A Modest Proposal Concerning Manuscripts Shown in Historical Documentaries

I like some documentaries about archaeology. And I'm very, very much interested in ancient and Medieval texts. And so, when in a well-made film on an archaeological topic, the host takes a break from the digs to go to a library's special collection and show us some old manuscripts, I tend to like it very much indeed.

But still, I think it could be done better. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite archaeological series, In Search of the Dark Ages, written and hosted (or presented, as they say in British English) by Michael Wood and first broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This series, for the most part, covers the Anglo-Saxon period in England and the adjoining Celtic part of Britain. One episode goes earlier, having to to do with the first-century revolt of the British queen Boudica against the Romans. 

Woods walks around historic sites, talking to archaeologists who are supervising digs, or led digs a a while ago, or want to get permission to begin digs, and asks them intelligent questions. Or he walks around historic sites by himself and speaks intelligently to the camera. Occasionally making allusions to current political events which sometimes make me wince with their conservative flavor, but no-one, not even Michael Wood, is perfect. He often quotes from Anglo-Saxon or Latin accounts of Medieval events -- he's a specialist in Anglo-Saxon -- and translates into modern English for the viewer. He seems quite fluent in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. It's all quite wonderful.

Where I see room for improvement -- and not just in Michael Wood's shows, but in every show I can recall in the archaeological genre -- is in the way in which old manuscripts are presented to the viewer. The scene will shift from a dig to a library, while Wood says in voice over something like, "To find out more about, we must turn to a manuscript in" -- in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, or in the British Library, as the case may be, or somewhere else. 

Wood will walk into special-collections rooms and proceed to read from Latin or Anglo-Saxon precious rare manuscripts. Which is awesome, but -- it leaves out the scholars who are currently working with those manuscripts.

Why not talk to those textual scholars just as he's been talking to the archaeologists? Or at the very least, mention some of them? He reads, in the episode "In Search of Arthur," from the Welsh Annals, the Annales Cambriae, one of the earliest written mentions of King Arthur. He reads the passage about Arthur right from the Bodlian Library's manuscript of the annals, the best existing manuscript.

The thing is, most of us don't have as much access to special collections as Michael Wood does. We can't just drop in and consult the best manuscripts whenever we want to. Luckily for us, in 1860, the Rev John Williams, also well known by his Welsh bardic name Ab Ithel, published an edition of the Annales Canbriae based on the very same manuscript Woods reads from in the show, and two others. 

I would like it if Wood, and other hosts of similar shows, would mention the printed editions that you and I can read. I don't know whether a new edition was being prepared while Wood was filming the show about Arthur. If so, Wood could have interviewed the new editor just as easily as he interviewed all those archaeologists. His interviews with the archaeologists have been wonderful. I see no reason to doubt that his interviews with textual editors would have been just as wonderful. If no new edition was underway at the time, Wood still could have interviewed a scholar and authority on the manuscript. 

In the episode on Boudica he reads from a manuscript of Tacitus' Annals, the primary written source for Boudica's rebellion. Why not also at least hold up to the camera CD Fisher's 1906 Oxford Classical Texts edition of Tacitus' Annals and mention that the viewer could easily get the original Latin text for themself if they so desired? Or, even better, he could have interviewed Heubner or Wellesley, who were working on new editions at the time. 

Being Michael Wood, I'm sure he could've come with far more intelligent questions for the new editors of Tacitus than I ever could, just as he came up with all of those great questions for the archaeologists. 

Let the viewers know, let them see and hear, that textual criticism is a living, ongoing, exciting thing, just like archaeology. It just needs the right host, the right presenter, to put it across. Michael Wood could definitely do it. Show the viewers that they can take part in the text in more ways than just seeing the host go into the library and look at a manuscript. Which is great! I don't want any of the producers to stop showing the manuscripts. I just want them to give the viewers a more solid connection to the manuscripts. And if it's not a famous text like the Welsh Annals or Tacitus, if it's actually still unpublished, then talk about how it isn't even published yet, and about the need for more students of Anglo-Saxon or Medieval Latin or what have you.

Buy In Search of the Dark Ages on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Wi5WaB

Yes, That is a Very Great Amount of Aristotelian Manuscripts [PS: No, actually, it is not.]

Someone who struck me as authoritative -- I do not remember who -- wrote -- I do not remember where. I should write these sorts of things down more often. It may have been in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which I read often and recommend heartily -- that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I then consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, and saw that "myriad" literally means "10,000."

[PS, 19 February 2018: My memory was faulty here. I finally tracked down the mention of literally myriad manuscripts. It was a reference to manuscripts, not of Aristotle, but of Augustine. Nevermind.]

Attempting to verify that there really are as many as 10,000 manuscripts of the works of Aristotle, I found that, as of the writing of the article on Aristotle in the 1972 Encyclopaedia Britannica, there were 47 surviving philosophical works attributed to Aristotle, and that he actually wrote many more. Not from the encyclopaedia, I learned that these 47 works were often copied individually, as opposed to huge volumes each containing many of the works. I learned that several of these works survive in Latin translations in several hundred manuscripts each (Aristotle wrote in Greek, and was very popular among Medieval scholars of Western Europe who could read Latin but not Greek.). If several hundred Latin copies is typical for each of those 47 works, then perhaps there really are over 10,000 manuscripts of Aristotle surviving in our time, and the vast majority of them are Latin translations. (Several hundred X 47 = more than 10,000.) I'm assuming that untranslated Greek manuscripts of Aristotle are not nearly so numerous, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

I have absolutely no ideas how many manuscripts of Aristotle in Arabic translation have survived to our day, or in other languages, for that matter.

Some time ago, I read in Rackham's Loeb edition and translation of Aristotle's Politics



that the manuscripts of that work "are not very good nor very old. The oldest evidence for the text is a translation in barbarous Latin by a Dominican monk of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke[...]The five best extant Greek copies are of the fifteenth century[...]" That was the first time that I had read anything about the transmission of Aristotle's texts. And so I mistakenly assumed that there were not many manuscripts of anything written by Aristotle. It turns out that Moerbeke is one of the Latin translators of Aristotle who has been copied into hundreds of surviving manuscripts, per work, having translated other works by Aristorle besides the Politics, and that not everyone has shared Rackham's low opinion of his Latin prose.

So, is Aristotle in 2nd place among ancient authors, behind only the Bible, in terms of numbers of surviving manuscripts? I don't know. One reason I don't know is because the experts on ancient Greek and Latin literature themselves don't know how many surviving manuscripts there are of the authors in which they specialize. And the reason they often don't know is because they don't much care. How can this be? Well, you see, the most important aspect of their jobs is get a version of those ancient texts as close as possible to what the ancient authors originally wrote. And for the purpose of determining those texts, the great majority of the manuscripts can be dismissed, if it has been determined that they are all copies, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc, of some other surviving manuscripts. There is often a very great difference between the number of manuscripts which scholars use to determine the text, and all of the surviving manuscripts of that text. Oh, so there are X number of manuscript copies of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics? Hey, that's great. But because I have the actual copy which Moerbeke made (or high-res photos of that copy), I don't need all those hundreds of others. Is how those scholars will often react, if they see their job as editing the text.

There are other reasons for looking at all of the other copies. For example, someone has to determine where they came from, whether manuscript J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, or what exactly. Or maybe Professor Y thinks that Professor X made a mistake when he or she said that J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, and wants to check for him- or herself.

Another reason is if we want to get a general idea of how popular that ancient author was in a certain time and place. We can only get a very general idea of this, because we know that a lot of manuscripts have disappeared, and we don't know how many. Just because there are hundreds of manuscripts today of Ovid, and none at all of Pompeius Trogus, doesn't mean that Ovid was read by more people in the 2nd century AD than Trogus. But the great number of 12th-century manuscripts of Ovid (compared to surviving 12th-century manuscripts in general), combined with other things such as frequent mentions of him by 12th-century writers, mean that we're probably pretty safe in saying that Ovid was widely-read in the 12th century. Probably.

It seems to me that typically, there are more 15th-century manuscripts of a given Classical Latin author than manuscripts of any other one century, and sometimes more than all the other centuries put together. It seems that way. But I don't know for sure, because I only have those century-by-century numbers in the case of a few Classical Latin authors. Maybe they're pretty typical of the rest, maybe they're not. After the 15th century, the numbers of manuscripts of Classical Latin authors drops away to almost nothing, because of the invention of the printing press. One notable exception to that is the text of the 1st-century novel Satyricon by Petronius,



the inspiration for Fellini's film of the same name, liked by Fellini fans, less well-liked by Classicists who feel that Fellini missed much of Petronius' message. The text of Satyricon has been patched together like Frankenstein's monster from various manuscripts each containing just a part of the whole. 4 of those manuscripts were written in the late 16th century, and just recently, Maria Salanitro has found what she believes are still more parts of the novel, contained in a 17th-century manuscript.

How much of the preponderance of 15th-century manuscripts -- assuming I'm correct in assuming it exists -- is due to an actual rise in the reading of ancient Latin Classics in the 15th-century, and how much is due to people being suddently much more careful to preserve manuscripts? I have no idea.

It was nice of Martin Wohlrab to list and comment on all 147 of the manuscripts of Plato which he could find, late in the 19th century, and it was also nice of the University of California to re-print his list



in the 21st century. Did Wohlrab include manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato (or translations into still other languages) in his list? I'm going to have to examine this list a little more closely and get back to you on that one. Were there ever very many manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato? Hey, that's another really swell question. I know that Latin translations of Plato were made after the invention of printing.

Are the numbers of manuscripts of Cicero or Vergil comparable to those of Aristotle? Another thing I really wish I knew.

Why do I care so much about it? Am I about to help these professors in their task of sorting out which manuscripts derive from which, by the process they call collation? No. Am I interested in the numbers of readers these authors have had? To be honest: only slightly. I think I care about these numbers of manuscripts because autism. (It would also be great if I could demonstrate that there are more manuscripts of one Classical author or another than of the Bible, but I suspect that the Bible-thumpers out there who're saying that there are only 20 manuscripts of Livy [There are hundreds. How many hundreds? I wish I knew. Hey, there might be thousands for all I know.], and so forth, have also drastically under-counted the total number of Biblical manuscripts.)

The Difference Between The Date Of A Text And The Date Of A Manuscript Of That Text

Some of my readers may find it strange that I am devoting a blog post to such things. Some of my readers are academics and other people who are long since thoroughly familiar with everything I'm going to say here. However, some of my readers are in other fields, and only an academic who has not spent a lot of time discussing ancient literature and textual transmission with the general public, and who has not read a lot of stories about new finds of ancient manuscripts in the mainstream media, nor watched a lot of TV shows about those subjects, knows these things, while being unaware of how many people do not know them.

The date of a text is the date when a certain piece of writing was first written. The date of a manuscript of that text is the date when a particular copy of that piece of writing was made. The general public almost never seems to show any significant interest in ancient texts other than the texts of the Bible and other Jewish and Christian writings, and this post is for the general public, so let's explain this with reference to those texts.

The 27 books of the New Testament are far and away the most thoroughly-researched texts in Western civilization. (I don't say they're the most most thoroughly-researched in the world because I don't know enough about texts from other civilizations to say so. For all I know, the scope of knowledge and research of the Vedas, or of the Koran or of Buddhist or Confucian texts, may utterly dwarf that of Biblical studies. I simply don't know.) There are tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament. Many of these manuscripts are from the 5th century or earlier.

There are no original copies of any of the texts of the New Testament. By the way, scholars of ancient literature refer to a original copy as an "autograph." There are no autographs of the New Testament, there are no autographs of the Old Testament, or, as far as I know, of any ancient texts which are referred to as "literary" texts, which means: texts meant for a public audience: not just poems and plays and novels but also works of history and philosophy, and religious works such as the Bible. Scholars refer to all of such works intended for a public audience as "literary," in order to distinguish them from private letters, shopping lists, contracts, instructions from a government official to a subordinate, reports from such subordinates to their superiors, etc. We happen to have autographs of every one of those "non-literary" kinds of ancient writing, mostly in the form of papyri discovered since the late 19th century, a great many of them from the garbage dumps outside the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, where about a million fragments of papyri with writing of some sort or other on them have been found. About 5000 of those fragments from Oxyrhynchus, both literary and non-literary, have been published so far.

So. Anyway. To get back to the main theme of this post: The date of a text, the date when those particular words were first put to writing in that particular order, is different from the age of a manuscript containing that text, and when it come to ancient literary texts, that is: texts meant for a public audience, including religious texts like the Bible, we have no autographs. We have copies made later. The date of a Biblical manuscript is always later than that of the text recorded on that manuscript.

For very many ancient literary texts, we have no manuscripts made within 1000 years of the original text. For ancient Latin, pre-Christian, so-called "pagan" Latin ("pagan" originated as a term of abuse applied to those pre-Christian people by Christian authors in the 4th century and maybe earlier), it is very rare to have any manuscripts older than AD 800, older than the foundation of Charlemagne's Empire. Charlemagne did a tremendous amount to revive education and preserve those "pagan" Latin texts.

In the case of the Bible, until the 19th century, the oldest-known manuscripts for the Greek New Testament were from the 12th century, and the oldest-known manuscripts for the Hebrew Old Testament -- I don't know. Sorry. Pretty sure they were 10th century or more recent, but I don't know.

Then, starting in the 19th century, great discoveries of Biblical manuscripts were made. First, manuscripts from the 4th century were found here and there between Alexandria and Sinai in monasteries and antiquities shops, including the tremendous Codex Sinaiticus, a nearly-complete 4th-century copy of the Greek New Testament along with the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, discovered by Constantine von Tischendorf in pieces at Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai in Egypt beginning in the 1840's and gradually put together over a period of decades, and now in 4 different libraries, but most of it in the British Library.

Beginning in 1896, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt found the huge piles of pieces of papyri at Oxyrhynchus, which I mentioned above. Most of these pieces of papyri are just little scraps which were discovered and preserved not long before they were going to become dust. So in that respect they're completely different than the nearly-complete Bible contained in the Codex Sinaiticus. However, many of the Oxyrhynchus manuscripts are quite a bit older than the 4th century AD. Some are as old as the 3rd century BC. They contain literary texts as well as the non-literary items described above. And these literary manuscripts include scraps of the New Testament from as early as the 2nd century AD, copies made with decades of when the text was first written, quite possibly within the lifetime of the original authors, something otherwise unheard-of for ancient literary texts.

In the 20th and 21st centuries the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library and other very old papyri and parchments containing biblical and apocryphal texts have been found and continue to be found, although so far there has not been another find as huge as that at Oxyrhynchus. In 1979 in Jerusalem two silver scrolls were found containing the Priestly Benediction ("May the Lord bless and keep you..." etc) from the Book of Numbers. The verses were etched into the scrolls before 600 BC.

Have I cleared anything up or just confused you worse? I hope this has helped. Be careful when you're reading news stories or watching TV shows about these sorts of things, because sometimes these stories and shows have mistakes, like saying "4th-century text" when they should say something like "4th-century manuscript of a 2nd-centiry text" or what have you.

So how do people figure out how old the texts are? The same way they figure out how old the manuscripts are: I don't know. That is to say: I know some of the criteria used, such as handwriting styles, which vary quite uniformly over time and place or origin, and things mentioned and not mentioned in the texts, and where the manuscripts are found, and carbon-14 analysis and multi-spectral analysis and many other things. And I know that the experts very often disagree about the date of a certain manuscript or of a certain text, but that usually these disagreements have to do with very small differences in age: a decade or two, or sometimes as much an entire century, in the age of a manuscript 2000 years old or older. But if you hand me a manuscript and need an expert opinion of how old it is, chances are the best I will be able to do is hand it right back and refer you to some actual experts. I do know some experts.

The Term "Textus Receptus" Doesn't Always Refer To The Bible

Not everyone has had the advantages I have. Before I became mixed up with all of these lunatics arguing about the Bible and Jesus and related things, I had already become somewhat familiar with Classical scholarship in general and the editors of ancient Latin in particular. Because of that, I was aware that people discussing the Bible use some terms as if they applied only to the Bible, while those terms actually have more broad uses.

There's the term "textus receptus," Latin for "received text." Some people are using this term to refer to several 16th-century printed editions of the Greek New Testament, and nothing else. But since well before the 16th century, the term "textus receptus" has referred to most familiar or generally-accepted form of any text, Biblical or not.

(And by the way, it is not true that the makers of the King James Version referred only to one of those 16th-century printed editions when preparing their version of the New Testament. I know it is not true, because they made many notes referring to differences between this "textus receptus" and various manuscripts.)

I think I've mentioned before on this blog that I've seen the term "Oxyrhynchus papyri" used to refer to ancient Biblical manuscripts on papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, as if those were the only papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, when in fact, out of the over 5000 Oxyrhynchus papyri published so far (out of more than 1 million excavated), only a small fraction have to do with Christianity in any way.

People often use the terms "textual transmission" (the process by which a text goes from the author to the reader) and "textual criticism" (examining the manuscripts and/or other evidence of a text and attempting to restore as nearly as possible the original text) as if they had only to do with the Bible, when actually they are applied to any and all texts, and very frequently to ancient non-Christian Latin and Greek texts, as well as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Flaubert or whom have you.

The term "Codex Vaticanus" is widely used these days, it seems, to describe one Biblical manuscript, although the phrase "Codex Vaticanus" actually means nothing more than "manuscript in the Vatican Library," and there are lots and lots of manuscripts in the Vatican Library." A more proper designation for this particular Biblical manuscript is Vat. gr. #1209, Vatican Library Greek manuscript number 1209. You can see the phrase "Codex Vaticanus" applied to many other manuscripts in the writing of Classical scholars. But since there are so many manuscripts in the Vatican Library, these scholars generally provide a key at the beginning of each piece of such writing, giving a more precise definition of what they mean by "Codex Vaticanus" -- or, if the piece of writing refers to more than one manuscript from the Vatican Library, which is not at all usual, the key may inform the reader that throughout the text, for example, "M" will refer to Vatican Library Latin manuscript #3225, "P" will refer to Vatican Library Palatine Collection manuscript #1631, and so forth. M because the manuscript belonged to the Medici before the Vatican acquired it, P for Palatine. These examples are the abbreviations used by RAB Mynors in his edition of Vergil, published in 1969. He doesn't use the phrase "Codex Vaticanus" to refer to every manuscript of Vergil in the Vatican Library which he has used in the preparation of this edition, because 6 of the 21 manuscripts he used are from the Vatican Library.

The 27th edition of the Nestle/Aland Greek New Testament makes use of dozens if not hundreds of New Testament manuscripts from the Vatican Library (in addition to thousands of other New Testament manuscripts from elsewhere), and, since "Codex Vaticanus" means nothing more or less in Latin than "manuscript from the Vatican Library," the editors of that edition came up with a different abbreviation to refer to each one.

I don't know how often actual legitimate Biblical scholars use such terms as if they were never used outside of Biblical studies or in their literal Latin meanings, or whether this is just one more example of Wikipedia and TV shows about the Bible conspiring to make mankind more stupid. Some of the articles on Wiki having to do with textual transmission and textual criticism have recently been improved to more clearly indicate that these things do have a life apart from Biblical studies. (Years ago I used to make some corrections on Wiki myself, but I stopped because they weren't paying me enough.) A Google search for textus receptus might give you the impression that the term never meant anything other than those 16th-century printed editions of the Bible. (Btw, in Classical studies, "edition" is usually used to mean "printed edition," as opposed to "manuscript.") The sheer number of Web pages using the term "textus receptus" in this narrow sense drown out the others, unless you refine your search extensively. You have to search for something like "textus receptus" -bible -testament -gospel in order to get results indicating that this is not all just about the Bible.

Editions Of The Greek New Testament And Other Ancient Texts

If I counted correctly, the editors of the 27th edition of this version of the Greek New Testament, known as the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland,



consulted 586 Greek New Testament manuscripts, of which at least 291 were made before AD 800, and at least 35 before 300. It's "at least" because several of those manuscripts are dated 8th or 9th century, and several are dated around 300, or 3rd or 4th century. There are thousands of other Greek New Testaments available to scholars, but these editors -- Erwin Nestle, Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo Martini and Bruce Metzger -- were satisfied with these 586. However, in addition to the Greek manuscripts, they also looked at 62 Latin New Testament manuscripts, at least 44 of those older than AD 800. The current location and catalog number of each of those 586 Greek and 62 Latin manuscripts is given, so that you can look them up or find photos of them, and look at exactly what the editors were looking at when they prepared this edition. They also consulted editions (that is, printed versions) of the New Testament in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopian and Old Church Slavonic.

And in the lists of these sources they have assigned a symbol to each one -- for example, p40, 2298 and d -- and in the so-called "critical apparatus" (I love that term), which is the strange stuff at the bottom of each page below the main text, they indicate which part of their text is supported by p40, or 2298, and so on -- and also indicate which manuscripts contain some other version of the text which they consider significant. (p40 comes from a fairly standardized list of New Testament papyri, from p1 into the p120's and still counting. I assume that 2298 is from some list of other New Testament manuscripts running into I don't know how many thousands. If I knew where that entire list was I'd tell you. I bet Bart Ehrman knows.)

And the editors of series like Oxford Classical Texts



or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (that's Latin for Teubner's Library of Greek and Roman Works)



do the same in each volume: provide a list of all the manuscripts and other sources they have consulted in preparing their texts, with a symbol for each one (Usually each symbol is a capitol letter because usually less than 26 manuscripts are used for a given text. But in cases of authors like Vergil or Terrence, editors might run out of capital letters, and also use small letters, and/or Greek letters, and/or numbers or abbreviated words or what have you.), and then at the bottom of each page they indicate which sources have the same text as the one they've chosen, and indicate other versions, which they consider significant, from other sources. In addition to these major variations, the Nestle-Aland provides dozens of pages' worth of minor variations at the end of the volume. In the Oxford Classical Texts and the Teubneriana and other editions of ancient works, such as this edition of the New Testament, the editors typically describe the manuscripts they've used, and in a case like this where there are more existing manuscripts besides the ones used, they'll give their reasons for using these ones and not those, and so forth.

They show their work when editing Sallust or the Bible, is what I'm getting at. It's usually not the same guys editing the Classics and the Bible, but the techniques are similar. Classics or the Bible, it's known as scholarly editing. And so while you or I might reasonably disagree with what Bruce Metzger said about how it's certain that Jesus existed, if we're going to criticize what he said about Biblical manuscripts and how the text of the Bible changed over the centuries, we better come correct, cause he was all up in it.

Ancient Literary -- No, I Won't Call Them Forgeries. Plenty of Others Will -- Misattributions

Dr Bart Ehrman and some other Biblical scholars have caused a lot of agitation in the general public lately with the news -- news more to the general public than to specialists in New Testament studies -- that some passages in Paul's letters, and some entire letters, some of the shorter books in the New Testament, were not actually written by Paul.

Ehrman is extremely popular in some segments of the "militant" atheist population -- excuse me, but I have to stop the essay for a moment. This use of the word "militant" is really ridiculous. We do not brandish Kalashnikovs. We do not bomb buildings. We do not kidnaps heiresses. We post sharply-worded opinions in Internet social venues. No-one is in danger of physical harm -- and within that segment and the segment of the pious who do the Itchy & Scratchywith us, Ehrman has created quite a ruckus with this news that not all of what we've traditionally thought of as Paul's writings are by Paul. As often happens in these sorts of discussions -- Really. We're discussing things. "Militant." sheesh! -- I feel a bit off to the side, because what interests me in the immediate topic at hand is not the theological implications which are exciting most of the discutants, but the textual transmission.

And just this morning it occurred to me -- aside from the theological implications which, yes, no doubt, are immense. I just can't get excited about it. I find theology to be excruciatingly boring -- that Paul was hardly unique among prominent ancient authors in having spurious works attached to his name. On the contrary. Take Homer. The Homeric Question,that is, whether there really was a poet or singer named Homer who wrote or sang the Iliad and the Odyssey, and if so the details of his biography and the degree of similarity of his creation to the Iliad and Odyssey we know today, is still debated today, but even those, a dwindling minority for the moment, it seems, who are convinced that Homer existed and that he made both poems very much as we know them, tend to agree that he had nothing to do with the creation of the so-called Homeric Hymns, so-called because for a very long time people assumed that he had written them. Take the Appendix Vergiliana, so-called because they were erroneously taken for the juvenalia of Vergil. The poem Halieutica is now generally agreed not to have been written by Ovid, but it's still included in this volumeof Ovid's works, along with a few other bits and pieces, because they were associated with Ovid for so long that this is the natural place to put them. And because they're short. For similar reasons, a lot of fragments probably not of Hesiod's writings, and some surely not by him, are included in this collection of his actual works, while this collection of the works of Sallust include an oration supposedly by Sallust against Cicero which he probably never made, and Cicero's equally-ficticious replay, and short commentaries on Caesar's Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars, commentaries traditionally attributed to Caesar but now nobody knows for sure who wrote them, are thrown in with this edition of Caesar's account of the Civil War.

And also some of Plato'sdialogues were not really written by Plato. And on and on. And these are not unusual cases. They're typical: if you were a famous ancient author in Latin or Greek, some stories not by you would get attached to your actual work, sometimes by someone deliberately perpetrating a fraud for nefarious or pecuniary purposes, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately but with no malicious intent, because some admirer of the famous author thought it would be a nice tribute to write something and sign the famous guy's name to it. Yes, some simpletons back then really wouldn't have seen the harm. Or maybe not even such simple guys, which may strain your credulity unless you realize that customs and attitudes change greatly over time, and that was a long time ago. And then typically a century or two or three ago some scholar would say Hey wait a minute and compare style and content and comments by contemporaries of the ancient authors and other considerations and prove, either that this or that piece is not really by who we thought it all was, or that we must now gravely doubt that it is. This is typical. In a way, if it hadn't also happened to Paul, it would've been embarrassing for him, it would've made him stick out like a sore thumb from all the other literary bigshots.

So that's the textual-critical skinny on that. I know, I know, the theological implications of Paul's not actually having written that short letter to Titus are -- yawn Oh, excuse me! -- are huge. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled, excruciately-boring theological uproar.

Back to Nonfiction: the Daily Facepalm

(I'm under no illusion about the immense room for improvement which exists in the state of human things, but sometimes, face to face with the dingbats, with no reason in sight far and wide, I honestly wonder how anything ever gets done. How over 90% of them, those, out there, manage to hold down jobs and own cars or vans and live indoors. I guess it's my autistic-spectrum condition which makes it hard for me to understand how the world functions for most people.

Again: what follows, the non-italicized part, is real unscripted dialogue.Horrifyingly real.)

HER: The letters of Paul were written less than 50 years after the death of Jesus.

ME: No, earlier than that: they were written 50 to 60 years after Jesus' (supposed) BIRTH.

HER: All four of the gospels were written within less than 100 years, with Mark being written at about the time of the fall of the temple in 70 CE.

ME: My understand­ing was that the Gospels were all completed by AD 115. Again, that's 115 years after the BIRTH of Jesus.

(At this point, a simple "Oh yes, of course: after Jesus' BIRTH! How silly of me! Thank you, fellow Huffington Post reader!" would've sufficed. That would've worked just fine.

But NO. Sister had to get all up in a monkey's face.)

HER: How is '50 to 60 years after Jesus' (supposed) BIRTH' any 'earlier' than 'less than 50 years after the death of Jesus'?

ME: If Jesus lived to be 33 years old, then 50 years after his birth was 33 years earlier than 50 years after his death. I'm pretty sure. Does somebody want to check my math? (Anybody? Please!)

HER: Do you want to find a pin so we can argue about the number of angels dancing?

ME: No!

HER: What part of "range" don't you understand­? Why are you quibbling over something that is so totally irrelevant­? Are you sure about that pin and dancing angels invitation­? I think you would relish the event.

(Wrong again! So wrong!

She started out here correcting somebody else's Biblical dates.

I swear, I don't understand how y'all haven't blown it all to bits yet.

Not knowing is not enough to achieve stupidity. Stupidity also demands that you don't want to know. That when someone points out a mistake, you respond with hostility. She didn't just have her dates crunked up: she was correcting someone else's crunked-up dates at the time.

Sheesh.)

Goodbye To All of That

I've given up on arguing with religious people about religion, because it's a waste of my time. I made that decision quite a while ago. I didn't figure out all on my own that it was a waste of time. There are many very important things I know because wise people told them to me. In this case it was Nietzsche. But today it occurs to me that I have been wasting my time on another large group of people: those who attack the Bible on specious grounds having to do with textual transmission, claiming that the King James Version is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation, or that Roman Emperors had Biblical texts edited to suit their political ends, or that there used to be hundreds of Gospels. You know the type, if you've participated in a lot of discussions of how the Bible came down to us and reached its present form. (You may BE one of those people.) It's usually atheists who raise these and other inaccurate objections to the text of the Bible. But not always: there are those who might be described as Ur-Christians, people who believe that Christianity was impure even before it reached the stage of being written down in the New Testament. They may believe in a Q source for Matthew and Luke, which no-one has ever seen. There are angry Protestants who think that Catholics have greatly altered the Bible. (There are a few angry Catholics who think that the Vulgate is just fine and that the King James Version is a mess.) What these people and others have in common is that they object to the current Bible on the grounds that it is not the original Bible, that the text has been corrupted. To be sure, they can't SHOW you very many examples of this corruption. If challenged to do so they'll typically take off on a non-sequitur tangent. If pressed, they might assert that the entire Christian concept of the Virgin Birth is a linguistic error, because the term for "young girl" was mistakenly changed to the term for "virgin." Actually, virgin birth is one of many concepts integral to Christianity which are not original to Christianity. The many alleged errors and/or deliberate changes in the Biblical text are typically part of a narrative repeated at second or third hand. A mythology, asserted without evidence just as religious mythology is asserted without evidence. If you take the trouble to go back to the written sources of early Christianity, you will see the record of the very opposite of the alleged willful alteration of Holy Scripture. You see an immense effort on all sides to identify and faithfully preserve the earliest and purest written records of Christ and of the Church. Immense, and I think actually successful: the "other" Gospels, that of Thomas, of Judas, of Mary Magdalene, all seem to have been written significantly later than the four which were eventually included in the Christian canon, in the late 2nd century AD, when Irenaeus was referring to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the original accounts of Jesus' life. And I think they are actually the closest to original accounts of all the known Scripture and would-be Scripture, of all the Bible and all the known apochrypha. Perhaps the atheists and others who constantly cry corruption cannot conceive that Christians as early as Irenaeus could A) honestly want to find the most original documents pertaining to the life and teachings of Jesus, and B) actually succeed in the attempt to identify the most original such documents in existence. All through the history of Christianity, countless scholars have vied with each other to transmit these documents faithfully, and to translate them accurately, and ever more accurately. (I don't mean to diminish the huge contribution made by Jewish scholars in preserving the Old Testament, beginning who knows how many century BC. It's just that this whole meshuggah discussion of Biblical texts being intentionally corrupted seems to center around Christians and ex-Christians and people who are angry specifically at Christianity.) Those who allege intentional corruption have got nothing, it's just as simple as that. They're repeating a political talking point, they are not familiar with the relevant source documents. Just like religious believers, their point of departure is the evidence of things not seen. And it's futile to argue with people like that. They're not open to arguments, whether they believe in the content of the Holy Scriptures under discussion, or in the currently popular myth of that content having been intentionally altered any time after, say, AD 150. Earlier than that, there's very little historical record to tell us anything about the content of the New Testament or people's attitudes toward it. But there are scraps of papyrus with fragment New Testament texts from around that time -- not the authors' copiess, but copies of the texts actually written down in the 2nd century AD. Smoking guns which could prove that someone later altered them extensively. They prove the opposite. So -- goodbye to all of that nonsense. The search continues for sensible discussion partners to add to the few I already have.

You Want an Example of a Stupid Atheist? Okay --

HIM: How can anyone seriously "study" a book that was written 3500 years ago, by unknown authors, that has undergone thousands of re-transla­tions by different religious sects to fit their own understand­ing or to justify their belief, and that has some many contradict­ions in it.

ME: Thousands of re-transla­tions. *sigh* What, do you think that when someone made a new translatio­n of the bible in 1980, they only consulted translatio­ns into the same language made after 1970? Is that how you think Bible translatio­n works? Oh, and btw: written 3,500 years ago? Where do you get this stuff?

HIM: The book of Exodus was dated as 1500 BC. Let's see....add our 2000 and that makes 3,500. Check it out.

ME: A fundamentalist might believe Exodus was written 3,500 years ago -- or 3,200 to 3,300 years ago, if they identify Ramses II as the Pharaoh in Exodus and have their Egyptian history straight. Maybe you thought I was another fundamenta­list. Nope. I'm an atheist, I'm anti-relig­ion. But I can still disagree with other atheists about some things. These days very few Biblical scholars or archaeolog­ists -- some of whom are (gasp!) atheists -- think any proof has been found that there was an Exodus anything like that described in the Bible, or that Moses existed. Very few would assert with anything approachin­g certainty that there was a Hebrew written language in 1,200 BC. As far as I know, the earliest evidence of a Hebrew or proto-Hebr­ew written language is an alphabet which was scratched onto a rock a little before 900 BC, and the oldest artifact with a Bible verse written on it is a tiny metal scroll made a little before 600 BC. Now what's the problem with the translations?

HIM: If you would be open minded to accept the possibilit­y that you might be ignorant of the facts, and did some research (type into google "how many translatio­ns of the bible are there?" ) you will find the following: The Bible continues to be the most translated book in the world. As of 2005 at least one book of the Bible has been translated into 2,400 of the 6,900 languages including 680 languages in Africa, 590 in Asia, 420 in Oceania, 420 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 210 in Europe, and 75 in North America. The United Bible Societies are assisting in over 600 Bible translatio­­n projects. The Bible is available in whole or in part to some 98 percent of the world's population in a language in which they are fluent. The United Bible Society announced that as of 2007 the Bible was available in 438 languages, 123 of which included the deuterocan­­onical material as well as the Tanakh and New Testament. Either the Tanakh or the New Testament alone was available in an additional 1168 languages, and portions of the Bible were available in another 848 languages, for a total of 2,454 languages.

ME: I am aware that the Bible has been translated into thousands of languages. So what? What does the number of translatio­ns have to do with the quality of any one translatio­n? Every Bible translatio­n I know has been working from the original languages, consulting the best manuscript­s available.

HIM: Did you ever hear about the experiment wherein on person tells another a statement who in turn tells another and they tell another, on and on. By the time it gets to the last person the statement has no commonalit­y to the original statement. So the point is, there is lost in translatio­ns, the original word. And who was it exactly that penned the original word? Being human, it is plausible that he even lost something in the translatio­n from whoever it was that told him. The real question is how can any one take the bible literally, as the word? What is reality? For every choice, there is a renunciati­on. If you choose to believe the bible as the unalterabl­e word, than you must renounce facts. Of science. Of other opinions. Of other people's beliefs. Just because a person has a passionate belief in an idea, that does not make it true, even if many people believe it. I choose to believe in gravity even though no one can explain it.

ME: *ahem* Einstein... *ahem*

Textual Transmission

The transmission of a text is the process by which it goes from the original writing of the author to the reader. In the case of a letter written today, usually the reader has before him the exact version written by the author. On an Internet forum or message board, a moderator may change something in the original text before it is presented to the reader, putting one more step between author and reader.

In the case of older texts, written in ancient or medieval times, things may be more complicated, many more steps may be involved. In other words: the transmission may be much more complicated.

Scholars have found some of the original copies of personal letters and shopping lists and written instructions from an employer to an employee, things like that, from the Middle Ages and some even from before. For example, this letter, one of thousands of pieces of ancient papyrus unearthed at the site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, has been dated to the 2nd century AD:



It has been translated as follows:

Thais to her own Tigrius, greeting.

I wrote to Apolinarius to come to Petne for the measuring. Apolinarius will tell you how the situation stands concerning the deposits and public dues. He will let you know the name of the person involved.

If you come, take out six measures of vegetable seed and seal them in the sacks, so that they may be ready. And if you can, please go up and find out about the donkey.

Sarapodora and Sabinus salute you. Do not sell the young pigs without consulting me. Good bye.

Not an earthshaking communication, perhaps, but if one examines a lot of such documents, together they may be very helpful in forming a mental picture of past places and times.

Then there are the texts referred to as "literary," intended for a larger audience: besides the genres we may think of as "literature" in a narrower sense, fiction and poetry and drama, these include works of history and philosophy and science. There's just one copy, from before the age of mechanical and electronic reproduction, of Thaius' letter to Tigrius, presumably either written in Thaius' own hand or dictated to a servant. There may be many copies of a given ancient literary text, but it's rare to find one made within even several centuries of its original composition. For example, as I recently found out, in the case of Sallust' histories of the Cataline conspiracy and the Jugurthine War, written in the 1st century BC, there appear to be over 500 manuscripts in publicly-accessible collections today. But apart from 4 fragments preserved in scraps of papyrus from the 4th and 5th centuries, none of these manuscripts is older than the 9th century. Here's the left edge of one of those papyri:



The fact that several of the manuscripts of Sallust's works are as old as the 9th century is very good. The fact that there are also some older ones known, even if they are just scraps, is exceptional. It's good from a point of view of the manuscripts as objects from the 9th century of historical interest in their own right, and it's also good on the general assumption that the older a manuscript is, the greater the chances are that it preserves the original text, that which Sallust actually wrote, with some sort of accuracy. That's a very general assumption. We don't generally know, for any given manuscripts of an ancient text, how many copies may lie between it and the original. A 4th-century papyrus may be a very sloppy copy of a very sloppy copy of a very sloppy copy... repeat many more times, of the original. On the other hand, a 15th century manuscript may be a very accurate copy of a very much older manuscript which was copied from Sallust's own personal copy. Manuscripts are judged on other criteria than age. But generally speaking, for those interested in accurately reconstructing the original text of an ancient author, when it comes to manuscripts, old is good and very old is very good.

And with very few exceptions, until the last couple of centuries, 9th century was about as old as any surviving manuscripts of pre-Christian Classical authors were. This is one of the main reasons why so many scholars point to the reign of Charlemagne as the end of the Dark Ages: because he instituted an educational program, including the study of those ancient pagans, and many of those 9th-century copies were made because of him. So why don't we have many of the copies from which the 9th-century copies were made? Because, before the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century, it rarely seems to have occurred to anyone in Western Europe that a manuscript -- or a building or anything else -- might be worth preserving simply because it was old. New copies were made, and the old, worn-out ones were thrown out. Some of those pre-9th-century exceptions include 8 4th and 5th century manuscripts of Vergil, and 4 5th century manuscripts of Livy -- at least 4. I know of 4, in addition to some of the papyri described below.

Many more older manuscripts have been found by archaeologists from the 19th century onward, written on papyrus and buried in the desert south and east of the Mediterranean, where, it turns out, papyrus can last for a very, very long time without decomposing. By far the most famous of these finds has been the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that discovery was just one of many. Most of the finds have just been scraps, like the papyrus of Sallust illustrated above, but still, because of their age, they're very exciting to students of ancient literature.

Here's a fragment of the Gospel of John, believed to have been copied out in the first half of the 2nd century, very close to the time that this text was originally written:



Speaking strictly as a layman, let that be perfectly clear, the general impression I get from the comparisons of these discoveries of old papyri with medieval manuscripts and with modern editions of ancient texts is that the medieval scribes tended to be very scrupulous and accurate and that the modern editors tend to be very good at their jobs. I know I could never do what they have done, and I'm very grateful for their efforts.