We've Never Found the Original Bible Manuscripts

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan. And

Dan Beecher I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are good.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher It's a, it's, it's a good time here, uh, here in the world.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Uh, well, I mean, not all the things are good, but my stuff is good.

Dan McClellan Oh, it's on, the world's on fire.

Dan Beecher Yeah, yeah.

Dan McClellan Um, but yeah, and it's 84 degrees, uh, from what I can tell right now. So it's, it's a warm day, but we're inside for some reason.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We're doing all right. Um, yeah. We're doing all right. We're

Dan McClellan gonna be okay.

Dan Beecher Uh, and we have a really fun and interesting topic to go over today. I'm looking forward to it.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Uh, it is something that we have discussed quite a bit on the show, or we've touched on. It has something, it's something that looms over much of what we do here on the show.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Uh, it's a What's That, and we're talking about textual criticism.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Which is something I, I think... You know, this is one of those things where a lot of people, uh, raise an eyebrow about it. But I think, you know, if your friends and family, if you tell them about stuff that, that we've talked about on this show, and they get, "Well, where did that come from?" This might be the episode to, to share around and let people know, uh, what, what's going on.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Th- this is something that is, uh, does not have a, a particularly ideological bent to it. This is, this is something that is used- Says

Dan Beecher you.

Dan McClellan It, well, this is, uh, used across the board.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Like, everybody engages in textual criticism, and then they go and they engage in that textual healing-

Dan Beecher Yes, they do ...

Dan McClellan that is, is so important at the end of a long day.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, let's, let's, let's just dive into it with What's That. So textual criticism.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Now, not everybody is thrilled about textual criticism, I can tell you. I, uh, when I was looking at it, when I was looking it up, I s- did find, uh, at least one place, Way of Life Literature, uh, at Way of Life Bible College- Oh ... uh, has, has a little thing, and they, and in, in their thing on textual criticism, um, this is, uh, this is excerpted from, uh, Faith Versus the Modern Bible Versions- Mm-hmm ... a course on Bible texts and versions of a tenfold defense of the King James Bible.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Uh, and they start with the words, "We further reject modern textual criticism- ... because of its terrible fruit, increasing i- uncertainty and skepticism, a weakening of the authority of scripture, and the promotion of ecumenical, of the ecumenical movement." Uh, and so what their claim is is that, uh, modern textual criticism has resulted in uncertainty in the- Hmm ... biblical text.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher Uh, and what I say to that is, if that's your main concern, and your main concern isn't trying to really understand what the text is trying to say, and what the text is, and what it means and stuff, you may be a, y- you're not really searching for truth. You're just searching for certainty, and that can be a problem.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I'm a little curious. The Way of Life Bible College just sounds- ... sounds kind of silly just, uh, just off the bat. I'm trying to find some information on this, but, uh, like, their blog, the, the, they have a post that they just reposted, uh, first from 2008. They just reposted it today, and the, the title is just Beware of Tony Campolo. Um, so- I

Dan Beecher don't know who that is, but okay.

Dan McClellan I don't know, but they're doing personal attacks on the blog of this, quote-unquote, Bible college, so- Mm-hmm ... um, forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in anything that they do or say.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Uh, but they, they, I see there's a book available, Why We Hold to the King James Bible. And here's the thing, King James Onlyism is, you're basically required to hate textual criticism, at least modern textual criticism.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Because textual criticism, like, immediately you're like, "Okay. Well, the King James Bible is out," um-

Dan Beecher Right, right ...

Dan McClellan because... And so if you wanna hold onto the King James Bible, you have to be like, "Well, wait on a minute. Wait a minute. Maybe the problem is with all of the experts." Um, and you have to, uh, hate on modern textual criticism. But the King James Bible is a product of textual criticism as well. Like, the, the process itself is, is in the background. It's, it's baked into the foundation of the King James Bible as well. You just don't like the outcomes of, of more developed textual criticism. But textual criticism goes all the way back to, um, prior to the life of Jesus. Uh, and it actually, uh, originates outside of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's actually, we gotta go back to, like, the librarians at Alexandria, and people who were, were bringing together the, the main canons of Greek literature and things like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so specifically Homer and The Iliad, and these other things, where you have a variety of different manuscripts. There are different versions of it, and if you are bringing them together, and you happen to be comparing them, you're like, "Wait a minute. These are different. Why are they different?"

Dan Beecher "Where's my favorite story? Why isn't it in here?" Yeah.

Dan McClellan Um, and so all the way back, over 2,000 years ago, they started asking, "Why do these manuscripts differ from one another, and which one is correct?"

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that is the main question of textual criticism. Correct is, is, you know, more of a value judgment. But textual criticism, it, it, we used to think of it as trying to recover the original text. Mm-hmm. The ur-text. We don't really talk about it that much anymore because- There might not be an ur-text for an awful lot of the texts we're talking about. Like, it gets really complicated if a given book of the Bible, like, was compiled from a bunch of different texts.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then those texts came together from different traditions, and some of them were written, and some of them were oral, and then later traditions alter- Like, you can't go back to an original text a lot of the time. And so now, really, what textual criticism, at least textual criticism of the Bible, is mainly concerned with is trying to, uh, reconstruct the earliest recoverable form of a given text. And unfortunately for the biblical text, the earliest recoverable form is not all the way back to the autographs. It's not all the way back to what was written by the authors. Again, that-

Dan Beecher Because we don't have those. I, I- We don't have those ... I, I think there's a lot of people that would be surprised to learn that there's-- we don't have access to any original text for any of the books of the Bible, including the, the, uh, the New Testament.

Dan McClellan Right. The, the closest we have is there's a little fragment of, uh, of papyrus, uh, P52, which contains, like, 35 or 36 words, half on one side, half on the other, of the fragment. It's about the size of a credit card. That preserves parts of the Gospel of John. 35 or 36 words that really eager, uh, enthusiastic textual critics would say might date to around 120, 125 CE, which would be maybe 20, 30 years after the Gospel of John was written.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Other-- There are others who would be like, "Eh, maybe it's around 150, but it could be as late as, like, 200." So-

Dan Beecher But even, even that's not gonna be in the handwriting of the original author.

Dan McClellan No. No. No. It's going to be-- It's, it's gonna be at least a copy of a copy of a copy.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Um, and, but the, uh, you know, that's not the entire Gospel of John. We don't know what's going on with a lot of the parts of John that are open to text critical debate. Uh, so yeah, we don't, we don't even get close. When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, our earliest copies for the overwhelming majority of the verses in Hebrew come from a couple thousand year- no, about, uh, 1,500-ish years after they were probably originally written.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Now, we do have less than half of the verses of many books of, uh, the Hebrew Bible preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. When it comes to the Book of Isaiah, we happen to have almost the entire thing, the overwhelming majority of it, preserved in the Great Isaiah Scroll. Uh, and so there is a-- you have this window from maybe as close as 20 to 30 years away from the, the original composition, all the way to 1,500 years or more-

Dan Beecher Hmm

Dan McClellan ... uh, for any, uh, for given verses. And so what can happen within those, those decades and those centuries? A lot. Um-

Dan Beecher Right. And that's, that's the problem that I guess textual criticism is facing, is just, you know, there, there, over those, over the, the, the, this long period of time, this has been transmitted and transmitted and recopied and recopied and recopied.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And there are scribal errors, as we've talked about on the show.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher There's scribal additions. There's emendations, all sorts of stuff, and you gotta figure out what's what.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You gotta figure out wha- So, uh, so obviously that's impossible, and we should all just give up.

Dan McClellan Well, it's, it's not an exact science. We can't rub, uh, a special piece of paper on the manuscript to see if it turns pink, meaning this is the original, you know, this matches the original, uh, text. Uh, but over the centuries, we've developed some observations about how things tend to happen. And, you know, a- again, some kind of textual criticism goes back over 2,000 years. But we have, when people are collecting manuscripts of the, the Bible, uh, at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, there's a degree to which there would've been some textual criticism going on as these people gathered these different manuscripts, and a lot of the manuscripts differ, some in, in very significant ways from each other. But they still held onto them. Uh, you go a few centuries down the road, you get to Origen, uh, in the third century CE, an early Christian, who put together, uh, the Hexapla, which is, like, a six-column, side-by-side comparison of, uh, the Hebrew, a transliterated version of the Hebrew, the Septuagint, uh, like a bunch of different versions, and compared things and started using little symbols and signs to indicate, "Here's where this version has extra text. Here's where this version is missing text. Here's where this version has a different text. Here's where this version has a different word order." And, and we started kind of cataloging the different kinds of variants and the different kinds of differences that can occur between manuscripts. And then we have to go, we have to go many, many years down the road before it starts to become what we might call something approaching a science.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Uh, in, in the Reformation, the Renaissance, when comparative literature begins to, um, kind of become a thing, you have a lot more comparison of texts. Translators who are putting together, uh, translations of the Bible, for instance, Desiderius Erasmus in the early 16th century, what did he do when, uh, he wanted to put together the, the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament? He went to his library in, in Switzerland, and he, uh, said, "Give me all the manuscripts, the Greek New Testament manuscripts you got." And they- They put-- They threw seven of them on the, on the counter and said, "This is, this is everything." And he then had to decide, "Okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take two of them as my base text, and then the other five, I'm gonna compare to the base text, and I'll make changes where I think a, a certain reading is probably better."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Now, Erasmus was not a, a textual critic in, in the sense that we use the, the label today, and so some of his decisions were better than others. Uh, and then for the, the last chapter of Revelation, he didn't have-- They didn't have that chapter covered in any of the seven manuscripts.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so he just took the Latin Vulgate and just-

Dan Beecher Oh, right

Dan McClellan ... translated the Latin back into Greek and then, and then just wrote that down.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But he did multiple editions of that. With each new edition, he had access to more manuscripts and made changes regarding the text critical decisions he made. So, so here's where you have kind of the, the collision of a concern for original text, uh, along with professional printing concerns-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... and publishing concerns. It's like, okay, well, we want another edition. We wanna make changes. We also wanna sell books. So, um, you know, this turns this into something that people are taking more seriously. Uh, and we get into the-- this-- 1551 is when a guy named Stephanus decided he was gonna, uh, divide everything in the New Testament out into individual verses. That division into chapters and verses has-- had happened earlier with the Hebrew Bible. We talked about that in, in a recent episode.

Dan Beecher That's right.

Dan McClellan Uh, and then we get to-- It's really in the 18th and 19th century that textual criticism turns into something we might call a science, something where, where people started methodologically kind of figuring out what are our standards, what are our rules, how are we doing things, and we a- we adopted a number of observations. So, for instance-- And, and, uh, we still like to use these Latin titles, lectio difficilior potior, which, which means the diff- more difficult reading is preferred. Um- And the idea there is, look, when scribes make changes, more often than not, those changes are to make the text easier to understand or comprehend or accept, not harder.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the more difficult reading, uh, when we're comparing two manuscripts, the one that makes less sense is probably the earlier one. Not a hard and fast rule, but just a trend.

Dan Beecher Just a-- Yeah, just, just a guidepost.

Dan McClellan Yes, a tendency.

Dan Beecher And when you say, when you say-- when you ended that phrase with "is preferred," you just mean if we're guessing it older.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Not-

Dan McClellan All other things being-

Dan Beecher As opposed to as it may not be a better message or whatever. It may not be, but it is, but it is more l-likely to get to originality. Yeah,

Dan McClellan more likely to be earlier.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Uh, in, in the sense of the reading that preceded the other one. Uh, so the other reading-

Dan Beecher Do we have some examples? We should give, like, con-concrete examples of some-

Dan McClellan Um

Dan Beecher ... some of these things.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I, I suppose I, I could have pulled some examples up. Um But there, there are some, there are some famous ones, and here's why it's just a, you know, a tendency and not a hard and fast rule, because let's take a look at, uh, the Gospel of John. Chapter 1, Verse 18 has an incredibly famous text critical problem. Uh, and here is the-- Do, do, do, do, do. John 1:18 in the-- according to the NRSVue says, "No one has ever seen God. It is only-- It is the only Son himself, God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known." And this is actually a very problematic, uh, attempt to, uh, eat one's cake and have it, too. Because in the Greek, uh, you have-- The manuscripts say-- The, the main preferred manuscripts say one of two different things, monogenēs huios or monogenēs Theos. Monogenēs means, y- you know, in the King James version, it's translated "only begotten," but really-

Dan Beecher Mm

Dan McClellan ... it, it means one of a kind or unique.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Um, and so is it the one of a kind or unique son, or is it the one of a kind or unique God?

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And we have manuscripts that say each. The ones that say God actually come from earlier. The ones that say son come from a little later. However, once you get that reading, that is, like, almost every other manuscript that we have. And then, you know, you have little differences when it comes to whether or not it has a definite article or something like that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But lectio difficilior would come into play because monogenēs Theos is not anything that has ever-- that is-- You don't-- That phrase doesn't occur anywhere else in the, in the New Testament. Monogenēs huios does occur in the Gospel of John, and so it would be more difficult because it doesn't match what we have elsewhere, and so it doesn't make as much sense. And so the argument is does this mean monogenēs or monogenēs Theos, if it was more early, somebody would have-- a scribe would have been like, "Uh, why does it say that? I'm changing it to what I know it says elsewhere."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So that, that's, uh, sounds like a more reasonable change. How did the change happen? Why did the change happen? At the same time, however, one could push back and say, well, it's actually the easier reading if this change occurred in the period of these Christological debates over the divinity of, of Jesus. During-

Dan Beecher Sure

Dan McClellan ... during Nicaea- Somebody, um, might have been like, "Oops, I changed it to monogenēs theos," or it, it could have accidentally been changed. Uh, in the earliest manuscripts, we have what are called nomina sacra, which are abbreviations of words and titles for divinity.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so in the Greek, it actually just says, it actually just, uh, has a theta and a sigma. And the difference between theos and huios in the, using nomina sacra would've just been one letter. So one letter, if it was transcribed sloppily, could have resulted in the confusion.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so you have to, you have to bring all that into consideration to weigh which reading you think is more likely, because it's not impossible and, and it's not incredibly uncommon for scribes to correct something they know to be an error, in which case lectio difficilior might mislead you.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because if, if huios is original and somebody, "Oops, I changed it to theos because I find that theologically helpful," and then other scribes came through later and went, "Stop doing that"- Yeah ... and changed it back to huios, uh, you know, that's, that's also something that could have happened. So, so this is what makes textual criticism in, in many ways just as much an art as a science, because we're weighing probabilities. We have to consider all different kinds of ways to contextualize what's going on, to get inside the heads of the scribes who may have been transcribing this, to figure out when it may have been transcribed, uh, to when it dates, and things like that. So that, that's one example. The, another example is, um, lectio brevior, which would mean the shorter reading- Right ... is the preferred reading. Now, we had, uh, Lincoln Blumell, a friend of mine, on the show, and I don't know if you recall, but he mentioned that there were a number of textual critics these days who are actually saying sometimes the shorter reading is actually not preferred. In fact, the, to the degree that we may have to overturn that standard in textual criticism. Maybe lectio brevior is false. Hmm. Maybe it is the longer reading, or it is the, um, the longer reading that is preferred. Now, I, I have not followed up with that particular debate, but, you know, we, we saw an example of that with our passage in John with, uh, the elect lady. Um, and I don't remember what episode that was, but maybe in the, the show notes we can refer to that episode if somebody wants to go-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... check out, uh, the discussion there. Uh, so th- so those are a couple of the most common text critical, uh, considerations that, that go into this. Interestingly enough, when we look at, um, Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the, the text critical industries are, are quite a bit different between the two of them- Hmm ... although we're, we're trying to kind of coordinate them and bring them closer together so they're not operating under different standards. But when we get into-- It's really the New Testament that kind of leads the way for, uh, textual criticism of the Bible. You have a guy named Johann, uh, Jakob Griesbach, who put together his own critical edition of the Greek New Testament. It was based on, uh, this was in, uh, 18th century, 17, like 1772 to 1775, I think was, uh, or 1777, something like that, was his first edition. And he was based on the Textus Receptus, so the tradition that was started by Erasmus. But he had access to even more manuscripts, because in the 17 and 1800s, we discovered a lot of manuscripts of the New Testament, a lot more became available for scholarly consultation. And so he was like, "Okay, there are a lot of problems with the Textus Receptus, so I'm gonna use the Textus Receptus as my base text, but I'm gonna go through and make a bunch of notes and talk about why I think this reading is better and that reading is, is better over there." So his critical edition was a bit of a departure from the Textus Receptus, which w- kind of dominated, and that's the, what is underlying the King James Version. So when people talk about how textual criticism is the devil- ... um, and the King James Version, uh, is, is the only version of the Bible that is the very word of God, they are champions of the Textus Receptus.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then in the, uh, 1800s, we had, uh, 1831, Karl Lachmann published his critical edition, and instead of, like Griesbach, using the Textus Receptus as a base text and editing it, he just threw it out the window and said, "I'm creating my own critical text based on the manuscripts that are now available to us."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so this, this is the, the first iteration of the critical text as, as we understand it today, which is not tied to the Textus Receptus. And this is, this is basically, um, you know, the, the kingdom of Satan, uh, coming home to roost- ... according to the King James Onlyists.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Uh, a- and that led to, uh, w- in 50 year, 50, 50 or 51 years later, I can't re- I think it's 1881, it might be 1882, but, uh, 1881 is in my head, is when we have the first English translation of the New Testament that is actually based on the critical text rather than the Textus Receptus. Hmm. And that's the RV, the Revised Version, which basically took the King James Version's New Testament and then tr- uh, edited it according to a critical, uh, edition of the New Testament that was available in that time. And I have that big old Bible that, uh, that I pulled out to take our pictures with for YouTube-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... thumbnails.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Um, that is an 1882, I think, Bible. 1881 or 1882. It is the, the first publication where they actually put the RV and the King James Version side by side. So, they publish the two of them together so you could compare the, the Revised Version to the King James Version, and that's where they actually have-- You know, if you go look in Matthew 17:21 or any one of a number of other, about 16 other passages, they just omit the verse altogether.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because through the process of examining all the manuscripts, comparing them, and making judgment calls about which readings are better, we arrived at the conclusion that there are over a dozen full verses in the New Testament that r- are secondary additions to the text, that were not written by the authors of these texts. We have manuscripts where they are absent, and we can-- And it's-- The explanation that they were added later is, uh, a far stronger conclusion than the explanation that they somehow fell out-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... prior to our earlier, earliest manuscripts.

Dan Beecher And this, this-- And the funny thing is that some of these things, you know, I-- obviously, the, the glaring example is the woman taken in adultery. We've talked about that.

Dan McClellan That's-- Yeah, there are two glaring examples, that one and then the, what we call the long ending of Mark.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Uh, verses nine through 20 of Mark 16, which are not in our earliest manuscripts.

Dan Beecher And the, and the point that I was gonna make is that, like, the woman taken-- The story of the woman taken in adultery is great.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Like, it's a good, like, it's a good addition to the book. I like it. But it-- But, like, so, so I, I, I think it's important to clarify that when we say, uh, this is a good translation or this is a, you know, textually accurate thing, it's not-- that's not actually a, a value judgment on what's good and what's not good in the Bible so much as it is just try-- Like, the, the, the project here is to get at some level of accuracy or some level of, uh, of understanding of what the original text may have said.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, um, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but, um, this is-- I, I mentioned that New Testament and, and, uh, Old Testament Hebrew Bible textual criticism is, is different, and much of that has to do with, uh, the fact that we're usually aimed at producing different kinds of results. Like, critical editions of the Hebrew Bible have historically gone at it a little differently from critical editions of the New Testament, and the main difference is that when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, almost all of our critical editions have always been what are called diplomatic editions. So now we'll get into some of the glossary things.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Diplomatic edition is a critical edition that is based on a single manuscript. And then-

Dan Beecher Right. Right. Right

Dan McClellan ... uh, and, and so our critical editions of the Hebrew Bible are the Leningrad Codex for the most part. And then in the critical apparatus, we might say, "Okay, there are Qumran manuscripts that say this," or, "The Septuagint says this," or something like that, and that allows a translator to make text critical decisions about what they're actually going to translate. The New Testament, there is no single manuscript that is considered as authoritative as the Leningrad Codex, which is the Masoretic Text. So we have always used what we call eclectic editions. So diplomatic is based on one manuscript. Eclectic editions are based on an edition of the source text that has been cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts. So that's the Textus Receptus, and that's all the critical editions that have been published ever since, unless you have, like, a critical edition of the Codex Sinaiticus or something like that. But those are, are very rarely used for translations into English. Uh, that might be used for a translation into modern Greek, Demotikos, for, uh, you know, the Greek Orthodox Church or something like that. Uh, and so that's one of the, the main differences. Uh, some other glossary things that would be helpful for you. I use these words sometimes in my videos. I usually try to explain them, but when I don't, they just go scorching by over people's heads. But, um, you, you'll hear about two different kinds of changes. One is haplography, one is dittography. Haplography is when something has accidentally been omitted. There's been a transcription error that results in text being lost, and frequently-- And there are two different reasons that that happens mostly. One of them is called homoiarchton, one of them's called homoioteleuton. So I promised I would get to these words, but homoiarchton means same beginning. And so if you've ever tr- ever transcribed a text, you go to your, your exemplar, your source text, you read as many words as you can exactly remember, and then you go over to your blank manuscript page, and you write down the words exactly as you remember them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then you have to return back to your source text. Now, usually what you do is you either keep in your head how the word, the last word you wrote down ended, or you take note of how the next word coming up in the source text begins.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So you go back, and then when you come back to your source text, you go back to what you recall the word ended with or what you recall the next word began rit- with-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... and you pick back up there. And if words that either end or begin the same occur multiple times within a line or within a couple lines or even a few lines of each other, sometimes you accidentally go back to the wrong word.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you pick up either where you have already transcribed or you skip over stuff to pick up again. And so if you, uh, you know, if homoiarchton, two words that begin the same, you accidentally go back and record a word or multiple words all over again, that's called dittography. Dittography is where you have repeated or added material. And then if you skip lines or words because of the way a word ended or because of the way a word began, that is haplography. That's where you have omitted material. So in textual criticism, if you listen to a presentation given by a textual critic, they'll, they, they might push their glasses up on their nose and go, "And this was omitted because this is haplography as a result of homoioarcton." And, uh, it all sounds very fancy, and, and we are very proud of our ability to remember these, uh, these Latin and Greek words-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... and use them to try to help us figure out, uh, what reading was likely original. But it is, it is a fun exercise to actually look at a text and be like, "Oh, wow, I can see now exactly how the scribe went about doing this."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they went from that word and skipped over these words and picked back up on this other line, and that's why in the, the, the manuscript that I have, it skips over those things, and, you know, it either does or doesn't make much sense, uh, the resulting text.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan There are a lot of examples of, of that going on. Uh, we can even see in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The largest correction that the Dead Sea Scrolls have helped biblical scholars make to biblical manuscripts in terms of just number of words is a part in, uh, Book of Samuel, where there is a whole paragraph that got omitted because of haplography 'cause the scribe skipped from, from one word to another.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And, and we, we found a manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls where it has that paragraph. But what's funny is you can even see in the Dead Sea Scroll manuscript that part of the paragraph had to be written into the margins- ... by a different scribe because even within that Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, they accidentally omitted-

Dan Beecher They, they did the same thing

Dan McClellan ... some of the paragraph. Yeah, yeah.

Dan Beecher They did the-- Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan So they did it within that manuscript, and then- ... later on, the Masoretic Text, and, and that, that omission goes all the way back to the Septuagint. Like, that-

Dan Beecher Wow

Dan McClellan ... happened very, very early on in the transmission of the Book of Samuel. So, and, and then the last thing I'll point out is, um, what we call conjectural emendations because sometimes we're pretty sure this manuscript reading is not right, but we don't have an extant manuscript that preserves a different reading. And sometimes we'll be like, "We really, really, really think we know what happened here."

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And so you might have, if, if a critical edition or a translation is open to what are called conjectural emendations, they might just say, "You know what? We're just gonna, uh, we're gonna call an audible. We're gonna make an executive decision here. I'm changing this to what we're pretty darn sure it originally read, even though we don't have a manuscript that directly attests to that." There are textual critics who will be like, "That is anathema. You can never do that. That is not allowed." You'll have other textual critics who say, "Yeah, we, we're pretty darn sure." "We don't need to worry about this. We can make this change." So conjectural emendations are a somewhat controversial, uh, aspect of textual criticism today as well.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go.

Dan McClellan And there's a whole lot more to get to that we, we don't get to talk about.

Dan Beecher Out, out there, uh, th- all these, all these textural, textural critics out there just causing uncertainty in the biblical text, ruining it for everybody. Well, that's it for today. Uh, if you would like to become a part of making this happen and, uh, maybe just help us out just a titch, you can go over to patreon.com and become, uh, patreon.com, specifically, slash dataoverdogma- ... where you can become one of our patrons, and in so doing, uh, depending on what level you do, you can get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can get access to what we are now calling the pregame, um, maybe. We'll see how, wha- uh, if that sticks. Anyway, there's-

Dan McClellan We're gonna workshop that one, yeah.

Dan Beecher There's, there's, uh, there's bonus content every single week. Uh, so head on over there if you can. We'd sure appreciate it. Uh, and share this, as we said before, with, with someone that you think might, uh, be interested in it. Uh, also like, comment, subscribe, do all of those things, please.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Uh, thank you so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to Sam, my right-hand man. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. We'll talk to you again next time.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.