Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Schmuel <schmuel AT nyc.rr.com>]

Hi Folks,

Peter Kirk - 
> Schmuel who made unqualified claims like "Texts full of scribal blunders" 
> which could be 
> taken as suggesting significant unreliability in the New Testament.

Schmuel
> This is by taking the quotes from Dean John Burgon  ....

sujata - 
>Is there a complete list of scribal error somewhere on the Internet?

Schmuel
Nope.. however here is a quote from Dean John Burgon that gives some numbers 
and 
a few verses.  I have never seen these numbers of blunders contested.  Please 
note
that he is not talking about textual variants or doctrinal tamperings or 
questions -
but simply scribal blunderama.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/burgon/mark.iv.vi.html
Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark 
Vindicated Against Recent Critical Objectors and Established

More recently, a claim to co-ordinate primacy has been set up on behalf of 
the Codex Sinaiticus ... the Codex in question abounds with “errors of the 
eye and pen, to an extent not unparalleled, but happily rather unusual in 
documents of first-rate importance.” On many occasions, 10, 20, 30, 40 words 
are dropped through very carelessness.  In this way 14 words have been 
omitted from Cod. in S. Mark xv. 47-xvi. 1:­19 words in S. Mark i. 32-4:­20 
words in S. John xx. 5, 6:­39 words in S. John xix. 20, 21. . “Letters and 
words, even whole sentences, are frequently written twice over, or begun and 
immediately cancelled: while that gross blunder ... whereby a clause is 
omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, 
occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament 

And here is some more commentary about the number of revisors.

From Stewarton Bible School 
<http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/vital/kjv/part1-4.html#Sinaiticus>http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/vital/kjv/part1-4.html#Sinaiticus
 
On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, 
done by 10 different people. Some of these corrections were made about the 
same time that it was copied, but most of them were made in the 6th and 7th 
century. (snip) 

The great Greek scholar, Dr Scrivener, points this out in his historic work A 
Full Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus. He speaks of correctional alterations 
made to the MS: 'The Codex is covered with such alterations... brought in by 
at least ten different revisers, some of them systematically spread over 
every page, others occasional or limited to separated portions of the MS, 
many of these being contemporaneous with the first writer, but the greater 
part belonging to the sixth or seventh century.' "

The following is a more general discussion and has a bit more of the opinions 
and conclusions of Dean John Burgon.  Some of this covers the issues raised 
in the post by Karl Randolph about why old manuscripts might be preserved not 
used much. 

To put a bluntly ... an early manuscript .. oddball and scribally corrupt .. 
stashed away in the desert
   =  junque.

From Cecil Carter 
<http://www.mag-net.com/%7Emaranath/OLDBEST.HTM>http://www.mag-net.com/~maranath/OLDBEST.HTM
 
OUR SECOND WITNESS AGAINST THE "OLDEST AND BEST" MANUSCRIPTS 

John William Burgon -(Vaticanus). 

Concerning the manuscripts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, Burgon said; 

"I am utterly disinclined to believe," continues Dean Burgon, "so grossly 
improbable does it seem - that at the end of 1800 years 995 copies out of 
every thousand, suppose, will prove untrustworthy; and that the one, two, 
three, four or five which remain, whose contents were till yesterday as good 
as unknown, will be found to have retained the secret of what the Holy Spirit 
originally inspired." 

"I am utterly unable to believe, in short, that God's promise has so entirely 
failed, that at the end of 1800 years, much of the text of the Gospel had in 
point of fact to be picked by a German critic out of a wastepaper basket in 
the convent of St. Catherine; and that the entire text has to be remodeled 
after the pattern set by a couple of copies which had remained in neglect 
during fifteen centuries, and had probably owed their survival to that 
neglect; whilst hundreds of others had been thumbed to pieces, and had 
bequeathed their witness to copies made from them..." 

Concerning B and ALEPH his remarks are as follows. 

"As for the origin of these two curiosities, it can perforce only be divined 
from their contents. That they exhibit fabricated texts is demonstrable. No 
amount of honest copying - persevered in for any number of centuries - could 
by possibility have resulted in two such documents. Separated from one 
another in actual date by 50, perhaps by 100 years, they must needs have 
branched off from a common corrupt ancestor, and straightway become exposed 
to fresh depraving influences." 
Rev. Revised P. 318 

"If they had been good manuscripts, they would have been read to pieces long 
ago. We suspect that these two manuscripts are indebted for their 
preservation, solely to their ascertained evil character; which has 
occasioned that the one eventually found its way, four centuries ago, to a 
forgotten shelf in the Vatican Library; while the other, after exercising the 
ingenuity of several generations of critical Correctors, eventually (viz. in 
A.D. 1844) got deposited in the wastepaper basket of the Convent at the foot 
of Mount Sinai. Had B and ALEPH been copies of average purity, they must long 
since have shared the inevitable fate of books which are freely used and 
highly prized; namely, they would have fallen into decadence and disappeared 
from sight, but in the meantime, behold their very antiquity has come to be 
reckoned to their advantage; and (strange to relate) is even considered to 
constitute a sufficient reason why they should enjoy not merely 
extra-ordinary consideration, but the actual surrender of the critical 
judgment." (Revision Revised P.319) (snip) 

With regard to Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. 

"We are able to show -- that the readings they jointly embody afford the 
strongest presumption that the Mss. which contain them are nothing else but 
specimens of those 'corrected', i.e. corrupted copies, which are known to 
have abounded in the earliest ages of the church." (Dean Burgon) (snip) 

"These are two of the least trustworthy documents in existence. So far from 
allowing Dr. Hort's position that--'A text formed' by 'taking Codex B as the 
sole authority', 'would be incomparably nearer the Truth than a Text 
similarly taken from any other Greek or other single document' (p.251), -- we 
venture to assert that it would be, on the contrary, by far the foulest Text 
that had ever seen the light: worse, that is to say, even than the Text of 
Drs. Westcott and Hort. And that is saying a great deal." 
(Revision Revised p. 316) 

This illustrious scholar so greatly feared by Westcott and Hort, that after a 
few feeble rebuttals, they tended to ignore the battering ram criticisms of 
their attack on the Word of God; now calls for testimony from one of the 
Westcott and Hort demolition team of "revisers" of the pure English Bible. 

====

I will point out that such manuscripts would never be of interest for 
scholarship regarding the Hebrew Bible.  In that realm careful scribal 
activity is the norm and a grossly deficient manuscript would have been long 
defunctified.  Perhaps pointing that out will help keep us from getting to 
far off topic :-) 

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic