imaginary text is without error.\u00a0 Nothing stable can be built on the product of pure fantasy and imagination.<\/p>\n
This approach to the Scriptures falls apart because it is based on a false presupposition.\u00a0 That presupposition is that the authority of the Scriptures is vested in the text itself, the (in the case of the Old Testament often unknown) author, or some combination of the two.\u00a0 The authority of Scripture, however, is the authority of the Spirit who breathed it out.\u00a0 This action of the Spirit is not limited to the moment(s) that Scriptural texts were inspired or first written, but rather continues through the entire process of copying, transmission, editing, and compilation throughout the centuries.\u00a0 Just as God’s activity in creation did not cease after the initial creation of the world, but has continued and will continue, so also the Spirit’s work in and through the Holy Scriptures.\u00a0 The conservative scholars cited at the beginning of this post would not, by and large, disagree with these statements regarding the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 In fact, in other places and in various ways, they frequently affirm them.\u00a0 Nonetheless, they posit the existence of a reliable, truly inerrant, inspired text at only two points in church history: the time of initial composition and then in our own era in which we can reconstruct that “original text” through our technological tools and wealth of textual data.<\/p>\n
The natural consequence of belief in the Holy Spirit’s ongoing inspiration and providential guidance of the Scriptures within the Church is that the Church has always had, at every point, a Bible guided inspired by the Spirit.\u00a0 St. John Chrysostom’s New Testament was not less reliable or more prone to errors than mine, despite his lack of digital tools and an academic press.\u00a0 Every century has had the Bible provided for it by the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 What produces the disconnect, then, in statements on inerrancy by Protestant scholarship?\u00a0 The affirmation of the Holy Spirit’s active and infallible guidance of the Church through the centuries has consequences beyond the text of the Scriptures alone.\u00a0 It is worth noting that all of the nearly 6,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts in Greek are Orthodox Christian Bibles.\u00a0 Part and parcel of the affirmation of the work of the Spirit in guiding and preserving the Scriptures is that the Spirit was working and guiding the Orthodox Church in the East through all of those centuries.<\/p>\n
Once this is affirmed about the text of the Scriptures, then it becomes difficult to argue that this work of the Spirit had no effect on the interpretation of the Scriptures in those same communities.\u00a0 Once it is realized that the same Spirit who inspired the Scriptures also guided the Church to recognize those texts as Scripture over the course of centuries, it becomes difficult to argue that, for example, the Spirit did not do the same thing with conciliar gatherings of the Church, or the recognition of church fathers, or the recognition of orthodoxy over against heresy.\u00a0 Protestantism qua<\/em> Protestantism is required to reject all of these later conceptions regarding councils, fathers, and the Church even while she is required, both doctrinally and honesty to history, to affirm them about the Scriptures.\u00a0 Conjuring the phantasm of an original text does nothing circumvent these difficulties.<\/p>\nThe Holy Scriptures are not a single entity with a single, verifiable form existing unchanging through the centuries.\u00a0 The Holy Scriptures are themselves a tradition.\u00a0 As such, there is no coherent way to separate the tradition of the Scriptures from the rest of Holy Tradition; to separate the “textual” element of the life of the Spirit from the rest of the Spirit’s life and work in the historical community of Christ.\u00a0 This understanding of Scripture within the Church is not a lower view of Scripture than that held by conservative Protestant scholars.\u00a0 If anything, it is the opposite.\u00a0 It is to cease to approach the Scriptures with a grammatical, historical, critical, ultimately archaeological method as an ancient relic.\u00a0 It is to begin again to approach the Scriptures as a living text which participates in the life of the Holy Spirit within the Church and the world, both the same and always new in every generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While the Church has always held that the Scriptures are free from error, within the realm of (particularly American) Protestantism, the concept of the inerrancy of the Scriptures came to take on a particularly pointed character in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries.\u00a0 Having posited the idea of Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures would be, for Protestant communities, the sole infallible rule of faith and life, modern modes of textual criticism became a threat to the entirety of traditional Protestant doctrine.\u00a0 While many conservative Protestant scholars have engaged, to varying degrees, with critical methodology, the defining aspect of their doctrinal conservativism for the past century and a half has been the affirmation that the Scriptures are free from error\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"The Imaginary "Original Text" - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Imaginary "Original Text" - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While the Church has always held that the Scriptures are free from error, within the realm of (particularly American) Protestantism, the concept of the inerrancy of the Scriptures came to take on a particularly pointed character in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries.\u00a0 Having posited the idea of Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures would be, for Protestant communities, the sole infallible rule of faith and life, modern modes of textual criticism became a threat to the entirety of traditional Protestant doctrine.\u00a0 While many conservative Protestant scholars have engaged, to varying degrees, with critical methodology, the defining aspect of their doctrinal conservativism for the past century and a half has been the affirmation that the Scriptures are free from error\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-03-09T05:23:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2021\/03\/istockphoto-1128639883-612x612-1.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"12 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/\",\"name\":\"The Imaginary \\\"Original Text\\\" - The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2021\/03\/istockphoto-1128639883-612x612-1.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-03-09T05:23:52+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-03-09T05:23:52+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2021\/03\/istockphoto-1128639883-612x612-1.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2021\/03\/istockphoto-1128639883-612x612-1.jpg\",\"width\":459,\"height\":314},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2021\/03\/08\/the-imaginary-original-text\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Imaginary “Original Text”\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\",\"name\":\"The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"description\":\"The Scriptures in the Orthodox Church\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\",\"name\":\"Fr. 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Stephen De Young","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/54dc899af5499978d3770526996cf817d0a8e3c9e776a06507dd686f6923d420?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/54dc899af5499978d3770526996cf817d0a8e3c9e776a06507dd686f6923d420?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Fr. Stephen De Young"},"description":"The V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young is Pastor of Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. He holds Master's degrees in theology, philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, and a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Amridge University. Fr. Stephen is also the host of the Whole Counsel of God podcast from Ancient Faith and author of four books, the Religion of the Apostles, God is a Man of War, the Whole Counsel of God, Apocrypha, and Saint Paul the Pharisee. 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