Sunday, 27 August 2017

Was John the Son of Zebedee Capable of Writing a Gospel?

written by Dr. Bart D Erhman


QUESTION:
You mention in your book Forgeries and Counter Forgeries that John most likely did not write the Gospel attributed to him as he almost certainly could not write in Greek. I seem to remember you writing that the Greek of that Gospel was good and fairly nuanced. However, I am being told by someone who is fairly conversant in these matters that John could easily have learned the Greek necessary to write the Gospel, since he lived for over 60 years on the mission field and that his Greek is the most basic of the NT. Is he right? And if so how would you respond?

RESPONSE
Yes, I get asked this question a lot, or rather, get told this a lot – that if an illiterate Aramaic speaking day-laborer spent a lot of time abroad, he would be able to write a Gospel in a foreign language (it  has been established on clear philological grounds that John’s Gospel, like the other books of the New Testament, is an original Greek composition, not a translation from Aramaic).    It’s clear that my thinking about this is not at *all* what (some? many?) other people think.  The problem, it seems, is that people have a massive misunderstanding about education levels in the ancient world, and of what people were capable of doing when it came to reading and writing.
To begin with, the New Testament itself indicates that the apostle John was a fisherman by trade.   How well educated were fishermen in rural Galilee?  We actually have a reliable answer to that.  They were not educated at *all*.   The vast majority of people in Galilee had zero education.  There were not day schools; the only people who got education were urban elites – the wealthy upper crust who lived in major urban areas.
John lived in a tiny rural community where there almost certainly was no school (see my bibliographical references at the end of this post).  And as a day laborer from a family of day laborers, he was in the lower classes.  He would never have learned his letters, let alone how to read a book, let alone how to copy a book, let alone how to compose a sentence in writing, let alone to compose a book.  And that is in his *own* language, which was Aramaic.  That is why the New Testament itself indicates that he was “agrammatos,” i.e., someone who didn’t know his letters, that is, someone who could not read (let alone write; let alone compose a book) (thus Acts 4:13).
Why would any experience he had on the missionary field with people who spoke a different language (Greek) suddenly make him educated, able to read any language, or the language of people he was suddenly living among, or able to compose a sentence in writing in that language, or able to write an entire book in perfectly constructed, even literarily pleasing in places, Greek?  I think the problem is that we simply assume that rural day-laborers in ancient Galilee were kind of like our next door neighbors in 21stcentury America: highly educated people with college degrees who know how to write and who, if they spent say twenty years in a foreign country, would be able to write in that other language.  But that’s not how it was at all.
For one thing, there is nothing in the New Testament to suggest that John spent any time at all outside of Palestine.  Whenever he is mentioned, he is either in Aramaic-speaking Galilee or Jerusalem.  But even more important, just because someone spends time in countries speaking a foreign language that doesn’t make them qualified to write a *book* in that language.
Here is more what it is like.  I have a wonderful house cleaner from Guatemala who has been in the U.S. for about fifteen years.  Her English is barely functional, even though she has TV, radio, a computer, access to social media and American movies, and is constantly among English speaking people doing her job.  Would she be capable of writing a Gospel about Jesus in English?   Good grief –NO!  She would not be able to construct more than a very brief and improperly worded sentence or two.  And she is far more educated (in her home country) than John was (in his).
Living abroad does not allow a person to become an author.  First there has to be a preliminary education, which, in the ancient world, happened only among children of very rich people, and took years.  After those years the student needed to learn how to compose writings.  That took more years.  It was a very long drawn out process.  It was only for the rich kids because everyone else had to start working for a living at a very young age.
Could an adult who was uneducated in this way eventually learn to write?  Possibly, but we have precisely zero evidence of anything like adult education in the ancient world.  And no evidence either, at all, of people being trained in a school setting to write in a second language.
I’m afraid too many people have a completely romantic idea about what education was like in the ancient world, because they think that it must have been roughly analogous to education in the modern world.   And partly because they’ve heard so many fictions about education in Palestine, where allegedly every boy went to a synagogue school to learn to read and write Hebrew.  But that’s simply not true.
I discuss all of this in my book Forgery and Counterforgery.  But no one has to take my word for it.  Go to the real experts. It is much better to see what such established scholars who have devoted huge chunks of their research lives to such matters have to say than simply to make some guesses based on some rather romantic hunches about what life might have been like all those years ago.
If you want to learn about literacy in antiquity, the best place to start is Columbia professor William Harris’s book Ancient Literacy.  If you want to know about how literacy worked in ancient Palestine, go to Catherine Hezser’s amazing study, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (she argues that the rates of literacy at the time in Palestine were probably not a lot more than 3%; that is, only 3% or slightly more of the population could read.  And that this 3-4% were wealthy urban elites – not rural fishermen).  If you want to see how education worked – how children learned to read and write – then read the books on ancient educational systems by Raffaela Cribiore, for example her enlightening Gymnastics of the Mind.

Do Later Manuscript Discoveries Ever Support Proposed Interpolations?

written by Dr. Bart D Erhman

It is fine, I think, for a post on the blog every now and then to get technical and into the nitty-gritty of scholarship.  And so I have no qualms about the following.
Yesterday I posted a response to a question about “textual emendation” by Jan Krans, a New Testament textual expert who teaches in the Netherlands.  The same blog reader had a second question that I have also directed to Jan, and here I give both the question and the answer.
The question has to do with my claim that there are some words/passages in the New Testament that *look* like they were added after the original was published, but for which we have NO manuscripts that lack the words/passage (so that there is no hard evidence that they were added after the text was originally published).   But has it ever happened that after a scholar suggested such a thing, a manuscript has turned up that provides actual evidence?  Here’s the interesting question about that, and Jan’s intriguing response.
QUESTION:
Do you know of any case where an interpolation has become a corruption, i.e. a part of the text that many scholars believed was not “original,” but was not missing from any of the known manuscripts, was found to be missing from a subsequently discovered manuscript?
JAN’S RESPONSE:
This question asks for conjectures for which attestation has been discovered after their publication, and then specifically conjectures that involve an omission (when the corruption is an interpolation, the conjecture is an omission). Whether interpolation has to involve a larger omission is left out of consideration. The issue of wider support for the conjectures will be addressed later.
If some less interesting cases are excluded, as well as those where the critic should or could have known about manuscript attestation, but did not bother looking for any—Friedrich Blass is known for this practice—, the following can be listed (in almost all cases, more information can be found by entering the cj numbers in the Amsterdam Database at NTVMR):

[I – Bart – need to explain what Jan is doing in the following lines.  He first gives the verse where the words can be found; he then gives the Greek words themselves.  I have translated them in boldface.  After the square bracket ], he indicates that a scholar has suggested that they were not originally found in the text by designating them with “om” which means – “omit”.  That is followed by the abbreviation “cj” which means a conjecture  (i.e. a scholar has conjectured, without any manuscript evidence, that the words were not originally in the text).  Following that he gives the name of the scholar who proposed the omission, followed by a cj number – which designates which proposed emendation this is in the data base maintained at Amsterdam.  He then in parentheses gives the date that the emendation was proposed, followed by a statement of which manuscript or manuscripts were later discovered which omitted the word(s) in question.  So there’s a lot packed into every line here!]

– Matt 23:35 υἱοῦ Βαραχίου = son of Barachiahom. cj Hammond (cj11258) (1653), attested in ℵ01*
– Matt 26:42 μου = myom. cj Blass (cj16341; not yet online) (1901), attested in 𝔓37(there is also versional and patristic evidence)
– Matt 27:9 Ἰερεμίου = Jeremiahom. cj Beza (cj12376) (1556), attested in Φ043 33
– Mark 2:26 ἐπὶ Ἀβιαθὰρ ἀρχιερέως = when Abiathar was high priestom. cj Beza (cj12696), made by Beza in 1556, who himself discovered, before 1582, that the omission was attested in D05
– Mark 10:30 οἰκίας καὶ ἀδελφοὺς καὶ ἀδελφὰς καὶ μητέρας … μετὰ διωγμῶν = houses and brothers and sisters and mothers … with persecutions ] om. cj Pearce (cj11325) (before 1774), attested in ℵ01*
– Luke 3:36 τοῦ Καϊνάμ = the son of Chainan ] om. cj Beza (cj10149) (1556); as at Mark 2:26, Beza conjectured the omission before finding it confirmed in D05
– John 7:22 διὰ τοῦτο = for this reasonom. cj Schulthess (cj11943) (1833), attested in ℵ01*
– John 7:32 οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι = the chief priests and Phariseesom. cj Semler (cj11947) (1771), attested in min. 118
– John 10:26 καθὼς εἶπον ὑμῖν (TR/𝔐) = just as I said to you om. cj Erasmus (cj10526), attested in 𝔓66c.75 ℵ01 B03 etc.; here, taking his cue from the Vulgate, Erasmus conjectures an omission that is now the text of our editions
– John 11:11 πορεύομαι ἵνα = I am going in order to om. cj Dieffenbach (cj12085) (1816), attested in min. 1186
– John 11:12 οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτῷ = the disciples … to himom. cj Griesbach (cj11962) (1775/1777), also attested in min. 1186
– John 19:20 τῆς πόλεως = the city ] om. cj Holwerda (cj10829) (1869), attested in min. 1313
– Acts 14:8 ἀδύνατος ἐν Λύστροις τοῖς ποσίν = in Lystra who could not use his feet] ἐν Λύστροις just retain the words “in Lystra” cj van de Sande Bakhuyzen (cj12019) (1880), attested in mins. 1611 1890 2138 (ECM)
– Acts 20:9 κατενεχθεὶς ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕπνου = being overcome by sleep ] om. cj Owen (cj10013) (1782), attested in mins. 206* 429 522 630 1509 1891 2200 (ECM); interestingly, in the apparatus of the Nestle editions, attestation (N21-NA28) has replaced Owen’s name (N13-20)
– Rom 8:38 οὔτε δυνάμεις = nor powers om. cj Fritzsche (cj10928) (1839), attested in min. 462
– 2 Cor 3:3 καρδίαις = heartsom. cj Holwerda (cj10142) (1853), attested in 0243 630 1739; similar to Acts 20:9, earlier Nestle editions mention Holwerda (N11-NA25), whereas from NA26 onwards only attestation is given
– Gal 2:3 ὁ σὺν ἐμοί = who was with meom. cj van Manen (cj14767) (1887), attested in 𝔓46
– Col 2:14 τοῖς δόγμασιν = with its legal demandsom. cj Baljon (cj10109) (1885), attested in min. 1881; again, the Nestle editions are interesting: Schmiedel (perhaps incorrectly so) is mentioned as author of the conjecture (N13-NA27); in NA26 the attestation is added, and in NA28 Schmiedel’s name is omitted
– 1 Pet 2:5 πνευματικάς = spiritual [sacrifices] ] om. cj Mill (cj15144) (1707), attested in ℵ01
– 1 Pet 3:4 ἄνθρωπος = person om. cj Bentley (cj11129) (around 1720), attested in min. 629
– 1 Pet 3:20 τοῦτ’ ἔστιν ὀκτώ = that is, eightom. cj Wassenbergh (cj11132) (1815), attested in min. 88
– 1 Pet 3:21 ὅ = which [in reference to baptism]om. cj Semler (cj16123) (1783), attested in 𝔓72 ℵ01* etc. (ECM)
– 2 Pet 2:12 γεγεννημένα = bornom. cj Bentley (cj14640) (around 1720), attested in 𝔓72
Jan now gives some reflections:
If I may briefly comment on this list, some patterns emerge. First, in general, most or all manuscripts tend to suffer from accidental omission, so it may be due to coincidence when one such omission agrees with a scholarly conjecture. Here the wealth of Greek manuscripts that we have is simply bound to produce a number of such instances. Second, and more specifically, the first hand of Codex Sinaiticus has many omissions, and since this manuscript is large and was discovered late in the history of scholarship, a number of conjectured omissions can be found here. Third, it is tempting to speak of “scribal conjectures” for some instances (e. g. Mark 2:26 and Luke 3:36), that is, a scribe may have left out some words for similar reasons as the critic who conjectured the omission.
It would seem that omissions are the more probable category for these patterns, but the Amsterdam Database does not confirm this. Conjectured additions are just as often found attested, and substitutions even more often, whereas conjectures that involve transpositions and more complicated operations very rarely turn up in manuscripts.
As for the scholarly reception of these conjectures, only the ones on Matt 23:35, Matt 27:9, Mark 2:26, Rom 8:38, 2 Cor 3:3, and to a lesser degree 1 Pet 3:4, have found considerable support. The ones on Matt 23:35, Matt 27:9, Mark 2:26 are clearly harmonising and grounded in hermeneutical principles that are no longer seen as critical. In my view, only Holwerda’s conjecture on 2 Cor 3:3, which I could have mentioned at the first question, is a serious candidate for the original text.

Could Moses Write Hebrew?

written by Dr. Bart D Ehrman

As you may have noticed, on a number of occasions I get asked questions that I simply can’t answer.   I received one such question this week, about the history of the Hebrew language.  Here is how the questioner phrased it:
What is our earliest evidence for Hebrew as a written language? I’ve been to apologetic seminars where they say it’s long been said by atheists that the Hebrew Bible can’t be trusted because the Hebrews didn’t have a written language until well after the stories in the OT would’ve taken place. The evidence that the Hebrews had a written language in close proximity to the Biblical stories is based on pottery evidence and things of that nature. I’m sure these are topics you are very familiar with and I’d appreciate your take.

It’s actually amazing how many topics I’m not familiar with at all!  So, not knowing the answer, I asked a colleague of mine who is an expert in Hebrew philology, Joseph Lam (he teaches courses in my department in Hebrew and other Semitic languages, and on the religion, culture, and literature of the Ancient Near East, and in Hebrew Bible; his office is across the hall from mine).   I simplified the question to get the heart of it.  This is what I said in an email to him.

Joseph,
Someone has asked me the question below.  Damn if I know!  I don’t need a long exposition, just a basic answer will do (some kind of inscription?)

What is our earliest evidence for Hebrew as a written language? 

Here is his very helpful response.
It depends on what you define as Hebrew. We have a number of inscriptions from Palestine in the late 2nd millennium/early 1st millennium BCE (which is when Hebrew mostly likely branched off as a distinct language from the broader “Canaanite” family of languages), but early Hebrew and Canaanite are difficult to distinguish from one another, especially in short inscriptions (sometimes a single word). For a long time the standard answer was the Gezer Calendar from the late 10th century (900’s) BCE, but I now think that text is better described as Phoenician or common Canaanite. Others would say the more recently discovered Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon (11th/10th century), but there are various oddities to that text that make it difficult to classify. There are also a number of short inscriptions from Tel Rehov that have been dated archaeologically to the 10th/9th centuries. The upshot is, there are a number of candidates from the 10th/9th centuries, but certainly by the 8th century we have many more unambiguously “Hebrew” inscriptions.

For more detail, I would recommend to your readers the following online article (and the article to which it responds):https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/what%E2%80%99s-the-oldest-hebrew-inscription/

As a follow-up, I said/asked the following:
Fantastic.  Just what I needed.  The questioner was not a scholar, but an interested lay person, who was especially interested in the question of whether, if there was a Moses living in say the 13th c BCE, he would have been able to write.   Do you have an opinion?  (I myself  don’t think there *was* a Moses, but still,  assuming there was…)

Here is Joseph’s short and very interesting response.
If there was a Moses, raised in the Egyptian court, he probably would have learned to write in Egyptian! The texts of the Pentateuch, whoever wrote them, are NOT in 13th century language; they are in classical 1st millennium Hebrew. Whatever a hypothetical 13th century Moses wrote, whether in Egyptian or Canaanite or something else, that’s NOT what we have preserved in the Pentateuch.

“If you are in doubt”

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