Follow up post on Ehrman's blog:
My next step in this thread about my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture will be to discuss the various Christological views known from the second century (Docetic Christologies, adoptionic Christologies, separationist Christologies; and Modalistic Christologies), and then I will try to show how textual changes made by scribes in the period reflect opposition to this, that or the other Christology, in support of the “Proto-orthodox” Christology that came to dominate the early Christian tradition.
Before doing that, I need to clear out one final piece of underbrush. The argument of my book was that Christological changes of the text were “intentional” not simply accidental. But that raises a very large question that I have not addressed on the blog, even though I have discussed intentional changes a number of times. It is this: how can we determine the “intention” of a scribe?
This is part of a much larger question that literary scholars have dealt with for many decades now, going back at least to the middle of the twentieth century, to what is called “New Criticism” in the field of literary theory. In the good ole days, before New Criticism came along, a scholar would interpret a text by showing what it must have meant based on what the author was intending to do. But the New Critics pointed out that we don’t have any access to an author’s intentions, only to his or her final product. So how can you use something you don’t have access to in order to explain that which you do have access to? (How can something you don’t know explain anything?)
The problem is even deeper. Suppose
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Suppose you interview someone to find out what her “intentions” were when she did something. Technically speaking, you have no way of knowing whether what she is telling you is right. She could be lying. She could be self-deceived. She may not remember. She possibly had a range of intentions, and only tells you the one that now seems most important. There are all sorts of possibilities. Intentions are, technically speaking, impossible to know.
And that’s with an author you are speaking to. What about an author you aren’t speaking to? An author who lived years ago who is no longer available for an interview? You may be able to surmise or reconstruct a plausible sense of her intentions from the various things she wrote. But it’s a very uncertain matter, and it doesn’t seem like a solid base on which to build an interpretation.
And what about an author who lived centuries ago for whom you do not have a large collection of writings, just a single text? You can’t very well use the author’s intentions to determine what he meant by what he wrote, if what he wrote is the only thing you have from his hand.
With scribes the matter is even worse. We not only don’t have access to them to interview, and don’t have a number of things they authored to ferret out their intentions, or even a single thing they composed themselves (except for their textual changes). We know almost nothing about these people. We don’t even know their names. Or just when or where they were living. Or much of anything about them. How can we decide what their “intentions” were?
If we can’t establish their intentions, then how can we show their intentions behind changing the texts they were copying? That’s a very big problem, and one I had to address head-on in my book.
This is how I did it. I adopted a kind of “functional” understanding of intentions. It works like this. Different scribal changes of the text function in different ways. Some changes harmonize one Gospel text with what you find in another Gospel; some rid the text of a contradiction or a historical error; some add additional detail to the text; some make the text more amenable to certain theological views.
A functional understanding of intention does not require us to say that this particular scribe “absolutely meant to accomplish” this that or the other thing in the change he made. The term “intention” in this case simply means that the change makes sense as a conscientious change by a scribe (it does not appear to have been made by a slip of the pen); and the function of the change is this, that, or the other thing. Moreover, just as a person can have a variety of intentions in any action they undertake, so too scribal changes can have a variety of intentions. It is not necessarily important to establish that *this* intention or *that* one was foremost in his mind. He may have had several things in mind. But some of these changes are of such moment that it appears he had *something* in mind. They were almost certainly not changes made by accident.
And so my book looked at changes of the text that functioned in order to make it more “orthodox” in its Christological views, to circumvent its use by Christians who had different Christological views, to make it more useful for Christians who advanced the “true” Christological view. Whether the scribes had that as their primary intention or not can never be known. But it can be known that this is the functional effect of the changes they made, in case after case.
Once there is an accumulation of evidence like this, of course it is possible then to argue that it *appears* that there was an actual theological motivation driving the scribes to make the changes they did. But we can never know for sure, since none of the scribes is around for us to interview, and even if he was, it would not guarantee that we would have absolute certainty about the matter.
To that extent studying scribal changes puts us in the same boat as those who study all historical phenomena. All we can ever do is establish what seems most probable to us about the past. When it comes to antiquity, we can almost never know beyond a shadow of a doubt. Ancient historians work principally with probabilities, rarely with certainties. So too those ancient historians that study scribes and the changes they made in their texts.
