This is a greatly neglected area, and yet the second largest group of N.T. Greek MSS is the lectionaries.
Bruce Metzger gives the background of the lectionaries: "Following the custom of the synagogue, according to which portions of the Law and the Prophets were red at divine service each Sabbath day, the Christian Church adopted the practice of reading passages from the New Testament books at services of worship. A regular system of lessons from the Gospels and Epistles was developed, and the custom arose of arranging these according to a fixed order of Sundays and other holy days of Christian year."
Metzger continues that 2,135 have been catalogued, but as of yet the majority still await critical analysis.
J. Harold Greenlee states that "the earliest lectionary fragments are from the sixth entury, while complete MSS date from the eighth century and later."
The lectionaries usually were rather conservative and used older texts, and this makes them very valuable in textual criticism.
The Bibliographical Test for Reliability of the Old Testament
In the case of the O.T. we do not have the abundance of close MS authority as in the N.T. Until the recent discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest complete extant Hebrew MS was around 900 AD. This made a time gap of 1,300 years (Hebrew O.T. completed about 400 BC). At first sight it would appear that the O.T. is no more reliable than other ancient literature.
With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a number of O.T. manuscripts have been found which scholars date before the time of Christ.
First in order to see the uniqueness of the Scripture in its reliability, one needs to examine the extreme care in which the copyists transcribed the O.T. MSS.
THE TALMUDISTS (AD 100-500)
During this period a great deal of time was spent in cataloging Hebrew civil and canonical law. The Talmudists had quite an intricate system for transcribing synagogue scrolls.
Samuel Davidson describes some of the disciplines of the Talmudists in regard to the Scriptures. These minute regulations (I am going to use the numbering incorporated by Geisler and Nix) are as follows: "(1) A synagogue roll must be written on the skins of clean animals, (2) prepared for the particular use of the synagogue by a Jew. (3) These must be fastened together with strings taken from clean animals. (4) Every skin must contain a certain number of columns, equal throughout the entire codex. (5) The length of each column must not extend over less than 48 or more than 60 lines; and the breadth must consist of thirty letters. (6) The whole copy must be first-lined; and if three words be written without a line, it is worthless. (7) The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other colour, and be prepared according to a definite recipe. (8) An authentic copy must be the exemplar, from which the transcriber ought not in the least deviate. (9) No word or letter, not even a yod, must be written from memory, the scribe not having looked at the codex before him...(10) Between every consonant the space of a hair or thread must intervene; (11) between every new parashah, or section, the breadth of nine consonants; (12) between every book, three lines. (13) The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line; but the rest need not do so. (14) Besides this, the copyist must sit in full Jewish dress, (15) wash his whole body, (16) not begin to write the name of GOD with a pen newly dipped in ink, (17) and should a king address him while writing that name he must take no notice of him."
Davidson adds that "the rolls in which these regulations are not observed are condemned to be buried in the ground or burned; or they are banished to the schools, to be used as reading-books."
Why don't we have more old MSS? The very absence of ancient MSS, when the rules and accuracies of the copyists are considered, confirms the reliability of the copies we have today.
Gleason Archer, in comparing the manuscript variations of the Hebrew text with pre-Christian literature such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, states that it is amazing that the Hebrew text does not have the phenomenon of discrepancy and MS change of other literature of the same age. He writes:
"Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (AD 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling. Even those Dead Sea fragments of Deuteronomy and Samuel which point to a different manuscript family from that which underlies our received Hebrew text do not indicate any differences in doctrine or teaching. They do not affect the message of revelation in the slightest."
The Talmudists were so convinced that when they finished transcribing a MS they had an exact duplicate that they would give the new copy equal authority.
Frederick Kenyon in Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts expands on the above and the destruction of older copies: "The same extreme care which was devoted to the transcription of manuscripts is also at the bottom of the disappearance of the earlier copies. When a manuscript had been copied with the exactitude prescribed by the Talmud, and had been duly verified, it was accepted as authentic and regarded as being of equal value with any other copy. If all were equally correct, age gave no advantage to a manuscript; on the contrary, age was a positive disadvantage, since a manuscript was liable to become defaced or damaged in the lapse of time. A damaged or imperfect copy was at once condemned as unfit for use.
"Attached to each synagogue was a 'Gheniza,' or lumber cupboard, in which defective manuscripts were laid aside; and from these receptacles some of the oldest manuscripts now extant have in modern times been recovered. Thus, far from regarding an older copy of the Scriptures as more valuable, the Jewish habit has been to prefer the newer, as being the most perfect and free from damage. The older copies, once consigned to the 'Gheniza,' naturally perished, either from neglect or from being deliberately burned when the 'Gheniza,' became overcrowded.
"The absence of very old copies of the Hebrew Bible need not, therefore, either surprise or disquiet us. If, to the causes already enumerated, we add the repeated persecutions (involving much destruction of property) to which the Jews have been subject, the disappearance of the ancient manuscripts is adequately accounted for, and those which remain may be accepted as preserving that which alone they profess to preserve - namely; the Massoretic text."
Reverence for the Scriptures and regard for the purity of the sacred text did not first originate after the fall of Jerusalem."
One can go back as far as Ezra 7:6,10 where Ezra is said to be "a ready scribe" (KJV). He was a professional, skilled in the Scripture.
THE MASSORETIC PERIOD (AD 500-900)
The Massoretes (from massora, "Tradition") accepted the laborious job of editing the text and standardizing it. Their headquarters was in Tiberias. The text which the Massoretes concluded with is called the "Massoretic" text This resultant text had had vowel points added in order to insure proper pronunciation. This Massoretic text is the standard Hebrew text today.
The Massoretes were well disciplined and treated the text "with the greatest imaginable reverence, and devised a complicated system of safeguards against scribal sips. They counted, for example, the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurs in each book; they pointed out the middle letter of the Pentateuch and the middle letter of the whole Hebrew Bible, and made even more detailed calculations than these. 'Everything countable seems to be counted,' says Wheeler Robinson, and they made up mnemonics by which the various totals might be readily remembered."
Sir Frederic Kenyon says: "Besides recording varieties of reading, tradition, or conjecture, the Massoretes undertook a number of calculation which do not enter into the ordinary sphere of textual criticism. They numbered the verses, words, and letters of every book. They calculated the middle word and the middle letter of each. They enumerated verses which contained all the letters of the alphabet, or a certain number of them; and so on. These trivialities, as we may rightly consider them, had yet the effect of securing minute attention to the precise transmission of the text: and they are but an excessive manifestation of a respect for the Sacred Scriptures which in itself deserves nothing but praise. The Massoretes were indeed anxious that not one jot nor tittle, not one smallest letter nor one tiny part of a letter, of the Law should pass away or be lost."
Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, writes: "We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own Scriptures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as the decrees of GOD, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them. Time and again ere now the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring tortures and death in every form in the theatres, rather than utter a single word against the laws and the allied documents."
Josephus continues by making a comparison between the Hebrew respect for Scripture and the Greek regard for their literature: "What Greek would endure as much for the same cause? Even to save the entire collection of his nation's writings from destruction he would not face the smallest personal injury. For to the Greeks they are mere stories improvised according to the fancy of their authors; and in this estimate even of the older historians they are quite justified, when they see some of their own contemporaries venturing to describe events in which they bore no part, without taking the trouble to seek information from those who know the facts."
QUOTATIONS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE RELIABILITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Robert Dick Wilson's brilliant observations take the veracity and trustworthiness of Scriptures back to Old Testament times: "In 144 cases of transliteration from Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Moabite into Hebrew and in 40 cases of the opposite, or 184 in all, the evidence shows that for 2300 to 3900 years the text of the proper names in the Hebrew Bible has been transmitted with the most minute accuracy. That the original scribes should have written them with such close conformity to correct philological principles is a wonderful proof of their thorough care and scholarship; further, that the Hebrew text should have been transmitted by copyists through so many centuries is a phenomenon unequaled in the history of literature."
Wilson adds: "There are about forty of these kings living from 2000 BC to 400 BC.Each appears in chronological order '...with reference to the kings of the same country and with respect to the kings of other countries...no stronger evidence for the substantial accuracy of the Old Testament records could possibly be imagined, than this collection of kings.' Mathematically, it is one chance on 750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 that this accuracy is mere circumstance."
Because of the evidence Wilson concludes:
"The proof that the copies of the original documents have been handed down with substantial correctness for more than 2,000 years cannot be denied. That the copies in existence 2,000 years ago had been in like manner handed down from the originals is not merely possible, but, as we have shown, is rendered probably by the analogies of Babylonian documents now existing of which we have both originals and copies, thousands of years apart, and of scores of papyri which show when compared with our modern editions of the classics that only minor changes of the text have taken place in more than 2,000 years and especially by the scientific and demonstrable accuracy with which the proper spelling of the names of kings and of the numerous foreign terms embedded in the Hebrew text has been transmitted to us."
F. F. Bruce states that "the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible which the Massoretes edited had been handed down to their time with conspicuous fidelity over a period of nearly a thousand years."
William Green concludes that "it may safely be said that no other works of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted."
Concerning the accuracy of the transmission of the Hebrew text, Atkinson, who was Under-Librarian of the library at Cambridge University, says it is "little short of miraculous."
Rabbi Aquiba, second century AD, with a desire to produce an exact text, is credited with saying that "the accurate transmission (Massoreth) of the text is a fence for the Torah."
THE HEBREW TEXT
Cairo Codex (AD 895) is located in the British Museum. It was produced by the Massoretic Moses ben Asher family. Contains both latter and former prophets.
Codex of the Prophets of Leningrad (AD 916) contains Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve minor prophets.
The earliest complete MS of the Old Testament is the Codex Babylonicus Petropalitanus (AD 1008) located in Leningrad. It was prepared from a corrected text of Rabbi Aaron ben Moses ben Asher before 1000 AD.
Aleppo Codex (AD 900+) is an exceptionally valuable MS. It once was thought lost, but in 1958 was rediscovered. It did not escape damage.
British Museum Codex (AD 950) contains part of Genesis through Deuteronomy.
Reuchlin Codex of the Prophets (AD 1105). The preparation of this text was done by the Massorete ben Naphtali.
THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS TO THE RELIABILITY OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES
The big question was asked first by Sir Frederic Kenyon, "Does this Hebrew text, which we call Massoretic, and which we have shown to descend from a text drawn up about AD 100, faithfully represent the Hebrew Text as originally written by the authors of the Old Testament books?"
The Dead Sea Scrolls give us the explicit and positive answer.
The problem before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was, "How accurate are the copies we have today compared to the text of the first century?" because the text has been copied over many times, can we trust it?
What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The Scrolls are made up of some 40,000 inscribed fragments. From these fragments more than 500 books have been reconstructed.
Many extra-biblical books and fragments were discovered that shed light on the religious community of Qumran. Such writings as the "Zadokite documents", a "Rule of the Community" and the "manual of Discipline" help us to understand the purpose of daily Qumran life. In the various caves are some very helpful commentaries on the Scriptures.
How were the Dead Sea Scrolls found?
Here I would like to quote Ralph Earle, who gives a vivid and concise answer to how the Scrolls were found:
"The story of this discovery is one of the most fascinating tales of modern times. In February or March of 1947 a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammed was searching for a lost goat. He tossed a stone into a hole in a cliff on the west side of the Dead Sea, about eight miles south of Jericho. To his surprise he heard the sound of shattering pottery. Investigating, he discovered an amazing sight. On the floor of the cave were several large jars containing leather scrolls, wrapped in linen cloth. Because the jars were carefully sealed, the scrolls had been preserved in excellent condition for nearly 1,900 years. (They were evidently placed there in AD 68.)
"Five of the scrolls found in Dead Sea Cave I, as it is now called, were bought by the archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery at Jerusalem. Meanwhile, three other scrolls were purchased by Professor Sukenik of the Hebrew University there.
"When the scrolls were first discovered, no publicity was given to them. In November of 1947, two days after Professor Sukenik purchased three scrolls and two jars from the cave, he wrote in his diary: 'It may be that this is one of the greatest finds ever made in Palestine, a find we never so much as hoped for.' But these significant words were not published at the time.
"Fortunately, in February of 1948, the archbishop, who could not read Hebrew, phoned the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and told about the scrolls. By good providence, the acting director of the school at the moment was a young scholar named John Trever, who wa also an excellent amateur photographer. With arduous, dedicated labor he photographed each column of the great Isaiah scroll, which is 24 feet long and 10 inches high. He developed the plates himself and sent a few prints by airmail to Dr. W. F. Albright of Johns Hopkins University, who was widely recognized as the dean of American biblical archaeologists. By return airmail Albright wrote: 'My heartiest congratulations on the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times!...What an absolutely incredible find! And there can happily not be the slightest doubt in the world about the genuineness of the manuscript.' He dated it about 100 BC."
Trevor quotes more of Albright's opinions: "There is no doubt in my mind that the script is more archaic than the Nash papyrus...I should prefer a date around 100 BC..."
The value of the scrolls
The oldest complete Hebrew MSS we possessed were from 900 AD on. How could we be sure of their accurate transmission since the time of Christ in 32 AD? Thanks to archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now know. One of the scrolls found was a complete MS of the Hebrew text of Isaiah. It is dated by paleographers around 125 BC. This MS is more than 1,000 years older than any MS we previously possessed.
The impact of this discovery is in the exactness of the Isaiah scroll (125 BC) with the Massoretic text of Isaiah (916 AD) 1,000 years later. This demonstrates the unusual accuracy of the copyists of the Scripture over a thousand-year period.
"Of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only 17 letters in question. Ten of these letters are simply a matter of spelling, which does not affect the sense. Four more letters are minor stylistic changes, such as conjunctions. The remaining three letters comprise the word 'light', which is added in verse 11, and does not affect the meaning greatly. Furthermore, the word is supported by the LXX and IQ Is. Thus, in one chapter of 166 words, there is only one word (three letters) in question after a thousand years of transmission - and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage."
F. F. Bruce says, "An incomplete scroll of Isaiah, found along with the other in the first Qumran cave, and conveniently distinguished as 'Isaiah B,' agrees even more closely with the Massoretic text."
Gleason Archer states that the Isaiah copies of the Qumran community "proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling."
Millar Burrows, cited by Geisler and Nix, concludes: "It is a matter of wonder that through something like a thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, 'Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Massoretic tradition.'"
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