Part 4
In his text Brown only names one particular mystery religion alleged to provide a source for Christian beliefs (see below), but in general, this can be said in reply:
The taking over of symbolism is true – but signifies ideological victory, not borrowing. Note to begin with that we are talking here not of apostolic Christianity of the first century, but of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.
What we see here is not so much “borrowing” but a sort of advertising campaign, or a type of artistic one-upmanship. The pagan deity Mithra was depicted slaying the bull while riding its back; the church did a lookalike scene with Samson killing a lion. Mithra sent arrows into a rock to bring forth water; the church changed that into Moses getting water from the rock at Horeb.
Why was this done?
It was done because this was an age when art usually was imitative. This is because the people of the New Testament world thought in terms of what could be "probabilities," or verification from general or prior experience. Imitation was a way of asserting your superiority: “Mithra is not the real hero. Samson is. Ignore Mithra.” “This mystery religion uses a miter as a sign of power. Well, we have the true power. We claim the miter for our own.” Note that the borrowing only involved art and ritual – it did not involve borrowing of ideology.
Now in terms of the only specific mystery religion Brown names, Mithraism:
The pre-Christian God Mithras – called the Son of God and the Light of the World – was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.
Not surprisingly, scholars of Mithraism know nothing of any of this. Let’s look at the claims one at a time:
He was called the Son of God and the Light of the World. This is simply false. I have previously surveyed Mithraic studies literature and neither of these titles is noted by Mithraic scholars.
He was born on December 25. This may be true, but it is of no relevance, for the New Testament does not associate Dec. 25th with Jesus’ birth at all. When the Christian Church chose December 25 as the birthday celebration for Jesus Christ, they did so in direct opposition to the pagan mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, not because they believed Jesus was born, like the pagan god(s), on that date.
He died,and was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. This is simply false. The Mithraic scholar Richard Gordon says plainly that there is “no death of Mithras – which means, there can be no burial of Mithras, and no resurrection of Mithras, either. Some amateur writers cite the church writer of the fourth century, Firmicus, who says that the Mithraists mourn the image of a dead Mithras; but this is far too late to have influenced Christianity (if anything, the influence was the other way around) and after reading the work of Firmicus, I found no such reference at all. More relevant perhaps is the late second-century church writer Tertullian's Prescription Against Heretics, chapter 40 which says, "if my memory still serves me, Mithra…sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers; celebrates also the oblation of bread, and introduces an image of a resurrection, and before a sword wreathes a crown…" The argument therefore relies on Tertullian's memory, and it isn't the initiates of Mithra, but Mithra, himself who introduces an “image” of a resurrection(?) – he is not “resurrected” himself.
Therefore, the comment of Brown’s character is a dismally erroneous assessment of what is reported by Mithraic scholarship.
“Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.”
This is also simply false. All available evidence indicates that Christianity was honoring Sunday long before Constantine. Brown is perhaps confused because certain New Testament passages, for example, record Paul going to the synagogue on the Sabbath to preach to the Jews (if one wants to preach to the Jews and the Gentile God-fearers who attended with them, then it is logical to look for them where they are found - on the Sabbath, in the synagogue!). However, it is clear that Christian observations are held on the “first day of the week” (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2; cf. Rev. 1:10), and there is also ample evidence of Sunday being observed well before Constantine:
1. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (110 AD), wrote: "If, then, those who walk in the ancient practices attain to newness of hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but fashioning their lives after the Lord's Day on which our life also arose through Him, that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.” Ignatius specifies the "Lord's Day" as the one on which "our life arises through Him" -- the resurrection day, which was a Sunday.
2. Justin Martyr (150 AD) describes Sunday as the day when Christians gather to read the scriptures and hold their assembly because it is both the initial day of creation and the day of the resurrection.
3. The Epistle of Barnabas (120-150) cites Isaiah 1:13 and indicates that the "eighth day" is a new beginning via the resurrection, and is the day to be kept
4. The Didache (70-75) instructs believers: "On the Lord's own day, gather yourselves together and break bread and give thanks."
5. Other later testimonies from Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Pliny the Younger, which pre-date Constantine significantly, testify that Christians worshipped on Sunday.
So once again, Brown’s “historian” receives a dismal grade in history.
Part 5 Coming Soon...........
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Saturday, May 13, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 3)
Teabing goes on, with more specific claims:
“Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen….Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land….More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament,and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
Was Jesus a figure of “staggering influence” about whom “thousands of followers” wrote? The answers to these questions is, “No, not exactly,” and “No, not that the evidence would allow.”
Jesus became a figure of “staggering influence” only AFTER the Christian church became a prominent force. As far as the historians of the day were concerned, Jesus was just a "blip" on the screen. Jesus was not considered to be historically significant by historians of his time. He did not address the Roman Senate, or write extensive Greek philosophical treatises; He never traveled outside of the regions of Palestine, and was not a member of any known political party. It is only because Christians later made Jesus a "celebrity" that He became known. Historian E. P. Sanders, comparing Jesus to Alexander the Great, notes that the latter "so greatly altered the political situation in a large part of the world that the main outline of his public life is very well known indeed.
Jesus did not change the social, political and economic circumstances in Palestine ..the superiority of evidence for Jesus is seen when we ask what he thought.” Jesus was also executed as a criminal, providing him with the ultimate “marginality”. He lived an offensive lifestyle and alienated many people. He associated with the despised and rejected: Tax collectors, prostitutes, and the band of fishermen He had as disciples. Finally, he was a poor,rural person in a land run by wealthy urbanites. The idea that Jesus had a ‘staggering influence” during his own life on earth is completely in error, which means that he could not have had “thousands of followers” to write authoritative biographies.
In fact, three or four biographies would be the most we should expect – especially since 90 to 95 percent of all ancient persons were illiterate and unable to write such a work to begin with!
Were there eighty Gospels out of which four were chosen? If this is so, then we are justified in asking several questions:
1) What are the dates of the manuscripts of the “excluded” Gospels?
If we are to consider any such work, we need to know how close it is to the time when Jesus lived. One way of determining this is to know what the earliest manuscript of it is. When we look at the evidence (sadly,evidence doesn’t seem to bother Brown in the least), we find that while there is near universal Christian knowledge and acceptance of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John)
by the middle of the second century, none of the non-canonical Gospels were even close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance. These were, for the most part, pseudo-gospels attributed to other Apostles but generally disqualified by most churches because they had no historical “chain of evidence” actually connecting them to real Apostles,and/or because they made claims that were contrary to what was already accepted in the canonical Gospels. This issue is also well known among Biblical scholars and information is easily obtainable in books written on a lay level such as Norman Geisler and William Nix’s A General
Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986) or online in sources such documented by the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia’s documents at
http://www.reference-guides.com/isbe/B/BIBLE_THE_IV_CANONICITY/ .
2) Is there any evidence of this “excluded” Gospel being used at an earlier date?
It is also useful to find citations of a work in contemporary writers, for if they quote a work, that is evidence that it existed at the time of their writing. Although there may have been as many as 50 pseudepigraphal gospels, most are known only by name from a few isolated statements by early church writers. The most significant ones are well known and the reasons they were never accepted by the majority of the church is well known and has never been kept secret by any
hierarchy. Geisler and Nix provide lay readers with a good summary of this issue in their book referenced above (pages 297-317) saying, “the extra-canonical literature, taken as a whole,manifests a surprising poverty. The bulk of it is legendary, and bears the clear mark of a forgery. Only here and there amid a mass of worthless rubbish, do we come across a priceless jewel” (311). In fact, that “priceless jewel” in almost every instance is a mere repetition of what we find in one or more of the canonical Gospels.
3) Does the context cohere with what we would expect of the historical Jesus?
In other words,if Jesus is said to open a “refrigerator” and take out a “burrito” and put it in a “microwave oven,” then we can be fairly sure that it does not accurately report the activities of a Jesus living in the first century. For example, in the Gospel of the Ebionites we find that John the Baptist didn’t eat honey and locusts, as the canonical Gospels record, but only honey. The Ebionites were vegetarians and didn’t let the truth get in the way of their dietary agenda. The
Gospel of Peter laid the blame for the crucifixion solely at the feet of the Jews, exonerating the Romans – an anti-Semitic stance Brown should consider intolerable. The very “Gospels” Brown brings forth to undermine the consistent story of the canonical Gospels promote teachings completely contrary to the “secret” Christianity Brown says they represented! It is this sort of data that scholars take into account when deciding whether a document is an authoritative source. In this chapter Brown does not name any of the other Gospels he has in mind, but he will name two of them in a later chapter, and we will address them in our discussion of those chapters. In closing, it is worth noting that Brown’s putative historian perpetrates two enormous blunders that would be an embarrassment to any scholar:
“Fortunately for historians…some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.”
First, as I explained to the woman at the bookstore, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, not in the 1950s. (Note for those with problems: Three times I have had people write me claiming that Brown is right here because Dead Sea Scrolls continued to be discovered into the 1950s. But this is clearly not what Brown intends to report: If it were, he would have said that they were found beginning in 1947 and through the 1950s; as it is, his claim here remains a blunder. In addition, I have noted with satisfaction that two different experts in Burstein's
guidebook [see below] peg Brown for exactly the same error.)
Second, they did not contain any “gospels” or anything mentioning Jesus. They overwhelmingly predate the New Testament and are mostly copies of Old Testament books, and internal documents for the Qumran community. Brown also has his character allege that the Vatican “tried very hard to suppress the release of these Scrolls” because they contained damaging information. This is merely an obnoxious conspiracy
theory found in popular writers, with no basis in fact. Again, the evidence concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls has been written about in so many books, journals, and articles, many on a lay level, that Brown can only make his erroneous statements with a complete disregard for the facts. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that promotes either traditional or deviant Christianity. The community at Qumran responsible for the Scrolls was not Christian, but Jewish. While the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing directly about Christianity, they do provide two important substantiations of traditional Christianity.
First, the texts of the Old Testament preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with verification that the Old Testament preserved by Jews and Christians throughout the centuries after Christ was an accurate rendition of what was known to Jews of Jesus’ day.
Second, the community at Qumran reflects a first century Judaism much more like that depicted by the New Testament writers than it does the Judaism that developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in A. D. 70. Those who speculated in times past that the Judaism presented in the New Testament was a later invention by Christian opposers to Judaism were refuted by what we have learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Did Constantine decide the canon? How did the process work?.
Constantine was not the decider of the canon, and played in fact no role at all in its assembly; the church at large was the party responsible. The process of canonizing the New Testament was based on a model that had existed for centuries whereby various religions chose a collection of normative sacred books. It is
likely that Paul himself began the process by collecting his own letters, or that one of his friends like Luke or Timothy did so. Far from being an arbitrary process, or one decided upon by Constantine much later, the formation of the canon was the result of carefully-weighed choices over time by concerned church officials and members. Later votes on the canon were merely the most definitive steps taken at the end of a long and careful, sometimes difficult, process.
Biblical scholar Robert Grant, in The Formation of the New Testament, writes that the New Testament canon was:...not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians. It reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these 27 diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God's revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church. To claim that Constantine was behind the canon, or was responsible for destroying Gospels he did not approve of, is a ludicrous distortion of history.
In fact, Constantine convened the Council at Nicea, paid the travel expenses of those who attended, and provided his summer lake palace for the site, but he had no ecclesiastical authority at all. The information we have on the Council is fascinating and in no way supports the idea of a pagan Roman’s overthrow of “early
Christianity” or any conspiracy. A good introduction to the facts about the Council is available in the Summer 1996 issue of Christian History magazine, “Heresy in the Early Church,” at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/51h/.
“The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”
Stay tuned for Part 4. Coming soon......
“Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen….Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land….More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament,and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
Was Jesus a figure of “staggering influence” about whom “thousands of followers” wrote? The answers to these questions is, “No, not exactly,” and “No, not that the evidence would allow.”
Jesus became a figure of “staggering influence” only AFTER the Christian church became a prominent force. As far as the historians of the day were concerned, Jesus was just a "blip" on the screen. Jesus was not considered to be historically significant by historians of his time. He did not address the Roman Senate, or write extensive Greek philosophical treatises; He never traveled outside of the regions of Palestine, and was not a member of any known political party. It is only because Christians later made Jesus a "celebrity" that He became known. Historian E. P. Sanders, comparing Jesus to Alexander the Great, notes that the latter "so greatly altered the political situation in a large part of the world that the main outline of his public life is very well known indeed.
Jesus did not change the social, political and economic circumstances in Palestine ..the superiority of evidence for Jesus is seen when we ask what he thought.” Jesus was also executed as a criminal, providing him with the ultimate “marginality”. He lived an offensive lifestyle and alienated many people. He associated with the despised and rejected: Tax collectors, prostitutes, and the band of fishermen He had as disciples. Finally, he was a poor,rural person in a land run by wealthy urbanites. The idea that Jesus had a ‘staggering influence” during his own life on earth is completely in error, which means that he could not have had “thousands of followers” to write authoritative biographies.
In fact, three or four biographies would be the most we should expect – especially since 90 to 95 percent of all ancient persons were illiterate and unable to write such a work to begin with!
Were there eighty Gospels out of which four were chosen? If this is so, then we are justified in asking several questions:
1) What are the dates of the manuscripts of the “excluded” Gospels?
If we are to consider any such work, we need to know how close it is to the time when Jesus lived. One way of determining this is to know what the earliest manuscript of it is. When we look at the evidence (sadly,evidence doesn’t seem to bother Brown in the least), we find that while there is near universal Christian knowledge and acceptance of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John)
by the middle of the second century, none of the non-canonical Gospels were even close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance. These were, for the most part, pseudo-gospels attributed to other Apostles but generally disqualified by most churches because they had no historical “chain of evidence” actually connecting them to real Apostles,and/or because they made claims that were contrary to what was already accepted in the canonical Gospels. This issue is also well known among Biblical scholars and information is easily obtainable in books written on a lay level such as Norman Geisler and William Nix’s A General
Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986) or online in sources such documented by the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia’s documents at
http://www.reference-guides.com/isbe/B/BIBLE_THE_IV_CANONICITY/ .
2) Is there any evidence of this “excluded” Gospel being used at an earlier date?
It is also useful to find citations of a work in contemporary writers, for if they quote a work, that is evidence that it existed at the time of their writing. Although there may have been as many as 50 pseudepigraphal gospels, most are known only by name from a few isolated statements by early church writers. The most significant ones are well known and the reasons they were never accepted by the majority of the church is well known and has never been kept secret by any
hierarchy. Geisler and Nix provide lay readers with a good summary of this issue in their book referenced above (pages 297-317) saying, “the extra-canonical literature, taken as a whole,manifests a surprising poverty. The bulk of it is legendary, and bears the clear mark of a forgery. Only here and there amid a mass of worthless rubbish, do we come across a priceless jewel” (311). In fact, that “priceless jewel” in almost every instance is a mere repetition of what we find in one or more of the canonical Gospels.
3) Does the context cohere with what we would expect of the historical Jesus?
In other words,if Jesus is said to open a “refrigerator” and take out a “burrito” and put it in a “microwave oven,” then we can be fairly sure that it does not accurately report the activities of a Jesus living in the first century. For example, in the Gospel of the Ebionites we find that John the Baptist didn’t eat honey and locusts, as the canonical Gospels record, but only honey. The Ebionites were vegetarians and didn’t let the truth get in the way of their dietary agenda. The
Gospel of Peter laid the blame for the crucifixion solely at the feet of the Jews, exonerating the Romans – an anti-Semitic stance Brown should consider intolerable. The very “Gospels” Brown brings forth to undermine the consistent story of the canonical Gospels promote teachings completely contrary to the “secret” Christianity Brown says they represented! It is this sort of data that scholars take into account when deciding whether a document is an authoritative source. In this chapter Brown does not name any of the other Gospels he has in mind, but he will name two of them in a later chapter, and we will address them in our discussion of those chapters. In closing, it is worth noting that Brown’s putative historian perpetrates two enormous blunders that would be an embarrassment to any scholar:
“Fortunately for historians…some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.”
First, as I explained to the woman at the bookstore, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, not in the 1950s. (Note for those with problems: Three times I have had people write me claiming that Brown is right here because Dead Sea Scrolls continued to be discovered into the 1950s. But this is clearly not what Brown intends to report: If it were, he would have said that they were found beginning in 1947 and through the 1950s; as it is, his claim here remains a blunder. In addition, I have noted with satisfaction that two different experts in Burstein's
guidebook [see below] peg Brown for exactly the same error.)
Second, they did not contain any “gospels” or anything mentioning Jesus. They overwhelmingly predate the New Testament and are mostly copies of Old Testament books, and internal documents for the Qumran community. Brown also has his character allege that the Vatican “tried very hard to suppress the release of these Scrolls” because they contained damaging information. This is merely an obnoxious conspiracy
theory found in popular writers, with no basis in fact. Again, the evidence concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls has been written about in so many books, journals, and articles, many on a lay level, that Brown can only make his erroneous statements with a complete disregard for the facts. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that promotes either traditional or deviant Christianity. The community at Qumran responsible for the Scrolls was not Christian, but Jewish. While the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing directly about Christianity, they do provide two important substantiations of traditional Christianity.
First, the texts of the Old Testament preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with verification that the Old Testament preserved by Jews and Christians throughout the centuries after Christ was an accurate rendition of what was known to Jews of Jesus’ day.
Second, the community at Qumran reflects a first century Judaism much more like that depicted by the New Testament writers than it does the Judaism that developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in A. D. 70. Those who speculated in times past that the Judaism presented in the New Testament was a later invention by Christian opposers to Judaism were refuted by what we have learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Did Constantine decide the canon? How did the process work?.
Constantine was not the decider of the canon, and played in fact no role at all in its assembly; the church at large was the party responsible. The process of canonizing the New Testament was based on a model that had existed for centuries whereby various religions chose a collection of normative sacred books. It is
likely that Paul himself began the process by collecting his own letters, or that one of his friends like Luke or Timothy did so. Far from being an arbitrary process, or one decided upon by Constantine much later, the formation of the canon was the result of carefully-weighed choices over time by concerned church officials and members. Later votes on the canon were merely the most definitive steps taken at the end of a long and careful, sometimes difficult, process.
Biblical scholar Robert Grant, in The Formation of the New Testament, writes that the New Testament canon was:...not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians. It reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these 27 diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God's revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church. To claim that Constantine was behind the canon, or was responsible for destroying Gospels he did not approve of, is a ludicrous distortion of history.
In fact, Constantine convened the Council at Nicea, paid the travel expenses of those who attended, and provided his summer lake palace for the site, but he had no ecclesiastical authority at all. The information we have on the Council is fascinating and in no way supports the idea of a pagan Roman’s overthrow of “early
Christianity” or any conspiracy. A good introduction to the facts about the Council is available in the Summer 1996 issue of Christian History magazine, “Heresy in the Early Church,” at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/51h/.
“The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”
Stay tuned for Part 4. Coming soon......
Sunday, May 07, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 2)
Brown’s imaginary arguments undermining the trustworthiness of the Biblical text are so unsophisticated and off the mark that one example will suffice to show his inadequacies.
In Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, Biblical scholar Maurice Casey examines the process of Mark's use of Aramaic sources in composing his Greek Gospel and offers a list of inevitable complications of translation and bilingualism and actual examples in practice. How a bilingual learns a language -- and how they keep up with it -- inevitably affects their translation ability.
There is a vast difference between a person who grows up with both languages (and may therefore be less proficient in both of them) and a person who learned a second language, and did not use their first language for many years. A modern scholar who learns ancient Greek or Hebrew must encounter similar difficulties. As Casey puts it, "All bilinguals suffer from interference," and translators more so. A few of examples offered by Casey bring this point home:
Bilinguals "often use a linguistic item more frequently because it has a close parallel in their other language." Thus: "...Danish students are reported using the English definite article more often than monoglot speakers of English. This reflects 'the fact that Danish and English seem to have slightly different conceptions of what constitutes generic as opposed to specific reference.' " Or: "...there is a tendency for English loanwords among speakers of Austrian German to be feminine -- die Road, die Yard, etc. -- and this is probably due to the similarity in sound between the German die and the accented form of English 'the', whereas the German masculine der and neuter das sound different."
When a source text is culture-specific, there is great need for changes to make the text intelligible. The example of how two German editions of Alice and Wonderland translated a particular passage differently serves well:
“Perhaps it doesn't understand English,” thought Alice, “I dare say it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.”
One edition substituted "English" so that the translation simply said that the mouse did not understand much, and to make the reference to William the Conqueror intelligible, added a phrase about William coming from England. A different translation made the language not understood by the mouse into German, and changed William the Conqueror into Napoleon. There were thus two different methods used to make the text intelligible to native readers.
A German person on a bus asks a person next to an empty seat, "Ist dieser Platz frei?" It is literally in English, "Is this place free?" But an English person would say, "Is this seat taken?" Or, a polite request in Polish to a distinguished guest to take a seat is literally, in English, "Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit!" The "short imperative" to "Sit!" sounds "like a command rather than a polite request" made to someone unruly rather than to a distinguished guest.
Translating Dickens into German, there is a phrase in The Olde Curiosity Shop where a character speaks of it being "a fine week for ducks." English speakers naturally know this to mean it was a rainy week. A German translator however concluded that for us, "a fine week for ducks" meant it was a fine week to go hunting for them!
Such then are typical problems of translating from one language to another. The sort of exhaustive knowledge required to perform an exact translation is simply beyond the understanding of most people, and presents a practical impossibility. This does not mean we must press a panic button over not being able to provide “definitive” translations of every single word immediately, giving us the full range of meaning implied in every word, but nevertheless enough to be reasonably certain of what is being said. Even the examples above clearly transmit the main meaning of the passage, even if some nuance is lost to non-native speakers. Linguistic studies continue to be performed to this day giving us new insight into ancient languages. This is so not only for Biblical languages, but other ancient languages like Latin, and a professional historian, unlike our fictional Teabing, would never offer such a ridiculously generalized statement.
Additions and revisions are also of no more issue than those found in any other document. Again, without a specific “addition” or “revision” to address, we can only offer some general points. There are a number of “checkpoints” that give us a reasonable certainty of what the Bible originally said when written. The first set of checkpoints come through the process called textual criticism. Put simply, scholars collect and compare copies of the work in question, work out their relative ages, and by this means decide what the likeliest reading of the original document was. In terms of evidence, it is common to speak of the “embarrassing” wealth of evidence we have for the text of the New Testament, comprised of over 24,000 copies or pieces of manuscripts, some dating as early as the second and third century. In contrast, consider that the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, writing about 100 AD, are attested to by a mere handful of manuscripts (less than a dozen) which date to a far later time at the earliest (the eleventh century!).
The Old Testament does not have quite as much or the same quality of manuscript evidence, but does still exceed significantly what is available from the likes of Tacitus and most other ancient works. On this basis, it is difficult to justify any claim that we do not possess a “definitive” idea of what the Bible actually said in its originals, or autographa, unless one wants to throw out all other ancient writings with it.
In terms of revisions, ancient writers did have justifiable reasons for performing certain types of revisions: As language changed or as certain facts become less known, it would become necessary to adjust the text in order for it to remain coherent to later readers. The Greek historian Herodotus, for example, used Greek measurement units to report weight, currency, and distance which would not have been used by the people of the places he reported upon. He does this even when translating inscriptions made by the people he is studying. Such revisions are very easy to discern and are not as problem for arriving at a “definitive” version of the biblical text.
Moreover, they should not be mistaken for wholesale content-revisions, or changes in ideology, and they were certainly not “countless,” if we are to have any respect at all for the evidence provided by textual criticism.
In Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, Biblical scholar Maurice Casey examines the process of Mark's use of Aramaic sources in composing his Greek Gospel and offers a list of inevitable complications of translation and bilingualism and actual examples in practice. How a bilingual learns a language -- and how they keep up with it -- inevitably affects their translation ability.
There is a vast difference between a person who grows up with both languages (and may therefore be less proficient in both of them) and a person who learned a second language, and did not use their first language for many years. A modern scholar who learns ancient Greek or Hebrew must encounter similar difficulties. As Casey puts it, "All bilinguals suffer from interference," and translators more so. A few of examples offered by Casey bring this point home:
Bilinguals "often use a linguistic item more frequently because it has a close parallel in their other language." Thus: "...Danish students are reported using the English definite article more often than monoglot speakers of English. This reflects 'the fact that Danish and English seem to have slightly different conceptions of what constitutes generic as opposed to specific reference.' " Or: "...there is a tendency for English loanwords among speakers of Austrian German to be feminine -- die Road, die Yard, etc. -- and this is probably due to the similarity in sound between the German die and the accented form of English 'the', whereas the German masculine der and neuter das sound different."
When a source text is culture-specific, there is great need for changes to make the text intelligible. The example of how two German editions of Alice and Wonderland translated a particular passage differently serves well:
“Perhaps it doesn't understand English,” thought Alice, “I dare say it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.”
One edition substituted "English" so that the translation simply said that the mouse did not understand much, and to make the reference to William the Conqueror intelligible, added a phrase about William coming from England. A different translation made the language not understood by the mouse into German, and changed William the Conqueror into Napoleon. There were thus two different methods used to make the text intelligible to native readers.
A German person on a bus asks a person next to an empty seat, "Ist dieser Platz frei?" It is literally in English, "Is this place free?" But an English person would say, "Is this seat taken?" Or, a polite request in Polish to a distinguished guest to take a seat is literally, in English, "Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit!" The "short imperative" to "Sit!" sounds "like a command rather than a polite request" made to someone unruly rather than to a distinguished guest.
Translating Dickens into German, there is a phrase in The Olde Curiosity Shop where a character speaks of it being "a fine week for ducks." English speakers naturally know this to mean it was a rainy week. A German translator however concluded that for us, "a fine week for ducks" meant it was a fine week to go hunting for them!
Such then are typical problems of translating from one language to another. The sort of exhaustive knowledge required to perform an exact translation is simply beyond the understanding of most people, and presents a practical impossibility. This does not mean we must press a panic button over not being able to provide “definitive” translations of every single word immediately, giving us the full range of meaning implied in every word, but nevertheless enough to be reasonably certain of what is being said. Even the examples above clearly transmit the main meaning of the passage, even if some nuance is lost to non-native speakers. Linguistic studies continue to be performed to this day giving us new insight into ancient languages. This is so not only for Biblical languages, but other ancient languages like Latin, and a professional historian, unlike our fictional Teabing, would never offer such a ridiculously generalized statement.
Additions and revisions are also of no more issue than those found in any other document. Again, without a specific “addition” or “revision” to address, we can only offer some general points. There are a number of “checkpoints” that give us a reasonable certainty of what the Bible originally said when written. The first set of checkpoints come through the process called textual criticism. Put simply, scholars collect and compare copies of the work in question, work out their relative ages, and by this means decide what the likeliest reading of the original document was. In terms of evidence, it is common to speak of the “embarrassing” wealth of evidence we have for the text of the New Testament, comprised of over 24,000 copies or pieces of manuscripts, some dating as early as the second and third century. In contrast, consider that the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, writing about 100 AD, are attested to by a mere handful of manuscripts (less than a dozen) which date to a far later time at the earliest (the eleventh century!).
The Old Testament does not have quite as much or the same quality of manuscript evidence, but does still exceed significantly what is available from the likes of Tacitus and most other ancient works. On this basis, it is difficult to justify any claim that we do not possess a “definitive” idea of what the Bible actually said in its originals, or autographa, unless one wants to throw out all other ancient writings with it.
In terms of revisions, ancient writers did have justifiable reasons for performing certain types of revisions: As language changed or as certain facts become less known, it would become necessary to adjust the text in order for it to remain coherent to later readers. The Greek historian Herodotus, for example, used Greek measurement units to report weight, currency, and distance which would not have been used by the people of the places he reported upon. He does this even when translating inscriptions made by the people he is studying. Such revisions are very easy to discern and are not as problem for arriving at a “definitive” version of the biblical text.
Moreover, they should not be mistaken for wholesale content-revisions, or changes in ideology, and they were certainly not “countless,” if we are to have any respect at all for the evidence provided by textual criticism.
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