Again thanks all. One thing I have learn here,
if you are presenting A topic you should know the
facts or you better know the facts, if not you will
look very stupid. Still developing my critical thinking
skills. Thanks to you all.
Do not add or do not take away.Rev.22;18,19
by jam 30 Replies latest jw friends
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PSacramento
Erhman's teacher was the late Bruce Metzger, my favorite NT scholar by far.
The bible is a collection of books and not A book.
The warning in Revelation was in regards to the "book" of Revelation.
Of course the books of the OT and NT were copied and edited as the centures went by and soem erros were made, but as the above noted scholar points out, NONE of the errors lead to any major doctrinal issue.
Many were spelling and copyist errors, some like the Johannine comma were deleberate but caught and "dealt with".
Other additions like the adultera pericope ( The adultress story in GOJ) were kept not because they were viewed as "original" but because they were in character of the gospel and didn't really add or take away from established doctrine.
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Leolaia
One ironic thing is that many scribal errors and corruptions were introduced not to intentionally change the text but to abide by the kind of puritist motive reflected in Revelation 22:18-19. Copyists already knew that the text was pluriform and they wanted to restore what they believed was the true text in cases where they found "mistakes". In fact, Revelation itself was victim to much textual corruption because it was written in atrocious Greek. So later scribes tried to correct the Greek, thinking the ungrammatical turns of phrase were later mistakes introduced into the text. However the reality is that those grammatical errors were original to the text; they were Semiticisms of the author who was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek, and who did not have as good a command of Greek as any other author in the NT. This is the reason why several early church fathers doubted whether John the Evangelist could have possibly written Revelation, and speculated that the latter was written by a different John.
A good example of this process can also be found in the NWT. The Society introduced "Jehovah" in places in the NT where it had never appeared before in the Greek text on the theory that it DID appear previously in the text and was later removed, despite the text there is not a single instance of the name anywhere in the Greek scribal tradition of the NT. So the desire to restore the true text resulted in new textual corruption.
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Leolaia
PSacramento....I recently read an interesting theory by Rius-Camps that asserted that the pericope adultera, while non-Johannine, originated with a canonical gospel, namely Mark. The evidence is textual and stylistic, which imo is quite persuasive. And it would fit well with my overall impression of the poor textual state of Mark, with it apparently missing its original beginning, its ending (with several other conclusions added in the textual tradition to complete the text), and there are odd seams like Mark 10:46 where something seems to be missing. There are actually two versions of the pericope in the textual tradition, one Markan in style and the other Lukan. He suggests that the original Markan version appeared just after Mark 12:12, then was redacted by the author of Luke into the Lukan version, where it appeared immediately after Luke 20:19. Then, under the increasing strict moral climate of the proto-orthodox church, Jesus' response to adultery was seen as too lenient or tolerant, so it then was omitted in both gospels fairly early in the transmission process (say, the early second century AD). Since there isn't a Matthean version, it is possible that it was already removed from Mark in the late first century AD. Both versions of the story survived however; Papias is known to have preserved a version of the story in his own book c. 130-140 AD. Scribes who valued the story then sought to restore it and the two different versions were variably inserted as an erratic boulder into Luke and John at different narrative locations. It was inserted at ch. 8 of John because contextually it had loose relevance to what was stated in John 7:51.
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PSacramento
Two awesome posts Leo :)
Yes, it does make since that the later copyists of Revealtion would have tried to correct the "atrocious" Greek in Revelation.
Reading it and reading the GOJ, I don't know how anyone could have thought they were written by the same person, still that doesn't mean that the original dictation/letters were NOT by the same person (The GOJ syas that those were the words passed on by the beloved disciple, hinting that the writer is NOT the beloved disciple but the person that the beloved disciple either dictated to or even wrote to and that the writer passed on in such beautiful greek).
That is a facinating view of pericope adultera and one that does indeed make so much sense.
Any "evidence" that it could be the case?
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wobble
It always made me sad that the Pericope de adultera was considered by the WT to be spurious, at the time I trusted their judgement in such matters.
I always thought it seemed so much like the Jesus I knew and loved to have dealt with the matter as he did. It now seems that we may have in the story a very early example of the kind of stories that were circulating about Jesus' teaching, good.
Dear Jam, it is refreshing to see the way you have accepted the new knowledge offered to you by posters on here, I too have many times been shown to be in error in my thinking on here, but I take it as all part of my(Free - thanks all !) education.
What a pity that the JW apologist types are too proud to admit that they need "readjusting" and they just continue to fight against what is true, there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see.
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PSacramento
The pericope Adultera is, in mnay ways, the whole of Christs teachings in one lesson, much like the prodigal son.
In it we have:
Forgiveness, love, compassion, non-judgment, repentance and salvation.
Man being reminded that he does NOT have the right to judge, that belongs to God (through Christ) and man's authority being reminded that they are LESS than God's.
No wonder the WT considers it "spurious".
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Leolaia
Well, to be fair, the passage is regarded by many if not most scholars as spurious, at least as far as the text of John is concerned. It doesn't appear in any MS before the fifth century and is missing in many later MSS, many MSS have symbols indicating that it is spurious, it has a synoptic (if not Lukan) style, and it appears in many different locations in the MS tradition (e.g. after Luke 21:38, after John 7:36, after John 7:44, after John 7:52, after John 8:12, after John 8:13, after John 10:36, and at the end of both gospels), suggesting that it was inserted at various places. There is also the question of links to other similar extracanonical stories, such as the one found in Papias that Eusebius claimed originated in the Gospel According to the Hebrews, the varying stories found in the Didascalia and Didymus Caecus (which the latter claimed was found in "certain gospels"), and the parallel story in the Infancy Gospel of James (with Mary being cleared of charges of sexual misconduct with the words "neither do I condemn you"). A comparison of these texts may be found here:
http://www.textexcavation.com/pericopedeadultera.html
As for Rius-Camps' analysis of the pericope (found in NTS, 2007), the main insight is that the textual tradition of the PA represents two basic archetypes, one with Markan style (such as the historical present, greater brevity, certain vocabulary) and the other has a recognizably Lukan style. The Lukan connection is one that has been suspected for a long time on account of stylistic features. One interesting insight is that the narrative fragment in the first three verses (which is closely parallel to Luke 21:37-38) represents the conclusion of the preceding pericope that was detached together with the PA when it was removed from Mark and Luke. The original pericope that it was originally attached with could have been the one in which Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants. It ends in Luke 20:19 with the words: "The scribes and the chief priests tried to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people; for they perceived that he had told this parable against them". But if we look at Luke's source in Mark, we find a concluding sentence that corresponds to the narrative fragment in the PA: "....for they perceived that he had told the parable against them, so they left him and went away". The first verse of the PA says essentially the same thing: "They went each to his own home". It is thus interesting that the Markan version indicates that a day had passed between the two pericopes, whereas the Lukan version doesn't indicate the passage of time at all. The dislocation of the PA, on this theory, would have removed this indication of elapsed time from the text, with the short passage in Mark 12:12 being a redaction that preserved this detail in Mark.
Anyway, its an interesting idea, but I don't think there is decisive evidence either way, and the PA remains a problem in the text history of the gospels.
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PSacramento
Close to 2000 years later and, barring some amazing discovery, all we have is speculation.
Personally I can see why the passages was kept "floating around" and (probably) passed down via oral tradition until put on paper.
It may even have been a parable that was taught but passed on as an "actual event", we don't know but it is one of the best examples of the "new teachings" of Christ.
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Leolaia
Well almost everything in biblical studies is speculation technically (assessed and constrained in terms of the preponderance of evidence), but the intrusiveness of the PA is one of the surest results of textual criticism. Its origin however is shrouded in mystery, and theories on its origins are certainly much more speculative and tenuous. It is however important to distinguish between the value of a pericope and its status in intracanonical textual tradition. As the conclusion to John implies, the stories of Jesus in circulation in the late first century far exceeded what ended up being written down in any given gospel, and there were many agrapha preserved in early Christian sources. There are parables and sayings in the fragments of Papias, Thomas, and the Apocryphon of James which probably tap this reservoir of material that was early but which did not enter into the four canonical gospels. The two narratives in POxy840 and PEgerton could easily pass for pericopes in the canonical gospels and would blend in very well in the NT, but in fact they are apocryphal in origin. At the same time, the canonical gospels have underwent redaction themselves: Matthew being expanded in the Jewish-Christian Aramaic gospels, Mark being likely truncated and expanded in parts (e.g. missing its beginning and conclusion, divergences between the double tradition and the extant text, the "Bethesda section", etc.), Luke having a shorter version as used by Marcion and Luke-Acts having a longer edition in the Western Text, and John having suffered dislocations and possible accretions. But the ethical value of a pericope stands on its own merits, and the PA certainly has a message that has had a huge impact on Christianity, and continues to speak to many people.