The Challenge of the Majority Text: Should We Reevaluate Our Critical Methods?

This paper was presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for a seminary course taken in autumn of 1986. Except for a few spelling corrections, it is published here in its original form.

Even as early as 1707 when John Mill published his large edition of the Greek NT based mainly on Stephanus's third edition of the Textus Receptus (hereafter TR), traditionalists raised severe criticism against him for the few textual changes he had effected on the basis of his critical study of available MSS.1 Nevertheless, as more ancient manuscripts were found or, in some cases, became more widely known, sentiment favoring a critical, eclectic text grew. Other texts which were based on a more or less eclectic approach were published, but it was not until the appearance in 1881-82 of Westcott and Hort's The New Testament in the Original Greek with its accompanying volume setting forth their textual principles that the floodgates were opened which brought the ascendancy of the critical, eclectic texts.

Against this historical background, a countermovement formed which sought re-establishment of the TR to its place of previous recognition as the definitive Greek text of the NT. Although this movement faltered when its few main proponents passed from the scene during the first half of the twentieth century, more recently, others are championing a return to the TR on the basis of a call to recognize the Majority Text (hereafter MT) (i.e. the text attested by the majority of extant Greek MSS). Proponents of the MT decry the lack of unanimity in textual matters due to employment of the eclectic approach2 and criticize the methods by which scholars have arrived at the presently accepted critical text.

The writer adopts the thesis that a wholesale return to the TR is not warranted by the arguments of the proponents of such a move--be they of the early opponents of the eclectic text or of those who now go under the banner of "Majority Text." Nevertheless, certain data pertaining to the debate generated about this matter do suggest that a reevaluation of presently employed critical methods may be in order.

The paper is presented in three main sections. The first of these considers the nature of the challenge presented by those who advocate a return to a text based on a majority of the extant Greek MSS. This section considers how methodological differences between the eclectics and the MT advocates produce texts of differing character. The second section covers significant aspects of the debate in question and especially treats the key arguments of those who call for a return to the TR tradition. The final section focuses on matters brought up by this debate which indicate that a reevaluation of some current tenets of textual criticism may be called for.

Although the MT controversy has only recently come to prominence, it is not really new. For the most part, neither the issues nor the underlying arguments are new. They are essentially the same as those advanced by the proponents of the TR against the eclectic, critical texts of the latter part of the nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, by placing their emphasis on aspects of this controversy which had not before been emphasized and by utilizing new data which had not before come to light, the proponents of the MT have gained a new hearing for arguments which, in effect, favor the Byzantine text-type which was the basis of the TR.

It is not surprising that, before the development of movable type, textual editing had been limited to penned-in corrections noted on the MS and occasional conflations or harmonizations when more than one MS was available to the copyist. If true textual criticism was done at one time or another during this period, it was the exception rather than the rule. Gutenberg's invention changed this, however, and opened the door for efforts at more careful textual criticism.3 Erasmus's Greek NT, set up in just a few months using movable type and first published in 1516, drew from several MSS but in a rather haphazard way.4 Although his edition and texts based on it did achieve reception as the definitive Greek text, textual studies did not cone to a standstill with its publication. As more, older, and better MSS became known than those available to Erasmus and the editors of the other early editions, it became clear that the TR was not the best possible text.5 What is more, it began to be evident that a better text could be formulated through a critical, eclectic use of the MSS. Certain scholars began to amass MS evidence, and tentative efforts were made toward the publication of a truly eclectic text, but it was not until Westcott and Hort published their epoch-making work on the NT that there was a critical, eclectic text which truly superceded the TR.

It is now generally recognized that Hort's arguments on textual theory were purposely constructed to dethrone the TR.6 And he did not fail to reach this major objective. Although Hort's theories have not stood the test of time unscathed, there was enough cogency and logic in them to precipitate great changes in the way scholars viewed the MS evidence of the NT. The critical, eclectic text became the standard for students and the basis for individually published New Testaments and for such major translations as the English Revised Version. Notwithstanding widespread acceptance of this new standard, the TR did not cease to have its adherents and defenders. These were quick to point out inconsistencies in Hort's theories and to highlight the real and supposed advantages of the TR. Prominent among the few scholars who took the part of the TR in this initial debate are J. W. (Dean) Burgon and H. G. Hoskier who laid out the basic lines this debate has followed even down to the present.7

In a recently published essay on textual concerns relative to the Third World, E. A. Nida notes that the refusal of critical texts by conservatives is an anomaly since they should be the ones most interested in constructing a text closest to its original verbal form.8 His observation may be well taken. Nevertheless, the writer believes that proponents of the TR would protest that, in holding to a MT concept, they are constructing a text closest to its original verbal form. In the introduction to The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, Zane Hodges notes the collapse of Westcott and Hort's genealogical scheme under scholarly criticism and says this has nullified their most essential argument.9 Hodges does not recommend that the genealogical method be abandoned, however. Rather, he suggests that Westcott and Hort employed the method badly, and he recommends constructing genealogies for each of the NT books.10 How this would favor the MT is not clear, but he may have in mind that the original provenance of many of the books would be within or near the Byzantine area thus establishing a link with later texts in that area.

Something Hodges has to say in another work reveals that establishment of a link of continuous transmission is a key concept in his efforts to gain ascendancy for the MT.

The question of whether an explanation can be given in any satisfactory manner" for the phenomena of the Byzantine text is not such a cut-and-dried matter as Hodges implies. Behind Hodges's reasoning is the postulate that the surviving documents of the MT are descended from non-extant ancestral documents of the highest antiquity. "These must have been [sic] in their own time [sic] as old or older than the surviving witnesses from Egypt."12 If Hodges means that these non-extant, ancestral documents were of the Byzantine type, as it appears he does, then his hypothesis is virtually without MS support and is favored only by those who are committed to the MT concept. This calls into question the methods of logic which underpin the MT, and one wonders if a more inductive method had been employed if a text more akin to our present eclectic text would not have emerged.

In any debate, certain issues emerge on which the matter in question hinges. The writer treats some of the salient aspects of the MT debate in the following section.

The publication of Hort's theories along with the New Testament he and Westcott edited proved to be the watershed for the critical, eclectic text, but adherents of the TR, which that watershed deposed, are almost unanimous in their condemnation of the theories and method he outlined. One aspect of Hort's theory which comes under fire is the genealogical method. W. N. Pickering points out that both deliberate alteration of the text and mixture between one MS tradition and another limit the utility of the genealogical method.13 This is, to some extent, a valid observation, but its impact is mitigated by the consideration that neither Westcott and Hort's text nor the contemporary eclectic texts are arrived at by strict application of the genealogical method. In his article "Genealogical Method: Its Achievements and its Limitations," E. C. Colwell points out that this method is not helpful beyond a point where one is dealing with archetypal MSS and no further genealogy can be constructed. He says that when conflicting readings arise at this level, a judgment must be made concerning the intrinsic worth of the MSS in question.

So genealogical stemmatics was not employed in any strict and practical manner to establish the actual text, but the method was used theoretically (and successfully) to counter the TR's claim to majority of witnesses. E. G. Colwell illustrates how Hort used genealogical stemmatics theoretically to counter the "majority" argument.

Westcott and Hort used just such a theoretical model to justify their reliance on the vellum codices Aleph and B--especially B. But not everyone is in agreement with their assessment.

Westcott and Hort's extensive use of the Vaticanus, or B, MS to establish their text came under the criticism from the proponents of the TR, and those who favor the MT today echo that judgment. Even the eclectic critics generally conceded that Hort's justification was insufficient for such heavy reliance on Codex B. Nevertheless, the Bible Societies, in their Greek NT give considerable weight to B and related MSS. A critique by J. K. Elliot of the United Bible Societies' commentary on its own Greek NT notes that "the committee set out to produce an eclectic text but ended by producing a conservative text dominated by Aleph-B."15 Differences over matters of this sort must finally be resolved by agreement concerning the weight individual MSS are to be given. But it is difficult for proponents of the MT to agree with eclectic critics on this.

The difficulty the opposing groups encounter in trying to agree on an intrinsic relative value for such MSS as B and Aleph may be due to certain a priori considerations that proponents of the TR bring to the discussion. E. F. Hills outlines an argument that explicitly or implicitly underlies the position of all those who champion the MT. He affirms that the Byzantine text could not be false, because God would not allow his church to use an imperfect text for all the centuries the TR was in use.16 But in another work in defense of the King James Version, Hills betrays just how far his prejudices go by his willingness to throw over even the Byzantine reading because of an a priori preference for a certain Bible version.

Are the readings [from the Vulgate] which Erasmus thus introduced into the Textus Receptus necessarily erroneous? By no means ought we to infer this. For it is inconceivable that the divine providence which had preserved the New Testament text during the long ages of manuscript period should blunder when at last this text was committed to the printing press.17

Although proponents of the Majority text would not defend the authenticity of the Vulgate readings, their preference for the Byzantine text-type on the basis of postulated, presently non-extant documents of the Byzantine type18 in the face of much evidence to the contrary19 betrays, as with Hills, an a priori decision to favor tradition over very compelling evidence. D. A. Carson compares their position to that of the Roman Catholics facing the Reformation. "The Argument that what is long held as traditionally correct is Cod's truth is, methodically speaking, the same as the one used to justify the worst features of the Roman Catholic tradition at the tine of Martin Luther: the appeal to long-established tradition."20

In the introduction to The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text we find,

This statement characterizes the transmissional theory on which the MT concept is built. The 80 to 90 percent of extant NT MSS which support the Byzantine text-type,22 when seen in the light of this theory, give strong support and justification to the MT. But proponents of the eclectic, critical text point out that it is precisely in the matter of "major disruptions in [the] transmissional history" that this argument of the MT hypothesis breaks down.23

In a critique of W. N. Pickering's The Identity of the New Testament Text, Carson notes that Pickering does raise some valid historical questions relating to the Byzantine text. But he concludes that Pickering is historically naive in failing to take into account

And he adds, "Historically sensitive answers to questions like these may provide the true answer to the problem of why the text-type found in B or p75 [sic] was neglected for centuries."25 Obviously, these answers would also satisfactorily explain why the Byzantine text-type is represented in 80 to 90 percent of the extant MSS.

Proponents of the MT also cite the uniformity of the Byzantine text-type as an argument for its authenticity. They see it as the product of an unguided process which, in light of its homogeneity, argues for its authenticity--especially since, according to this view, hypotheses of the MT's descent from a single, authoritative (Lucianic) copy do not hold up.26 Carson concedes that few now accept the Hortian theory of a Lucianic recension at the base of the Byzantine text-type,27 but he also points out that, considered chronologically, the Byzantine text-type is not as homogeneous as one might hope.

Carson also notes that where citations of the NT are unambiguous in the works of the ante-Nicene fathers, every text-type except the Byzantine is referred to.29 And even as late as the time of Jerome, the Byzantine text was apparently not predominant in the areas where he worked since, as Bruce Metzger reports,

These testimonies from the first centuries of the Christian era point up a consideration that must temper our view of MT claims of homogeneity: if the uniformity of the MT at the end of the fifteenth century does not reflect what the majority witness was at the end of the third, or fourth century, then that uniformity is meaningless as a sustaining argument for the MT.

Despite the a priori nature of many of the arguments put forth in the present debate, certain questions that focus on the methodological dimension of this matter do provide avenues which could lead to more exact knowledge as to which textual variants most faithfully represent the NT autographs. Reform of textual methodology along the lines suggested in the following section, in the writer's opinion, would probably not move the eclectic, critical text significantly toward the MT. Nevertheless, it behooves us to reevaluate our own methods when valid questions of this sort are raised, by taking then into account.

One methodological concern upon which both MT proponents and eclectic critics agree is the importance of reconstructing the history of the text. E. C. Colwell cites Hort's dictum that "all trustworthy restoration of corrupted texts is founded on the study of their history."31 This attitude is also echoed by other critics such as K. W. Clark who believes that future advancements in textual criticism will be in the area of better historical understanding.32 That there are many lacunae in our historical picture of the NT text is incontrovertible, But the finding of new MSS even since the beginning of the twentieth century33 is an indication that there may be a further filling in of the textual evidence. Colwell points out that, when new materials do appear, we must ask the question, where do the new MSS fit into a plausible reconstruction of the history of the MS tradition?34 Also, MSS which are already in hand may give up, under further scrutiny from a historical standpoint, additional secrets that could fill in areas where we are now historically ignorant about the lines and modes of transmission. This must be an ongoing labor, for it cannot be complete until we can say with confidence that we have reconstructed the text that faithfully reflects the autographs.

Because the exact replica of the autographs is not yet within our reach, present critical methods must rely on transcriptional probability. In his Studies in Methodology, E. C. Colwell points out that if conjectures as to transcriptional probability are to be soundly based, they must rest upon knowledge of scribal habits.35 W. N. Pickering cites Colwell's work "Scribal Habits in Early Papyri: A Study in the Corruption of the Text" to convincingly draw into question the maxim that the shorter reading is to be preferred.36 Colwell's study focuses on singular and nonsense readings in three of the more ancient papyri (P75, P66, and P45) and shows that they more often tended to omit letters, syllables, or words than to add them.37 It occurs to the writer that the preponderance of shorter readings among the irregularities, especially in cases like those of papyri P45 and P66, could be due to that means of publication whereby one person reads the original aloud while a number of others make copies.38 Any student who has taken notes in class knows that when the choice is between getting the sense without all the words and writing down every word but falling behind in what is being said, one normally opts for the former. In any case, it seems safe to say that, in MSS which show many cases of mistakes due to homophony (indicating a copy made from a vocal reading), one should question whether the shorter reading is to be preferred. And in the case of a specific MS which shows characteristics such as those of P45 and P66 (as mentioned above), the preference-for-the-shorter-reading maxim should be eschewed.

Although publication of Westcott and Hort's work constituted the watershed that brought the critical, eclectic text into its own, a number of their theses and maxims have since been discarded. Their claim that the Neutral text is "neutral" is now generally repudiated.39 Their genealogical method, although able to posit readings that go back to the autograph, has had to choose its readings from the MSS in hand.40 Besides this, mixture (a fact of life in all MSS) limits the usefulness and effectiveness of the genealogical method.41 But despite its limitations as a critical tool, the recognition of the general truth of the genealogical thesis warns most textual critics away from blindly following a majority of the MS witnesses. As J. N. Birdsall observes, "In establishing the text we need to resort to an informed and reasoned eclectic approach, since no one strand of tradition has preserved the autograph or its approximation."42 It is obvious that textual criticism should move on beyond the work of Westcott and Hort, but let us not forget the lessons they have taught us. In his Studies in Methodology, E. C. Colwell observes that Hort does not claim certainty, but asks that the witnesses be allowed to bring their evidence to court, and that the evidence be taken seriously.

With the invention of movable-type printing, the Greek NT first became generally available through publication of what eventually became known as the "Textus Receptus." As time progressed, however, and this same medium made a considerable variety of MS evidence available to scholars, it became evident that the originally published Greek text could be improved. Tentative efforts were made toward defining that improved text over a period spanning more than 150 years, but no critical, eclectic text superseded the TR until the publication of Westcott and Hort's Greek NT with its accompanying volume explaining Hort's textual theory. The critical, eclectic nature of Hort's text and its many divergences from the TR brought strong reaction from traditionalists who favored the latter. And that reaction gave rise to the formulation of textual theories to combat Hort's and to sustain the TR position.

Hort's opponents attacked his theory of genealogical stemmatics pointing out its inadequacies and criticized his heavy reliance on Codex B and relatives in the formulation of his text. Proponents of an eclectic text concede that the genealogical method is limited in its ability to contribute to the actual formulation of the text, and they agree that Hort did not adequately justify his reliance on Codex B. Nevertheless, genealogical considerations do convincingly illustrate why the text should not be established on the sole basis of majority of witnesses, and based on similar considerations, Codex B still retains, for the eclectic critics, an honored place among the MSS. Other arguments put forward by those who sustain the MT position are a priori in nature and methodologically akin to reasonings by which the Roman Catholics held to their tradition above the Scripture in their debate with Martin Luther. When the distinctive textual theories of the proponents of the MT are considered, their contention that the majority of the MSS reflects the earliest form of the text breaks down on events historically significant to propagation of the text, since they have not allowed for these events in formulating their theory. Likewise, the argument that the homogeneity of the Byzantine text-type indicates authenticity falters in that the Byzantine type is not uniform when its readings are compared chronologically, and patristic evidence indicates that the majority MS witness of the first centuries was probably not Byzantine.

Although the claim that the MT more closely approximates the autographs than the critical, eclectic text is not borne out by the evidence, certain issues brought up by the debate generated about the MT deserve careful consideration. It is agreed by both parties that a reconstruction of the history of the NT text is of paramount importance since textual considerations depend upon the place of a particular document within the MS history. There are also indications that the maxim, "Prefer the shorter reading." nay be more limited in its application than had been thought. And finally, as a generation greatly influenced by Hort's theories, we must be careful to discern within his work what has not and what has stood the test of time.

Footnotes:

1 J.Harold Greenlee, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), p. 73,

2 Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Nelson, 1977), pp. 15-19.

3 Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, From God to Us: How We Got Our Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), p. 165.

4 Greenlee, Intro. to NT Textual Criticism, p. 70.

5 Jack Finegan, Encountering New Testament Manuscripts: A Work- ing Introduction to Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 59. 6 Pickering, Identity, p. 32, See also Erm~~t C66ColYSll, "Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P , P , P ,11 in Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament. New Testament Tools and Studies Series, ed. Bruce M. Metzger (Grand Ra- pids: Herdeans, 1969), p. 106.

7 Burgon gave prominence to the basic concept of the MT in the second of his seven "Notes of Truth" which calls for "Consent of Witnesses, or Number." (Pickering, Identity, p. 129.) Hoskier at- tacked the neutrality and the dignity of the Vaticanus MS (the main- stay of Westcott and Hort's text) (Everett P. Harrison, Introduction to the New Testament [[Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1971], p. 77.)

8 Eugene A. Nida, "The New Testament Greek Text in the Third World," in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis, edited by Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon 1). Fee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 378.

9 Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad, eds. The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (Nashville: Nelson, 1982), p. xii.

10 Ibid.

11 Zane C. Hodges, "The Greek Text of the King James Version," in Which Bible? third ed., ed. David Otis Fuller (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1972), p. 34.

12 Hodges and Farstad, eds., NT According to the Majority Text, p. x.

13 Pickering, Identity, pp. 43-45.

14 Ernest C. Colwell, "Genealogical Method: Its Achievements and Its Limitations," in Studies in Methodology, ed. Metzger, p. 65.

15 J. K. Elliot, "The United Bible Societies' Textual Connen- tary Evaluated," in Novum Testamentum 17 (April 1975): 131.

16 Edward P. Hills, "The Magnificent Burgon," in Which Bible? third ed., ed. David Otis Fuller (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids Interns- tional Publications, 1972), pp. 104-105.

17 Edward P. Hills, The King James Version Defended (Des Moines, Ia.: Christian Research Press, 1984), p. 200.

18 Hodges and Farstad, eds., NT According to the Majority Text, p.x. 19 D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), pp. 44-47, 51-54.

20 Ibid. p. 61.

21 Hodges and Farstad, eds., NT According to the Majority Text, pp. xi-xii.

22 Hodges, "The Greek Text of the KJV," p. 26.

23 Carson, The KJV Debate, p. 116,

24 Ibid., p. 113.

25 Ibid.

26 Hodges, The Greek Text of the KJV, pp. 32-34.

27 Carson, The KJV Debate, p. 113.

28 Ibid., p. 62.

29 Ibid., p. 47.

30 Bruce M. Metzger, "St. Jerome's Explicit References to Variant Readings in Manuscripts of the New Testament " in New Testament Studies: Philological, Versional, and Patristic, New Testament Tools and Studies Series, ed. by Bruce M. Metzger (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1980), p. 208.

31 Ernest C. Colwell, "Hort Redivivus: A Plea and a Program," in Studies in Methodology, ed. Metzger, p. 156.

32 K. W. Clark, "The Effect of Recent Textual Criticism Upon New Testament Studies," in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, edited by V. D. Davies and D. Daube (Cambridge: Universi- ty Press, 1964), p. 30.

33 Harrison, Introduction to the NT, p. 80.

34 Colwell, "Hort Redivivus," p 157.

35 Colwell, "Scribal Habits," p. 107.

36 Pickering, Identity of the NT Text, pp. 79-82.

37 Ibid. What is apparently the same article to which Pickering refers also appears under the title "Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P45, P66, P75, " in Studies in Methodology, ed. Metxger, pp. 106-124.

38 Carson, The KJV Debate, p. 16.

39 Colwell, "Genealogical Method," p. 75.

40 Ibid., p. 66.

41 Ibid., p. 68.

42 J. N. Birdsall, "The New Testament Text," in The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 1, P. R. Ackroyd and C. P. Evans, eds. (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), p. 376.

Sorry to be so late in responding, but a crybaby on another thread got me suspended.

I do not necessarily support the Critical, or Eclectic Text per se - but I do not buy into the adulatory acceptance of the so-called Textus Receptus either.

A lot of it has to do with one's presuppositions, one set of which the author of the article condemns out of hand, while he accepts another set of presuppositions uncritically.

I will lay my presuppositions on the table: I believe that the Bible was given by the Holy Spirit to the Church and that the Church's living liturgical usage is the measure of the text, not archaeological conjecture.

In this sense, both the TR and the Critical Text are artifacts - highly useful and salutary ones - but not living expressions of the Scriptures in the Church.

For example, the most widely used edition of the TR, the Stephanus recension of Scrivener, was altered consciously and deliberately in order to conform the Greek text to the English translation of the KJV.

One could argue, if one believed that the Church subsisted in the form of British Protestantism, that the KJV was effectively the living Scripture of the Church and that therefore tailoring the Greek to conform to the KJV was a legitimate exercise. In fact, that is implicitly what Scrivener was doing - truing up the TR to the lived reality of the Christian community.

The original TR was the result of an artificial project undertaken by Erasmus and then Beza to recover the "primitive text" of the NT. The Scrivener TR was an effort to undo that project.

When Erasmus found certain passages which seemed to make more sense in the Latin of the Vulgate than in the Greek he had, he conformed his TR to the Vulgate, but in other places - where he felt the Vulgate went astray - he chose variants from the Vulgate sense.

In many ways both the TR and the Critical Text(s) reflect the personal prejudices of Erasmus and Beza and Hort and Westcott and Aland. In many ways the Vulgate and other translations reflect the institutional prejudices of the Church.

I personally would rather rely on the collective sensus fidei of the Church rather than the rather timebound and culturebound sense of a handful of individuals.

Remember also that concern for the original languages was not an overriding issue for the Church until the Reformation, although it was a concern. The Early Church's first Bible was the Septuagint - not the texts of the Jewish Masoretes.

Parn my iggernunce, but shouldn't the oldest text have more credibility than later texts?

The problem is that there is no copy of the oldest text. What we have is people deciding which is the "oldest variant" in a range of texts, all of which are probably at best tenth or twelfth hand copies of the originals. Some researchers claim that certain texts are older than others and other, equally qualified researchers think those texts are more recent.

People are talking about altering the Greek to match the English and Latin translations, which I find horrifying.

Let's take an example: we know that St. Jerome, when translating the Latin Vulgate had access to the Hebrew texts of Scripture extant in the Holy Land and spoke in Hebrew with Jews of the Holy Land while he was working on his translation: in other words he translated in the 4th century under close to ideal conditions.

Today, the oldest complete text of the Hebrew Scriptures we have dates to the year 1009 - six hundred years older than the texts to which St. Jerome had access. In some cases, passages in our editions of Hebrew Scriptures which seem very obscure to us have a quite lucid and plausible reading in St. Jerome's Vulgate - which is why references to the Vulgate are an indispensable part of the critical apparatus of any scholarly edition of the Hebrew Scriptures. St. Jerome gives us a view into editions of the Hebrew which are now forever lost.

Surely the true meaning of what was actually written by the hand of--or dictated by the lips of--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is absolutely authoritative.

From a textual-critical point of view we can only guess as to what the Evangelists precisely wrote - the original autographs are lost forever.

Is there a reliable translation of the Vulgate?

The Douay-Rheims is a solid translation of St. Jerome's Vulgate - although it is written in Elizabethan English.

I have read--can't remember where--that the Jews were very, very careful about keeping errors from creeping into their manuscripts on recopying. You seem to be saying that, say, the Hebrew versions of the OT now extant differ from the versions available to St. Jerome.

Orthodox Rabbinical Judaism has a view of Scriptural inerrancy - especially regarding the Torah or Pentateuch - which is much more intense and elaborate than any Christian notion of inerrancy. Orthodox Jews claim that the techniques they use for textual preservation date back to the time of Moses - the best empirical evidence shows that these techniques date back to the sixth century.

The version of the Hebrew Scriptures used by most Orthodox Jews is the Bomberg or Rabbinic Bible, also known as the Mikraot Gedolot. Bomberg's edition was first printed in its entirety in 1525, I believe. The text of the Leningrad Codex from 1009, the one used by most modern scholars, is significantly different textually from the Mikraot Gedolot.

Since both texts were produced according to the strict Masoretic rules of transmission, this creates some doubt about the very high reputation of Jewish text transmission techniques.

If there is a difference between a Masoretic text of 1009 and 1525 (516 years' difference) it stands to reason that there were variants between a Masoretic text of 380 and 1009 (629 years' difference).

I also wonder, if the Apostles came from a tradition of being that careful with manuscripts, whether a version of the Gospels survives that is not substantially identical with the originals.

This is doubtful. The beginning of Jewish canonical activity dates from the establishment of the scribal school of Tiberias after the destruction of the Temple. At that time there were a large number of Jews who read Scriptures in widely varying versions of Greek.

The Tiberian school refused to consider any Greek language document as holy.

The Apostles (except for perhaps Matthew) wrote in Greek - so they were separating themselves from the stricter textual school of the Pharisaic Jews already.

Additionally, immemorial Jewish practice was to use texts until they became too fragile - and then to bury those texts the way one would bury a person. Most surviving texts of ancient Hebrew documents exist only because they were buried in extreme desert climates where they did not rot.

The original texts of the NT were probably written in well-watered communities like Antioch and Jerusalem and the coastal cities of Greece and Turkey.

Given the propensity of Jews to bury well-thumbed texts, the autographs would most likely be lost forever.

If all that is true, then the Vulgate (and the DR) would have to be *the* authoritative version. Why would anyone use anything else?

Well, I use the Vulgate for devotional and liturgical purposes, but I think knowing the Scriptures in the original languages is a very worthwhile endeavor. I will probably read the Douay-Rheims to my children when they are old enough to comprehend speech.

Of course, the Vulgate itself exists in various versions - only two officially though: the Clementina (which is in actuality a revision of the edition of Pope Clement VIII), and the Nova Vulgata.

The very first printed Bible - the Gutenberg Bible, was a Vulgate according to the text used at the University of Paris.

Of course, there are many arguments against using the Vulgate - it is not a critical text; it is a translation; we are not sure exactly what Greek sources St. Jerome used; it itself endured the vicissitudes of transmission until it was redacted 11 centuries later; etc.

My belief is that the Scripture officially proclaimed by the Church in the liturgy is the standard and therefore the Clementina and the Nova are authoritative for me.

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