When I was in grad school, I had one class that just about killed me. It was a class common to all humanities grad students. Regardless of discipline, everyone had to take it. It was not, strictly speaking, relevant to any particular major. It went under the elusively simple title of “Graduate Writing Seminar”, or something like that. It was divided into two parts. First was advanced English grammar and academic composition. The second part was something called “paleography”, the study of ancient writing. It was enough to drive a dead man mad.
I have violated the rules of that class eleven times in the first paragraph (and once in this sentence).
But that class often comes back to me when thinking about the Bible. The question that begs is this: How did the Bible come down to us?
The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew. It was translated into Greek in the first and second century BC. The Greek version was ultimately bound for the library in Alexandria, and was used by the Greek speaking Jews of the region. (This Greek translation is the Septuagint. Septuagint is “seventy” in Latin and reflects the 70 translators who worked on the original. It’s abbreviated LXX.) There will be a whole post on this subject later.
Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke were originally written in Aramaic. The rest of the New Testament was originally written in a dialect of Greek (called Koine). None of the original manuscripts of the New Testament has ever been found. Everything we have available to us today is a copy of the originals. Of the surviving documents, everything comes to us in fragments…there’s not a single complete source that’s survived intact.
I couldn’t find anything more recent than a 1976 survey of the surviving fragments. The breakdown of these fragments works out like this:
1. There were a total of 5366 surviving fragments as of 1976.
2. 88 of the fragments are on papyrus.
3. 274 of the surviving fragments were written in all capital letters without diacritical marks.
4. 2795 of the surviving texts are in all lower case letters with no capitals and no separation between words. Imagine reading the Bible without punctuation.
5. 2209 of the surviving texts are from lectionaries.
6. Between the death of Christ and 407 A.D., the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin, Syraic, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Old Slav, Gothic and Arabic.
New fragments of the Bible are being found all the time. In 1911 there were about 3000 fragments. By 1963 there were 4689 different fragments. By 1976 the number of available manuscripts had grown to 5366. Archeologists and historians continue to add to the deposit of biblical scholarship.
With the exception of eight verses, it is possible to reconstruct the entire Bible based on quotations from early Christian writers. These quotations are originally written between 100 and 400 A.D. It is, therefore, possible to reconstruct passages from a variety of sources. For example, a piece of papyrus that is illegible in one or two words might be recreated by quotations from Eusebius or Clement of Rome. Alternatively, it might be possible to recreate a verse by comparing some of these ancient quotations with the papyrus AND one of the ancient lectionaries.
All very fascinating stuff, eh?
Now, add in the paleography element and you’ll see just how hard scriptural translation and study can be. Have a look at the link on the right that says Schoyen Collection, Bible. Scroll down to the one that says MS74, and you’ll see a pretty common example of very old writing. It ain’t always easy to read.
My point is this – if you approach the Bible as a strictly 21st century book, written in American English, you will likely miss some of the most important features. The heritage of the Bible is so rich that we American’s can’t always get our heads around it. We have to look at the Bible as a whole, and within the context of where and when it was written. We have to take it back to the Hebrew and Greek of the originals to really understand what the authors intended.
