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Re: inerrancy vs. infallibility (no otr)

On Fri, 28 Dec 2001, Brian K. Schermerhorn wrote:
> Peter says:

> > Given the sheer number of manuscripts out there, I find the existence
> > of the Bible less miraculous than the existence of, oh, the Annals of
> > Tacitus.  :)
>
> > My point here is not to pick individual passages apart -- my point is
> > simply to underscore the fact that the Bible is not inherently
> > different from any other text when it comes to textual transmission.
>
> I'm too many years removed from my undergrad Bible courses, but isn't
> that "sheer number of manuscripts" inherently different?  I mean, in a
> relatively short amount of time we see a proliferation of literature
> about this messianic character from a roman backwater province that's
> unparalleled, is it not?

Perhaps I should have made a clearer distinction between "manuscript" and
"text".  By "text", I would mean something like "the Gospel of Thomas",
"The Annals of Tacitus", "Homer's Iliad" and so on.  By "manuscript", I
mean a handwritten copy of one of those texts.

So when I refer to the "sheer number of manuscripts", I am referring to
the fact that we have far, far more ancient handwritten copies of the
Bible than we do of other texts.  They all vary from one another in terms
of spelling, word-choice, and even which entire passages they include,
however, you can use them all to compile a single "text" that is
remarkably close to the original text, whatever that was.  (That single
"text", however, is a modern reconstruction based on the manuscripts.)

So in that sense, because there are so many more copies of the Bible, its
survival would seem to be less miraculous than the survival of other
"texts", which often come down to us in fragmentary form (for example,
there are entire sections missing from Tacitus's Annals, partly because
the manuscripts we have of that "text" are fewer, and more recent).

And if I'm not mistaken, *most* of the manuscripts we have date to the 4th
century or later, which is exactly what you'd expect, since Christianity
was outlawed in the previous centuries and its texts were routinely
destroyed by the authorities, until, in the 4th century, it became the
institutional religion of the Roman Empire.  Of course, we have *some*
manuscripts that date to the earlier centuries -- the fact that a book is
banned does not mean no one kept a copy of it -- but if I'm not mistaken,
we don't have all that many, and what we do have is quite fragmentary.

> Now, if this is the case I'm not trying to draw the discussion back into
> that proliferation being "miraculous."  All I would try to do right now
> is claim that it demonstrates remarkable perpetuation and offers a much
> larger opportunity for induced changes / errors (take your pick).  But
> isn't that unique in it's scale and timing?

Maybe, I don't know.  I'm sure people in backwater provinces wrote lots of
things about themselves which never found an audience in the central
provinces and which were never preserved for posterity because the
communities that created them did not survive past the first century, so
I'm not sure what to make of the proliferation, per se.

I would add that most "induced changes" tend to happen rather early in the
process, when texts are still in flux and have not yet settled into an
accepted form; this would be in that same early period for which we don't
have all that many manuscripts.  You can actually see this process taking
place in the Synoptic gospels, where Matthew and Luke freely plagiarize
Mark while revising him and adding other material.  And according to some
traditions, there were at least two versions of Mark in the early days of
the church -- even evangelical scholar N.T. Wright has proposed that the
version of Mark we now have in our Bibles is a truncated form of the
original, missing the beginning and ending of the original text.

I'm not sure what argument I'm trying to make here, if any -- and perhaps
that is partly because I'm not sure what question you were asking.  :)

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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