In article , Don Kirkman says...
>
>
>
>It seems to me I heard somewhere that Matthew Johnson wrote in article
>:
>
>>In article , Don
Kirkman says...
>
>>[snip]
>
>>>One tiny quibble though I agree with the thrust of your message.
>
>>Now that you have opened the door up to quibbles, it is my turn to quibble;)
>
>And a rather large quibble at that.  :-)

Ah, yes, but you knew I think big, right?


>>>The sequence in which translations were done becomes quite relevant if
>>>the time span is great enough; modern translators have both manuscripts
>>>that were unknown to the translators in earlier centuries
>
>>Already it sounds like you have missed Helmut's point: the OP phrased the
>>question as if we were talking about the same text translated from the source
>>language into another language and then into another and so forth.
But for the
>>Hebrew OT and the Greek NT, this is clearly not the case, (with rare and
>>insignificant exception).
>
>But I was responding to Helmut's post, not directly to that of the OP.

Well then, what 'sequence' WERE you talking about?

>AIUI Helmut was already *correcting* the OP's assumption.

>>>and texts that
>>>probably come closer to what was originally written or spoken but may
>>>have been lost or corrupted through the early centuries of monastic
>>>copying,*
>
>>This too represents some serious confusion. The text UBS publishes is a good
>>scholarly reconstruction of the state of the NT text as it was in the late
>>SECOND century, in the area around Alexandria. There can be no serious doubt
>>about this. Where the doubts creep in is about the state of the
text _outside_
>>this area.
>
>I didn't know we were talking a specific translation but thought the
>topic was translations in general; why do you limit it to UBS (United
>Bible Society?).

Because UBS and NA27 texts differ by so very little, and both are the text used
(with small and insignificnt exceptions) by nearly all "modern"
translations.

>I think you might want to re-read and absorb what I wrote.  The starting
>place for textual criticism was the corpus of the Textus Receptus.

That is true. But since then, so much has changed in textual criticism. Even
Westcott-Hort's theories are considered quite outdated now.

>  At
>that point nothing was known (in a practical sense) about second century
>manuscripts.
>
>We *now* have papyri fragments, as well as parchment fragments and
>codices, to which we can add critical reconstructions of the most likely
>state of textual materials (i.e., other scriptural or quasi-scriptural
>documents) not found in the early documents.  So within the last century
>or so we have come to know the second century materials better than any
>earlier translators did.

No, I did not neglect this. Rather, the result of this "better
knowledge" IS
that we know the UBS text is a good reconstruction of the state of the text in
late 2nd century Alexandria. But those 2nd c. manuscripts are mostly
Alexandrian. We still havce too litle physical evidence for the 2nd century text
_outside_ of Alexandria.

>>But notice that the "monastic copying" you refer to is
completely irrelevant
>>here, since monasticism had not yet taken over the copying. Most of
the worrying
>>possibilities for changes occured long before, during the period of
persecution.
>
>Copying is how the Textus Receptus was preserved for us (didn't
>Constantine order 50 copies to be prepared for churches?)

Well, of course it was. But this is still quite beside the point: you were
talking about textual criticism as a way of stripping away the copying errors
due to _monastic_ copying, which all took place only later than the time
Constantine ordered copies of the NT to be made. And the poster you were
responding to was concerned about alleged corruption of the text due to
Constantine's rule. But "monastic copying" is compeletely
irrelevant to that
issue, since it happened much too late to hide the earlier texts.

> and
>individuals, at least, must have been producing copies from the
>beginning or there would have been no copies by the second century.

Right. But again, this is all _later_ than "monastic copying".
Your choice of
the phrase "monastic copying" really did make it sound like it
was the fault of
monasticism that the Textus Receptus came into being.

>AAMOF there is reason to believe that copies of Jesus' sayings and the
>material Mark gathered for Paul about the life of Jesus were shared
>among the early churches (or was all the teaching done orally?).

Now that is a much more difficult question. I don't think we really know what
teaching the early Church did orally, vs. what they did in writing, beyond vague
generalities, such as that they did not have the opportunity to do much at all
in writing before Constantine.

>>>as well as having a better understanding of the word usage of
>>>the original languages thanks to comparisons to sources such as the Dead
>>>Sea Scrolls and other ancient documents.
>
>>Well, that would be true, of course, only for Old Testament issues.
>
>Ignoring "other ancient documents," I suppose that's true. 
However, the
>Apocryphal writings and the many NT fragments seem to me to qualify as
>"other ancient documents," not to mention the Septuagint and
the Vulgate
>itself, which you mention below.
>
>>Finally, there are still both significant translation issues and significant
>>textual variants whose history can be understood only by means of the ancient
>>translations, the 'versions' (LXX, Samaritan Pentateuch...). For not only did
>>they have manuscripts that have long since disappeared, but at least
>>occasionally, they had knowledge about the source language that has since
>>disappeared. Hence the so-called 'Arabisms' in the Old Greek
translation of the
>>Old Testament. These are still important pieces of evidence for
what the words
>>in question meant in antiquity.
>
>OTOH we have a much better understanding of the number of Aramaic
>influences in the NT, largely unknown to earlier translators, as well as
>of the daily life of the inhabitants of the Near East in the centuries
>when Christianity arose, both developments enriching our understanding
>of the common language(s) used in the NT.

Ah, but I do not believe that is true. I know that is the popular belief in the
West, especially in academic circles, where people make careers out of
exaggerated claims of success in these endeavors.

>Methinks you're trying too hard to argue everything back into the
>ancient times and downplaying the gains made in the last century or two
>in shedding light on those ancient times.

No, what I am trying to do is warn against overstating (as you do) the 'gains'
made in this "last century or two". For many of these 'gains'
were things that
the Christian East never forgot. Yet Western 'scholars' routinely take such an
unscholarly attitude to the Christian East that they never realize how much we
preserved.


-- 
---------------------------
Subudcat se sibi ut haereat Deo
quidquid boni habet, tribuat illi a quo factus est.
(St. Augustine, Ser. 96)

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