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Post by Pietro on Oct 7, 2003 13:25:05 GMT -5
I found this Introduction to Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament(1971 United Bible Societies) by Bruce M. Metzger to be very interesting. If there is interest I will post more:
In the earliest days of the Christian church, after an apostolic letter was sent to a congregation of an individual, or after a gospel was written to meet the needs of a particular reading public, copies would be made in order to extend its influence and to enable others to profit from it as well. It was inevitable that such handwritten copies would contain a greater or lesser number of differences in wording from the original. Most of the divergencies arose from quite accidental causes, such as mistaking a letter or a word for another that looked like it. If two neighboring lines of a manuscript began or ended with the same group of letters or if two similar words stood near each other in the same line, it was easy for the eye of the copyist to jump from the first group of letters to the second, and so for a portion of the text to be omitted. Conversely the scribe might go back from the second group and unwittingly copy one or more words twice. Letters that were pronounced alike were sometimes confused. Such accidental errors are almost unavoidable whenever lengthy pkmtyolpages are copied by hand, and would be especially likely to occur if the scribe had defective eyesight, or was interrupted while copying, or, because of fatigue, was less attentive to his task than he should have been.
Other divergencies in wording arose from deliberate attempts to smooth out grammatical or stylistic harshness, or to eliminate real or imagined obscurities of meaning in the text. Sometimes a copyist would substitute or would add what seemed to him to be a more appropriate word or form, perhaps derived from a parallel pkmtyolpage. Thus, during the years immediately following the composition of the several documents that eventually were collected to form the New Testament, hundred, if not thousands of variant readings arose.
Still other kinds of divergencies originated when the New Testament documents were translated from Greek into other languages. During the second and third centuries, after Christianity had been introduced into Syria, into North Africa and Italy, into central and southern Egypt, both congregations and individual believers would naturally desire copies of the scriptures in their own languages. And so versions in Syriac, in Latin, and in several dialects of Coptic used in Egypt were produced. They were followed in the fourth and succeeding centuries by other versions in Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Nubian in the East, and in Gothic and (much later) Anglo-Saxon in the West.
During the early centuries of the expansion of the Christian church, what are called “local texts’ of the New Testament gradually developed. Newly established congregations in and near a large city, such as Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Carthage, or Rome, were provided with copies of the Scriptures in the from which was current in that area. As additional copies were made, the number of special readings and renderings would be both conserved and, to some extent, increased, so that eventually a type of text grew up which was more or less peculiar to that locality. Today it is possible to identify the type of text preserved in the New Testament manuscripts by comparing their characteristic readings with the quotations of those pkmtyolpages in the writings of Church Fathers who lived in or near the chief ecclesiastical center.
At the same time the distinctiveness of a local text tended to become diluted and mixed with other types of text. A manuscript of the Gospel of mark copied in Alexandria, for example, and taken later to Rome would doubtless influence to some extent copyists transcribing the form of the text of Mark heretofore current in Rome. On the whole, however, during the earliest centuries the tendencies to develop and preserve a particular type of text prevailed over the tendencies leading to a mixture of texts. Thus there grew up several distinctive kinds of New Testament text, the most important of which are the following.
Alexandrian or Neutral text
Western text
Caesarian text
Byzantine text
Textus receptus
Let me know if you want more.
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Post by foreverlearning on Oct 7, 2003 14:46:31 GMT -5
More!!!
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Post by Pietro on Oct 7, 2003 16:55:27 GMT -5
Here is a bit more fro Metzger. I'm skipping some boring technical stuff. Unless you want it.
The Alexandrian text, which Westoctt and Hort called the Neutral text (a question-begging title), is usually considered to be the best text and the most faithful in preserving the original. Characteristics of the Alexandrian text are brevity and austerity. That is, it is generally shorter than the text of other forms, and it does not exhibit the degree of grammatical and stylistic polishing that is characteristic of the Byzantine and, to a lesser extent, of the Caesarean type of text. Until recently the two chief witnesses to the Alexandrian text were codex Vaticanus (B) and Codex Sinaiticus (À), parchment manuscripts dating from about the middle of the fourth century. With the acquisition, however, of the Bodmer papyri, particularly p66 and p75, both copied about the end of the second or beginning of the third century, evidence is now available that the Alexandrian type of text goes back to an archetype that must be dated early in the second century. The Sahidic and Bohairic versions frequently contain typically Alexandrian readings.
The Western text, which was widely current in Italy and Gaul as well as in North Africa and elsewhere (including Egypt), can also be traced back to the second century. It was used by Marcion, Tatian, Irenaeus, and Cyprian… here's where I skipped)(…The chief characteristic of Western readings is fondness for paraphrase. Words, clauses, and even whole sentences are freely changed, omitted, or inserted. Sometimes the motive appears to have been harmonization, while other times it was the enrichment of the narrative by the inclusion of traditional or apocryphal material. Some readings involve quite trivial alterations for which no special reason can be assigned. One of the puzzling features of the Western text is that at the end of Luke and in a few other places in the New Testament certain Western witnesses omit words and pkmtyolpages tha are present in other forms of text, including Alexandrian. Although at the close of the last century certain scholars were disposed to regard these shorter readings as original, since the acquisition of the Bodmer Papyri many scholars today are inclined to regard them as aberrant readings.
In the book of acts the problem raised by the Western text becomes most acute, for the Western text is nearly ten percent longer than the form which is commonly regarded to be the original text of that book.
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Post by foreverlearning on Oct 8, 2003 17:55:44 GMT -5
And if I'm correct, Nasb containes the Alexadrian text. Some one please correct me if I'm wrong on that.  |
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Post by foreverlearning on Oct 8, 2003 17:56:59 GMT -5
P.s Thank you for this information.  |
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Post by Pietro on Oct 9, 2003 8:13:37 GMT -5
P.s Thank you for this information. More to come when I have time. It gets better as we move closer in time. Glad you like it. |
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Post by foreverlearning on Oct 9, 2003 18:07:55 GMT -5
More to come when I have time. It gets better as we move closer in time. Glad you like it. And I should make out the check to....? ;D ;D  |
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Post by MorningStar on Oct 10, 2003 6:31:08 GMT -5
This is cool info. I'm in the midst of a book now that discusses the Gospel of Thomas and it takes a look at why it was left out of the NT. There is a chapter soley on Thomas vs. John, and about the political agenda of the church to accept John and refute Thomas.
Good stuff.
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Post by mook2357 on Oct 10, 2003 7:13:54 GMT -5
Technical info? I might want that..depends what it consists of.. Do we have any actual examples of what the differences between texts are, or just the opinion of the author of the differences? I would REALLY like to see them first hand...(well, as first hand as I can  ) IE, I am curious about a few particular pkmtyolpages, such as John 1, particularly verse 18... This particular verse is translated so different in the various versions, I am most interested in the various ways it "originally" appeared...it would say a lot for how the "original Christians" regarded Jesus: KJV: John 1:18 No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. NIV: John 1:18 No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only,[1] ,[2] who is at the Father's side, has made him known.
Footnotes
1:18 Or the Only Begotten
1:18 Some manuscripts but the only (or only begotten) Son NASB: John 1:18 (1) No one has seen God at any time; (2) the only begotten God who is (3) in the bosom of the Father, (4) He has explained Him.
Show cross-references
Ex 33:20; John 6:46; Col 1:15; 1 Tim 6:16; 1 John 4:12
John 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9
Luke 16:22; John 13:23
John 3:11 YLT: John 1:18 God no one hath ever seen; the only begotten Son, who is on the bosom of the Father -- he did declare.See, this is one of those pkmtyolpages that identifies Jesus as God Himself, if we accept some of the translations...IE, if I ONLY had an NIV Bible...I would think this was indeed what the early Christians thought... However, imho, it is rather telling that the only versions that translate it to "God" instead of "Son of God" use many footnotes, and seem to have "added" and/or "altered" the pkmtyolpage... Do you have any info on this pkmtyolpage, by any chance? |
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Post by Pietro on Oct 10, 2003 9:18:28 GMT -5
Technical info? I might want that..depends what it consists of.. Do we have any actual examples of what the differences between texts are, or just the opinion of the author of the differences? I would REALLY like to see them first hand...(well, as first hand as I can ) IE, I am curious about a few particular pkmtyolpages, such as John 1, particularly verse 18... This particular verse is translated so different in the various versions, I am most interested in the various ways it "originally" appeared...it would say a lot for how the "original Christians" regarded Jesus: KJV: John 1:18 No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. NIV: John 1:18 No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only,[1] ,[2] who is at the Father's side, has made him known.
Footnotes
1:18 Or the Only Begotten
1:18 Some manuscripts but the only (or only begotten) Son NASB: John 1:18 (1) No one has seen God at any time; (2) the only begotten God who is (3) in the bosom of the Father, (4) He has explained Him.
Show cross-references
Ex 33:20; John 6:46; Col 1:15; 1 Tim 6:16; 1 John 4:12
John 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9
Luke 16:22; John 13:23
John 3:11 YLT: John 1:18 God no one hath ever seen; the only begotten Son, who is on the bosom of the Father -- he did declare.See, this is one of those pkmtyolpages that identifies Jesus as God Himself, if we accept some of the translations...IE, if I ONLY had an NIV Bible...I would think this was indeed what the early Christians thought... However, imho, it is rather telling that the only versions that translate it to "God" instead of "Son of God" use many footnotes, and seem to have "added" and/or "altered" the pkmtyolpage... Do you have any info on this pkmtyolpage, by any chance? I will respond to this tomorrow. |
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Post by Pietro on Oct 11, 2003 10:15:59 GMT -5
The Caesarean text, which seems to have originated in Egypt, was brought, perhaps by Origen, to Caesarea, where it was used by Eusebius and others. From Caesarea it was carried to Jerusalem, where it was used by Cyril and by Armenians who, at an early date, had a colony at Jerusalem. Armenian missionaries carried the Caesarean text into Georgia, where it influenced the Gregorian version as well as an uncial Greek manuscript of about the ninth century. Furthermore, perhaps Euthalius’s scholarly edition of the Pauline Epistles was made at Caesarea.
This it appears that the Caesarean type of text has had a long and checkered career. According to the view of most scholars, it is an Eastern text, dating from the early part of the third century, and is characterized by a distinctive mixture of western readings and Alexandrian readings. One may also observe a certain striving after elegance of expression, a feature that is especially typical of the Byzantine type of text.
Another eastern type of text, current in and near Antioch, is preserved today chiefly in Old Syriac witnesses, namely the Sianatic and the Curetonian manuscripts of the Gospels and in the quotations of the Scripture contained in the works of Aphraates and Ephraem.
The Byzantine text, otherwise called the Syrian text (so Westcott and Hort0, the Koine text (so von Soden), the Ecclesiastical text (so lake), and the Antiochen text (so Ropes), is, on the whole, the latest of the several distinct types of text of the New Testament. It is characterized chiefly by lucidity and completeness. The framers of this text sought to smooth away any harshness of language, to combine two or more divergent readings into one expanded reading and to harmonize divergent parallel pkmtyolpages. This conflated text. Produced perhaps at Antioch in Syria, was taken to Constantinople, whence it was distributed widely throughout the Byzantine Empire. It is best represented today by codex Alexandrinus (in the Gospels; not in Acts, the Epistles, or Revelation), the later uncial manuscripts, and the greae pkmtyolm of minuscule manuscripts. Thus , except for an occasional manuscript that happened to preserve an earlier for of text, during the periods from anout the sixth to the seventh century down to the invention of printing with movable type (A.D. 1450-56), the Byzantine form of text was generally regarded as the authoritative for of text and was the one widely circulated and accepted.
After Gutenberg’s press made the production of books more rapid and therefore cheaper than was possible through copying by hand, it was the debased Byzantine text that became the standard form of the New Testament in printed editions. This unfortunate situation was not altogether unexpected, for the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament which were most readily available to early editors and printers were those that contained the corrupt Byzantine text.
[Probably one more section after this involving the more recent (1870?) editions. And as transcribe this stuff I can see how things can change in the process.]
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Post by Pietro on Oct 11, 2003 10:19:14 GMT -5
Technical info? I might want that..depends what it consists of.. Do we have any actual examples of what the differences between texts are, or just the opinion of the author of the differences? I would REALLY like to see them first hand...(well, as first hand as I can ) IE, I am curious about a few particular pkmtyolpages, such as John 1, particularly verse 18... This particular verse is translated so different in the various versions, I am most interested in the various ways it "originally" appeared...it would say a lot for how the "original Christians" regarded Jesus: KJV: John 1:18 No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. NIV: John 1:18 No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only,[1] ,[2] who is at the Father's side, has made him known.
Footnotes
1:18 Or the Only Begotten
1:18 Some manuscripts but the only (or only begotten) Son NASB: John 1:18 (1) No one has seen God at any time; (2) the only begotten God who is (3) in the bosom of the Father, (4) He has explained Him.
Show cross-references
Ex 33:20; John 6:46; Col 1:15; 1 Tim 6:16; 1 John 4:12
John 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9
Luke 16:22; John 13:23
John 3:11 YLT: John 1:18 God no one hath ever seen; the only begotten Son, who is on the bosom of the Father -- he did declare.See, this is one of those pkmtyolpages that identifies Jesus as God Himself, if we accept some of the translations...IE, if I ONLY had an NIV Bible...I would think this was indeed what the early Christians thought... However, imho, it is rather telling that the only versions that translate it to "God" instead of "Son of God" use many footnotes, and seem to have "added" and/or "altered" the pkmtyolpage... Do you have any info on this pkmtyolpage, by any chance? “Monogenes Theos” (God, only begotten) seems to be in the Greek editions used by Metzger and the United Bible Society committee. “Monogenes hyios” (only begotten son) is a variant reading. There are scads of witnesses for each (witnesses being pieces of manuscript). Metzger writes: With the acquisition of p66 and p75 (proto-Alexandrian witnesses) both of which read QeoV (Theos); the external support of this reading has been notably strengthened. A majority of the Committee regarded the reading monogenhV
uioV (monogenes hyios), which undoubtedly is easier than monogenhV QeoV, to be the result of scribal assimilation to JN 3:16, 18; 1 JN 4:9. The anarthrous use of QeoV appears to be more primitive. There is no reason why the article should have been deleted, and when uioV supplanted QeoV it would certainly have been added. The shortest reading, ¢o monogenhV , while attractive because of internal considerations, is too poorly attested for acceptance as text.
Some modern commentators take monogenhV as a noun and punctuate so as to make three distinct designations of him who makes God Known.
[It is doubtful that the author would have written monogenes theos, which may be a primitive, transcriptional error in the Alexandrian tradition.]
So he says it is an earlier reading but probably an error. That doesn't make much sense to me. Sounds like the majority of later witnesses have “only begotten son” but the best earliest have, “God, only begotten”. John has already identified the Son with the Word and the Son with God. Sounds OK to me. |
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Post by Pietro on Oct 11, 2003 11:26:20 GMT -5
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Post by Pietro on Oct 11, 2003 14:39:28 GMT -5
The first published edition of the printed Greek Testament, issued at Basel in 1516, was prepared by Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist scholar. Since Erasmus could find no manuscript that contained the entire Greek Testament, he utilized several for the various divisions of the New Testament. For the greater part of his text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts now at the university library at Basel, one of the Gospels and on of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century. Erasmus compared them with two or three others, and entered occasional corrections in the margins or between the lines of the copy given to the printer. For the book of Revelation he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. As it happened, this copy lacked the final leaf, which had contained the last six verses of the book. For these verses Erasmus depended upon Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, translating this version into Greek. As would be expected from such a procedure, here and there in Erasmus’s reconstruction of these verses are several readings which have never been found in any Greek manuscript-but which are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament. In other parts of the New Testament Erasmus also occasionally introduced into his Greek text material derived from the current form of the Latin Vulgate.
So much in demand was Erasmus’s Greek Testament that the first edition was soon exhausted and a second was called for. It was this second edition of 1519, in which some (but not nearly all) of the many typographical blunders of the first edition had been corrected, that Martin Luther and William Tyndale used as the basis of their translations of the New Testament into German (1522) and into English (1525).
In the years to follow many other editors and printers issued a variety of editions of the Greek Testament, all of which reproduced more or less the same type of text, namely that preserved in the later Byzantine manuscripts. Even when it happened that an editor had access to older manuscripts-as when Theodore Beza, the friend and successor of Calvin at Geneva, acquired the fifth or sixth century codex Claromontanus-he made relatively little use of them, for they deviated too far from the form of the text that had become standard in the later copies.
Noteworthy early editions of the Greek New Testament include two issues by Robert Etienne (commonly known under the Latin for of his name, Stephanus), the famous Parisian printer who later movd to Geneva and threw his lot with the Protestants of that city. In 1550 Stephanus published at paris his third edition, the editio Regia, a magnificent folio edition. It is the first printed Greek edition to contain a critical apparatus; on the inner margins of its pages Stephanus entered variant readings from fourteen Greek manuscripts, as well as readings from another printed edition, the Complutensian Polyglot. Stephanus’s fourth edition (Geneva 1551), which contains two Latin versions (the Vulgate and that of Erasmus), is noteworthy because in it for the first time the text of the New Testament was divided into numbered verses.
Theodore Beza published no fewer than nine editions of the Greek testament between 1565 and 1604, and a tenth edition appeared posthumously in 1611. the importance of Beza’s work lies in the extent to which his editions tended to popularize and stereotype what came to be called the Textus Receptus. The translators of the Authorized or King James Bible of 1611 made large use of Beza’s editions of 1588-89 and 1598.
The term Textus Receptus, as applied to the text of the New Testament, originated in an expression used by the Elzevir brothers, who were printers in Leiden and later in Amsterdam. The preface to their second edition of the Greek Testament 91633) contains the sentence: Textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus (“Therefore you [dear reader] now have the text received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted”). In one sense this proud claim of the Elzevirs in behalf of the edition seemed justified, for their edition was, in most respects, not different from the approximately 160 other editions of the printed Greek testament that had been issued since Erasmus’s first published edition of 1516. In a more precise sense, however, the Byzantine form of the Greek text, reproduced in all early printed editions, was disfigured, as was mentioned above, by the accumulation over the centuries of myriads of scribal alterations, many of minor significance but some of considerable consequence.
It was the corrupt Byzantine form of the text that provided the basis for almost all translations of the New Testament into modern languages down to the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century scholars assembled a great amount of information from many Greek manuscripts, as well as from versional and patristic witnesses. But, except for three or four editors who timidly corrected some of the more blatant errors of the Textus receptus, this debased form of the New Testament text was reprinted in edition after edition. It was only in the first part of the nineteenth century (1831) that German cpkmtyollical scholar, Karl Lachmann, ventured to apply to the New Testament the criteria that he had used in editing texts of the cpkmtyollics. Subsequently other critical editions appeared, including those prepared by Constantin von Tischendorf, whose eight edition (1869-72) remains a monumental thesaurus of variant readings, and the influential edition prepared by two Cambridge scholars, B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort (1881). It is this latter edition that was taken as the basis for the present United Bible Societies” edition. During the twentieth century, with the discovery of several New Testament manuscripts much older than any that had hitherto been available, it became possible to produce editions of the New Testament that approximate ever more closely to what is regarded as the wording of the original documents.
In the preceding section the reader will have seen how, during about fourteen centuries when the New Testament was transmitted in handwritten copies, numerous changes and accretions came into the text. Of the approximately five thousand Greek manuscripts of all or part of the New Testament that are known today, no two agree exactly in all particulars. Confronted by a pkmtyolm of conflicting readings, editors must decide which variants deserve to be included in the text and which should be relegated to the apparatus. Although at first it may seem to be a hopeless task amid so many thousands of variant readings to sort out those that should be regarded as original, textual scholars have developed certain generally acknowledged criteria of evaluation.
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Post by Pietro on Oct 11, 2003 15:00:02 GMT -5
So what I got from all that was that when you look at a Bible it helps to know which Greek text it is based on.
Textus Receptus, Luther, Tyndale, Stephanus, and King James version are all from the same family based on the Byzantine text.
They are not as reliable as Lachmann, Tischendorf, Westcott & Hort that take into account also the Alexandrian , Western, and Caesarean texts.
More currently I believe editions by Nestle-Aland (1963) and Aland, Black, Metzger, Wikgren (1966) also take into account the other texts.
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