Too Bad. Hand-Written Copies of Copies of Copies … Over the Centuries Just Aren’t Good Enough To Be Trusted Without External Confirmation
Kevin R. Henke
October 27, 2022
In Henke (2022bh) and Henke (2022b), I stated the following:
“Mr. Lundahl fails to realize that ancient histories by themselves cannot be trusted, especially if they were written centuries or millennia after the supposed event that they are describing or if the documents are copies of copies of copies of copies... and not the originals Even if an ancient history happens to be an original copy describing an event that occurred at the time that the document was written, unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history. There’s a big difference between an historical claim and a reliable historical claim.” [my original emphasis in italics; my emphasis in bold]
In Lundahl (2022t), Mr. Lundahl provides the following partial comments on my bolded phrase:
“This is a very fine way to handle juridical documents in recent history, but it is over the top, unrealistic, when it comes to ancient texts.
We do have a discipline that compares text versions, it does very much not favour the general assumption that a text copied and recopied is like plasticine being molded and remolded.”
It’s too bad that ancient documents could not avoid the numerous copying errors and outright alterations that resulted from hand-copying copies of copies of copies… over the centuries. Contrary to Mr. Lundahl’s unreferenced claim in the above quotation, scribes miscopying and deliberately altering texts are serious problems as Ehrman (2003, pp. 217-227; 2013, pp. 61-67) explains. Also, see Tov (2001). Nevertheless, we should not lower our standards that demand textural quality and reliability just because the ancients were not fortunate enough to have printing presses and Xerox machines. Their inability to accurately duplicate their documents demands even greater skepticism about the trustworthiness of their copies.
In my next essay, Henke (2022ja), I’ll discuss additional comments from Lundahl (2022t) on my above bolded phrase.
References:
Ehrman, B.D. 2003. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew: Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 294pp.
Ehrman, B.D. 2013. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics: Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 628pp.
Tov, E. 2001. Textural Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd revised ed., Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 456pp.