RE: How do theists justify the translations of the scriptures?
October 15, 2019 at 3:06 pm
(This post was last modified: October 15, 2019 at 3:08 pm by mordant.)
Dritch is oversimplifying things as usual. He is describing certain historic collections of manuscripts rather than the current known universe of manuscripts, which is all that textual criticism legitimately concerns itself with today. Some parts of scripture have attestation in hundreds of manuscripts, some (small) fragments as far back as the mid 2nd century. We can look at that sentence by sentence and classify all the differences in the manuscripts. And there are MANY discrepancies; it's just that they're not very consequential.
In the 2 to 3 centuries prior to Westcott and Hort (1890 or so) many translations of the Bible were based on the Textus Receptus. After W&H, we had various discoveries including the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc., but most 20th century translations are based on W&H and this draws on a much larger corpus of known manuscripts than the TR. Yet, the resulting translations have not caused some sort of theological crisis. A handful of verses have shifted a bit in meaning, and that's about it. This, more than anything else, suggests to me that one can have reasonable confidence that currently available manuscripts reflect substantially what the originals did, even assuming for the sake of argument that there are discrete original manuscripts rather than a gradual committing of a prior oral tradition to writing.
Again, though, it's all for naught, as the substantive content of all these manuscripts is fabulist nonsense with all sorts of internal contradictions, anyway. I rejected late 20th century evangelical Christian dogma based on it not being even a poor explanation or prediction of lived experience -- not on the basis that its urtext was from a faulty or questionable source. Bullshit is bullshit, regardless of how it evolved to be bullshit and -- importantly -- on how the bullshit interpretation of the bullshit evolved.
In the 2 to 3 centuries prior to Westcott and Hort (1890 or so) many translations of the Bible were based on the Textus Receptus. After W&H, we had various discoveries including the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc., but most 20th century translations are based on W&H and this draws on a much larger corpus of known manuscripts than the TR. Yet, the resulting translations have not caused some sort of theological crisis. A handful of verses have shifted a bit in meaning, and that's about it. This, more than anything else, suggests to me that one can have reasonable confidence that currently available manuscripts reflect substantially what the originals did, even assuming for the sake of argument that there are discrete original manuscripts rather than a gradual committing of a prior oral tradition to writing.
Again, though, it's all for naught, as the substantive content of all these manuscripts is fabulist nonsense with all sorts of internal contradictions, anyway. I rejected late 20th century evangelical Christian dogma based on it not being even a poor explanation or prediction of lived experience -- not on the basis that its urtext was from a faulty or questionable source. Bullshit is bullshit, regardless of how it evolved to be bullshit and -- importantly -- on how the bullshit interpretation of the bullshit evolved.
